Taking a Break to Find New Quilt Inspiration

Do you ever find yourself feeling like your quilting's kind of stagnated. Perhaps you have a hard time getting motivated or you've just got that mental block where you can't come up with an idea for your next quilt. If so, it's time to take a break. Perhaps you need to go take a class and learn a new technique. Get out of your rut, do something different. Perhaps you used to always working with the same type of fabrics maybe you've always done the reproduction fabrics or maybe you've always worked with children's fabrics go buy some new fabrics try something you wouldn't normally do. Try different colors. Nothing will challenge you more than working outside of the comfort of your color zone than trying new colors. That's where a quilt challenge is a good thing that many quilt guilds offer trying a block of the month. Just something to get those juices going again. But you may wanna go outside of the quilting world and really take a break. A few, I guess it was last year we were camping at a delightful state park here in Colorado called Mueller State Park and they offer different lectures and films. And one day they had a teacher who was doing watercolors and it was a free class. And I thought, what the heck, why not, I'm gonna go take this. And I cannot draw a straight line with a ruler. And oh my gosh I still remember grade school trying to paint and all my paints got dirty and I made a mess and I just don't have that kind of artistic ability but I though what the heck nobody knows me here it'll be fun. So this is the result of my first attempt really at true watercolor painting. And it's certainly not going to put any current artists out of business or threaten anybody. And I'm certainly not a Picasso, but I had fun. Oh my gosh, I had fun. It was really a ball. And I learned about the different techniques for the shading and how to make things appear more realistic, such as the shading here on my Aspen trees and just different ways to represent that it didn't have to be exactly like I saw it but I could do a background that was different colors and not realistic. Oh my gosh, it was very freeing. So this year my son was in town and they were offering the class again down at Mueller. So we both took it. This is my son's picture. And I thought it was really really great. And he said, "Mom I started out "trying to make it realistic, "but then I realized it wasn't gonna work. "So I played with shading and blending "and just trying to have fun." Well he did better than I did. I tried to make mine realistic. I still am in that rigid mode. Just like I tend to be with my quilting. I tend to have a hard time just breaking open and doing some of these wild and crazy things that a lot of the fabric artists do. Mine tends to be a little more traditional. And it was funny how that came out in my watercolor compared to his and I found it interesting though, that I was working more on trying to work on the depth of field and some of the color combinations and that again it didn't necessarily have to be totally realistic so I learned a lot from it. And more importantly, we were out on the mountain and as we walked to and from, I found myself paying attention to the little details into the coloring. And I particularly enjoyed all of the wild flowers that are out in bloom right now in Colorado. And so when I got home, I'd decided to replicate the colors of some of these wild flowers because they weren't what you would traditionally think. And so I put together my fabrics and here they are a wide range of purples which I am not a purple person but all of a sudden I started seeing how these different shades were blending together. And then there were kind of the deep red flowers right next to those purples. And they looked so beautiful. So why can't those colors play together and be beautiful in a quilt? And then there were some, oh they look kind of like a blue bell but they were more in this periwinkle color. And of course there were the different greens of the leaves and the pine needles. And then I also had these wonderful yellow flowers that kind of looked like daisies. And then there were a ton of the orange ones. Well, it almost looks like the rainbow but it's not quite, there's still some interest here that I normally wouldn't have. And all of a sudden I am going to make a quilt. That includes all of these because if they can play well out in the forest and out in nature, why can't those colors play well on my quilt? So by getting out of my usual world of quilting and trying something totally new, it opened more creativity for me and opened me up to more possibilities with quilting. So I think you'll find if maybe you just take a break you'll get jump-started to be creative and enjoy your quilting once again.