I haven’t shared much here this past year as I’ve been experiencing creative blocks around surface pattern design and sewing projects. Early in the spring I started work on a new pattern collection and almost immediately got stuck with it. Everything I was working on came to halt and I even stopped sewing. I felt like I was failing at everything, the news just got worse and worse and I felt so helpless about all of it. Besides the heaviness of external circumstances, something was going on under the surface of my creativity and motivation, and I needed to figure

Heading into a season of rituals, some perhaps scary and others merry, I’m prompted to think about my own rituals, particularly around monthly creative housekeeping. What on earth is creative housekeeping? That just sounds like extra work – wait, hear me out. As a recovering perfectionist who struggles with procrastination and feeling lost, monthly creative housekeeping has given me so much grounding over the past year. Creative housekeeping includes two basic pillars: reflection and planning. At the end of every month, I sit down to think about these two things as they relate to my creative life. What did I

Curious about creativity? If you don’t already know about it, the always excellent Design Matters podcast hosted by Debbie Millman features designers, artists, and other creatives talking about their lives, work and creative process. Last year, record producer Rick Rubin was on to discuss his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being and there were so many resonant, jaw-dropping moments in it for me. I had to rewind several moments throughout because these insights were just so delicious, I had to hear them again! If you were ever curious about creativity and where it comes from, this is the

Sometimes the creative process has you working on bits of things over several seasons. I’ll explain: You travelled to France in the spring and came back with a cold, some ideas and a thousand photos. The creative process begins when you fall in love with the floor tile at your sister’s apartment and are compelled to recreate it in an illustration. One idea you come across is hodgepodge shelves – perfect! Your tile could go behind some messy shelves full of stuff. You also picked up some cool whiskey glasses on your trip, those would be fun to draw, add