I believe that I have always had a creative side to me, however, like many of us, it has been in hibernation whilst life happened. Now that my children are grown and are living their own full lives, my creative side has awakened.
As a young girl, I loved the Spirograph and can remember spending endless hours creating patterns, patterns and more patterns. I wanted to create a ‘catalogue’ of every possible pattern that could be created.. Not surprisingly, this never happened.
I did a dressmaking course at school and made my own clothes and my children’s clothes up until their teenage years when it wasn’t ‘cool’ to wear clothes that your Mum made. I also dabbled in hand embroidery and knitting on and off while raising my family.
Fast forward to about 15 years ago, my children are now in their late teenage years and I have a bit more time to spend on my creative activities. Cross stitch was my first venture into hand embroidery. I entered a few pieces in shows and won a couple of prizes. I joined the local embroiderer’s guild and found that there were other types of embroidery besides cross stitch! Wow, there was more to ‘embroidery’ than I ever thought and this opened a lot of ‘creative doors’ for me that I didn’t even know were there to be opened.
I tried my hand at several different types of embroidery and from there went on to gain a Teaching Certificate in Hand Embroidery covering a multitude of different embroidery types. The ‘organised’ side of be was drawn to cross stitch and blackwork embroidery – all counted forms of embroidery. Patchwork and Quilting was also covered in the Embroidery Teacher Training Course.
At the completion of that course, we had the option of specialising in one area. I chose to specialise in Patchwork and Quilting and went on to get a Teaching Certificate in Patchwork and Quilting.
The Next Chapter…
In the last few years, I have also been doing Zentangle and Art Journaling with a dash of mixed media. Precision is certainly not a requirement in these creative outlets and this balances the precision required in the body of pieces in my Tangled Line Art Gallery.
I have always wanted to draw and I now feel as though I have come full circle. My Tangled Line Art drawings combine my love of the spirograph, the precision, pattern and geometry of cross stitch and blackwork embroidery and the ‘geometry’ of patchwork and quilting.
Fast forward from now, I can envision multiple pieces of art based purely on geometry and/or quilt patterns. I am also looking at combining ‘all of the above’ into multimedia art works in due course.
I believe that creativity is within all of us. It is patiently waiting for us to discover it and show it the way forward. We just need to believe in ourselves.