Color runs in the family. Sounds like a great title for a blog article talking about color families - blues, greens, reds!
Actually, I'm thinking about how my immediate family's creativity is manifested in each person. It's amazing how similar yet totally different members of a famly can be.
Creativity takes many forms, from designing your own quilts to choosing your own fabrics for someone else's pattern, to painting or sculpting or writing. Maybe your creativity is finding solutions to problems, or encouraging play and creativity in littler ones by offering a box of dress-up costumes or helping them to stitch their own doll clothes or jazz up their t-shirts.
Perhaps during the year of a pandemic you create new ways to teach high school math online, help organize volunteers and staff for a telehealth portal, keep teams of solar intallers working and safe, or build a flourishing side-hustle business with little bottles of soul-brightening color. Creativity takes many forms.
Color runs in my family. I love color, as you know, especially color and fabric.
I spent last Sunday with my oldest daughter, helping to prep packaging for her Cool Treats summer collection - of nail polishes! We packed Strawberry, Pixi, Teddy, Roo, Tang and Creamsicle. She chooses such great colors to offer to her followers and customers.* She has found her creative jam with Instagram and YouTube, with both still and moving images of, yes, a colorful array of nail polishes, bringing thousands of people into her liquid color orbit. She also is a very creative problem solver. Give her a project to envision, and she can make it happen. Believe it and get out of her way, and it will be better than you imagined it. (Just don’t tell her how to do it…)
Growing up, my younger daughter was known by her color choices. Pink and brown. The right pink and brown, that is. Then everything had to have red cherries. She has always had style, and now it's rose gold and pink and white. Add some gray and teal in her home, and you can picture her look. She gets things done; she is an organizer. She made a full-size quilt for her senior project - pink and white, of course. We are going to visit her this week, and see her home for the first time since they moved in, almost a year ago. She has always known she would be a doctor, and orchestrated her life to make it happen. Finishing her first year of residency, she gets to wear white every day. Under layers of personal protective equipment, of course.
Our older son sees in 3D. I never knew if I had aluminum foil in the house, because he made sculptures with it, sculptures a foot or more high that could balance and not fall over. He forged swords and did some wood carving. He sees things in moveable patterns - and especially how he can manipulate and move them into a better arrangement. He's my "out of sync" source. He might not see color the way I do, but he could always see the "off" color or fabric - you know, the fabric that you really want to use and you try hard to make work, but it really just doesn’t? That one. He’s best at spotting a crimp in a pattern or design. He now helps design solar arrays, finding and adapting patterns to fit their environment.
Pink was also the color of choice for our younger son, along with bow ties, cool and colorful footwear, and sweater vests, all of which he still wears as a high school math teacher. A very creative math teacher, because as a student he could see the solutions and had to work at writing down the steps, so he gets it. He also sees patterns, whether on a sports field or in a math problem, often finding unique paths to solutions that others don't. While in middle school and high school, he made fun duct tape products for his friends - and charged them, of course - and YouTube unboxing reveal videos of his growing shoe collection. He still makes a statement with his clothing color choices, and chose great wall colors for his condo.
My husband paints with words. He always has story to tell, whether it's through characters in a play, or a musical, or with his own voice. He keeps me entertained.
He's not color-blind, but I like to think that our children's sense of color came from me. Their amazing creativity demonstrated in so many different ways? He might have had something to do with that, though.
We don't have to see color and fabric in the same way in order to create amazing quilts. That's where creativity comes in. Maybe your thing is seeing pattern or design, or maybe you can draw more than stick figures. Use your quilting tools to express your creativity. Find your own creative solutions to choosing border fabric and quilting thread colors. Don't get boxed in - do your own unboxing. Lift the corner just a bit, or rip it open wide, but let your creativity impact your color sense and fabric choices.
And, ultimately, enjoy the creative act of stitching. Especially stitching #NoMoreQuiltClones!
P.S. You can check out her site at https://oliveavepolish.com/ or on Instagram @oliveave_polish.
Some helpful resources from elsewhere on the Dynamic Quilting website:
JOIN MY EMAIL LIST to hear more about color and fabric and notice of future blogs. As a gift, you will receive my wall hanging pattern. It works well for trying out a color palette or showcasing a particular fabric. Practice making your quilts your own with this pattern!
The Dynamic Quilting Color and Fabric Plan - Make use of the Plan by starting with your overal goal for the quilt, find an inspiration fabric, and then use the Plan to aid you in choosing the rest of your fabrics.