The Crafter's Devotional

365 Days of Tips, Tricks, and Techniques for Unlocking Your Creative Spirit

Barbara R. Call

• Publisher: Quarry Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781610581219
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Creativity

Stay inspired every day of the year with this volume of tips, prompts, and insight into maintaining your own creative practice. Regardless of their chosen medium, all artists and crafters share the passion to create and the need for inspiration. Some of us have plenty of ideas for projects yet can't find the time to get started, while others are ready to go—yet can never decide what to make. The Crafter's Devotional offers ways to make your creative process part of your daily life. Rather than offering instructions to follow for a particular project, The Crafter's Devotional combines lessons, quotations, techniques and journaling prompts designed to help you explore and nurture your own creative impulses. Each day of the year is given its own focus, on which the reader will find a dose of inspiration, instruction, or illumination.

MONDAY day 1

Why Journal?

A BETTER QUESTION MIGHT BE, why not journal? Writing, sketching, or even just taking notes in a day book lets you capture your hopes, dreams, wishes, fears, aspirations, or creative ideas. A journal can also serve as a special, private place to record your grief, sadness, or random thoughts, using just two very basic tools: a writing instrument and something (usually paper) to write on.

Journaling is one of the first tools used to teach aspiring writers how to tap into the creative flow, but you needn’t be a writer to harness the power behind capturing your thoughts, visions, or favorite quotes, and that’s just for starters.

A basic definition of a journal involves a pen and paper, but the possibilities for journaling are virtually endless, from paper and fabric to wood and more. Journals, books, or collections of pages themselves can even become works of art.

Journaling needn’t be expensive—peruse your local office supply shop, drugstore, warehouse, or stationery store for a notebook that can serve as your first journal. Choose the book that you’re drawn to instinctively, whether it’s a miniature notepad or a leather-bound book.

JUST WRITE. Don’t judge your output or even reread your writing at first. The goal is to let yourself go and get comfortable with recording whatever it is that you want to keep track of, from happy moments to sad ones, and everything in between.

“How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts— I always write it according to the humor I am in, and if a stranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious—insolent and whimsical I must appear!—one moment flighty and half mad,—the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.”

—FRANCES BURNEY (1752–1840),
British author

TUESDAY day 2

Reusing Old Photos

HOME SCANNERS CAN CREATE electronic versions of childhood, vintage, or print photos you’ve taken (but lost the negatives), or photos sent to you by friends, colleagues, or other family members.

If you don’t have a scanner, the photos can be scanned at a copy shop or office supply store. These digital versions can be printed on demand, and the files can be manipulated, tweaked, stretched, cropped, tinted, and toyed with in a photo-manipulation program.

Even black-and-white copies can be made for pennies apiece (color copies are more expensive). Playing with the size, shade, or angle of the original photos during the copying process often creates unexpected, fun results.

All these techniques allow you to reuse a photo in your creative work without ruining the original. This is especially important with vintage photos, as there may be no way to ever re-create the original. Scanning older photos also gives you a more permanent means of storing them (electronically, such as on a CD or hard drive) or sharing them with other people (via email or other online connections.)

OLD PHOTOS CAN INSPIRE many creative endeavors—use them as you would any random image, but remember (and be respectful of) the potential power of any emotions attached to those photos (in yourself or in others).

To make the base for this art quilt, the artist used a combination of photo fabric and iron-on transfer sheets; and embellishments include buttons and decorative stitching.

ARTIST / Pam Sussman

For instructions on how to use photo fabric and/ or iron-on transfer sheets, see page 230–231.

WEDNESDAY day 3

Crayon Therapy

TODAY’S EXERCISE IS SIMPLE—pull out (or better yet, buy a new box!) of crayons and color to your heart’s content. Color in a coloring book, or just color on plain white paper. Don’t judge, don’t hold back, and just have fun.

SOMETIMES, the simple task of returning to the activities of our childhood can serve as inspiration.

THURSDAY day 4

Your Creative DNA

EACH OF US HAS A UNIQUE SET of DNA in our genes that determines, among other things, our body shape, our hair color, and the size of our feet. Consider this concept, borrowed from Twyla Tharp, one of America’s greatest choreographers: Each of us also has a unique creative DNA. Writes Tharp:

“I believe that we all have strands of creative code hardwired into our imaginations . . . these strands are as solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except that they govern our creative impulses. They determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them. I’m not Watson and Crick; I can’t prove this. But perhaps you also suspect it when you try to understand why you’re a photographer, not a writer . . . or why your canvases gather the most interesting material at the edges, not the center.

In many ways, that’s why art historians and literature professors and critics of all kinds have jobs: to pinpoint the artist’s DNA and explain to the rest of us whether the artist is being true to it in his or her work.”

(From The Creative Habit: Learn It and
Use It for Life [Simon & Schuster, 2003])

Tharp illustrates this theory by pointing to Ansel Adams, best known for his expansive black-and-white landscape photographs. Adams’s creative DNA compelled him to carry his camera high atop mountains to capture the widest view of nature, and this view of the world became his signature, she explains.

TAKE TIME TO REFLECT on your own artistic DNA, perhaps using these questions as a starting point. If you were born to produce just one type of work, what would it be? What is your unique view of the world, and how does it manifest in your artwork? What medium lets you best express your creativity?

FRIDAY day 5

The Power of Sacred Places

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INSPIRED while in a house of worship? Sometimes the music moves you, other times it may be the sermon, prayers, or meditation, and other days just the edifice itself—stained glass, the soaring ceilings, austere décor, or familiar icons.

For those who attend church, temple, or other houses of worship and prayer on a regular basis, here are some ways to tap your experience for later use:

• Pretend you are visiting your place of worship for the first time: Look upward at the edifice itself, noting the building materials, or stop and read the historical plaque on the outside.

• Explore the focal point of your place of worship—the altar, bimah, or the like— and beyond. How is it decorated, and why? Wh...