Getting Past Creative Block: Let It Grow

This is what I did to get past my creative block and get started making things again.

• I took inspiration from something with real emotional content for me
• I tried to communicate that emotional content in my work
• For the purposes of getting past creative block, I told myself that it is not relevant whether the work was good or not-good. The only important thing, I told myself, is whether the work speaks.
• I had a lot of fun hammering wire.

I think actually that last point was probably the most important one.

Let it Grow Necklace

Where this started from was actually the wire-hammering and combination of elements that I described in this blog post. The curling shapes were meant to represent the thaw of the frozen forest, the sudden blossoming of flowers and the  growing of wild vines in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - especially the scene when Bacchus arrives and they all have an enormous party! Then at the last moment I added the little blue ceramic bird from BlueBerriBeads, left over from the Bead Soup Blog Party.

It is quite a riotous necklace. If worn with very sensible clothes, it might be called a "statement necklace", except that the statement usually made by statement necklaces is something like I spent a lot of money on this necklace whereas the statement I was trying to make was more like

LET IT GROW!

Which reminds me. I really ought to get round to watching Frozen one of these days...

Inspired by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

My inspiration currently is C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I'm reading this to my son at the moment. One of my favourite parts of the story is the thawing of the frozen forest, when the streams start to flow again and the flowers all begin to appear.

So I tried curling some 0.8mm wire to embellish acrylic flowers, trying to capture the idea of new things growing. The rest of the wire can then make a loop, so that the flowers can be attached to something.

The other beads in the mix at the moment, apart from those green acrylic flowers, are:

• glazed ceramic rings
• pinkish-beige coloured rondelles of (howlite or magnesite? not sure…)
• rose-gold coloured pearls
• jasper stone chips to use as spacers

All the above from my local bead shop, except the jasper chips which were from The Internet (I forget where).

Here are the elements strung on a bit of spare beading wire - which is what I will have to use if I string them all together, because it's the only wire thin enough to go through the small holes in the pearls. And that means that the wire loop on the acrylic flowers will have to be a wrapped loop, as simple loops can too easily fall off beading wire.

Magical spaces and colours

Today I have had that rare thing, a quiet, reflective day.

For several months I have seemingly been able to exist only in two states: working (I include housework in this category, although alas it's not paid), and feeling guilty about not working. But today, I had a whole day of being in that space between those two states, where I can just be me without reference to work of any sort. Which has been rather lovely.

I have to admit that I haven't actually made anything for ages, since making only happens for me in that magical space between the working and the guilt-at-not-working, and that space hasn't yet opened up for long enough for sustained creativity.

But, I wanted to share with you these pictures taken from when my son and I visited the park in November. (That is actually the last time we have been to the park; the weather since that time has been shocking). The colours were so gorgeous, I had to take photographs: bright golds, misty purples, and emerald greens. Autumn is a sort of in-between, transitional space too, of course; every day the colours change, and every day is one day further away from midsummer and one day nearer to Christmas. All the golden colours have gone now; winter trees abound. More updates later.