The Year of Creativity

Katie Rowe
3 days ago
5 min read

One of my goals for this year is to reconnect with creativity. Over the last couple of years, somewhere between work and wedding planning and personal circumstances, I've quieted the part of my brain that finds joy in generating new ideas. I haven't stopped making things but it has become more and more rare to experience the spark of an exciting beginning, or the flow state of momentum in execution.

So, I've decided to dedicate the next month to building good habits to support my creative practice. Here is the plan (which borrows some elements from The Artist's Way...):

Create every day

I took an art class in college in which we were required to use our sketchbooks every day, without exception. Even if all we could do on a given day was draw a single line, we had to open and interact with our sketchbook daily. I definitely had one-line-days, and I remember one day when I just taped a receipt onto a page. But on other days, the act of opening the sketchbook was enough to lead to something greater.

My system will use a similar low-pressure approach: I have to do SOMETHING every day, in any medium, for any amount of time. My intention is to do some 15-minute sessions, each focused on a small material exploration or some sort of sketch. I'm planning to document this process and summarize each week in a blog post (but this part is optional).

Conscious media consumption

I want to try to create a little more space in my brain, and break the habit of filling multiple hours with mindless, simultaneous screen use. I'm coming off of 3 weeks in New Zealand in which I didn't watch tv and barely interacted with social media, and I didn't miss either. Everything is easier on vacation, but I want to work toward getting closer to that in my day-to-day life as well.

For me, that means:

Choosing movies that I am genuinely interested in watching with full attention. I can go out to the movies, or watch them with friends, or watch them alone at home but only if I don't go on my phone.
Limiting consumption of TV, especially easily binge-able content. I can watch TV at the gym or on the train (on the way home from work). If I want to watch something at home, it has to be after I've fulfilled "create every day."
I also want to create more space for silence. I'm not going to try to restrict myself from listening to music or podcasts, but when I'm on a walk or working on a project I'll experiment with waiting 5-10 minutes before putting anything on.
No restrictions on attending live performances! I want to do more of that (see below).

Inspiration & community

I am going to plan for at least one inspiration-gathering OR community-focused creative activity every week. This is somewhat borrowed from the "Artist Date" concept in The Artists's Way.

Valid options include (but are not limited to):

Going to a museum, gallery, or live performance
Spending time in nature
Taking a class/workshop
Having a sewing day with friends
Hosting a craft night
Volunteering at an arts-related space

And that's basically it! Simultaneously, my husband and I are starting what he calls "The Year of Fitness" and I'm starting to study for my professional engineering licensure, so I am also going to reserve some grace for the possibility of competing priorities.

Week 1

Here's a summary of the first week.

Overall, I consider it a success. I did successfully make space in my schedule and my brain to work on a creative project every single day. I only had one day that I would consider a "one-line-day," where I just spent a few minutes on something and then abandoned it.

Themes of the Week:

Sloppy Quilting: It was not my intention to have a specific theme at all, and quilting is not a big part of my normal practice. But I think the daily practice did give me enough momentum to iterate on similar ideas - Everything I worked on this week involved some amount of piecing, layering, and top-stitching.
Scraps!: Every project I worked on this week utilized fabric from my scrap bin (which is great, I need to work through that stuff). The only "new" fabric pieces I used were the floral/mushroom print fat quarters I used as the main fabric for the laptop sleeve, which I got at a curio shop on my honeymoon. But even this project used scrap flannel for the inner layers of the quilted pieces.

I did end up working on the same project for 4 days in a row, rather than starting something brand new each day. While that wasn't necessarily the original intention, it's still a positive outcome - I was still able to come back to it consistently every day, and since I was working without a pattern, there were plenty of new problems to solve each day.

It also helped me mitigate one of the biggest risks with this project, which is my commute to Boston. Although I only do it twice a week (and once this week, due a combination of illness and weather) I tend to be a complete zombie on those days. Historically, I do my two days in a row and I basically Severance myself from the evening before to the morning after. This week, despite a nightmare of a commute day because of the snow (about 4.5 hours total) I was able to refocus spend nearly an hour working on my project in the evening. I think convincing myself to start something new would have been significantly more challenging.

I don't know if I can say I successfully achieved the inspiration/community part of my goal this week -- Between getting snowed in, getting our heat fixed, putting a lot more effort into making our food, and going to the gym, I did not make it very far out into the world. I did go for lots of walks, and we played in the snow with our friends during the big storm, so that will have to count for Week 1.

Sunday - Quilted Laptop Sleeve

Monday - Quilt Strip (Material Exploration)

Tuesday - Cat Couch

I decided on Tuesday that I wanted to make a little bed/couch for my cat. She loves to sit in a little patch of sunlight on our kitchen floor in the winter, or to lie down near us when we are eating. She's also getting older and having more trouble moving around, so I wanted her to have a comfy option that we could move to wherever she wanted to hang out.

Wednesday - Cat Couch (Contd.)

Still working on the cat couch. This was my nightmare commute day, so I'm proud that I was able to get as far as I did before I (including solving my biggest technical issue from Tuesday and starting the stuffing step) before I crashed.

Thursday - Cat Couch (Contd.)

It may not look like I made much progress on Thursday, but that is because final assembly turned out to be the most time consuming step. I realized around this point that I would need to hand tack the crease of the arms/back to the very bottom of the couch so that it would keep its shape, which required thimbles, tweezers, and a lot of patience.