True confessions time…I’m one who’s prone to creative dry spells. Droughts lasting weeks, sometimes months, where I stick my head in the sand (or my nose in a book) and forget about creating anything new. This is one reason I’ve not posted since early January (another very well could be the silent auction I coordinated in February, but that’s a whole different story). Life gets in the way, and I quickly fall out of the habit of making time to make. Then it becomes hard for me to reenter the creative atmosphere. I convince myself that I have to think of something really stellar that’s worth making and writing about. I get so caught up in coming up with something good that I forget to see what’s right in front of my face. Like those damn cute marshmallow bunny ears I stuck on my Easter cupcakes (Thank you Pinterest!). Or the bunny and colored eggs I placed in a pot on the front patio to add some color on a dreary Easter day. Could have been a post.
But I think I’m getting close to finding my groove again. This morning I came across an issue of Vintage Style from January 2014 and opened to a feature on Felting Fashions. Aha! Those pages featured making flowers and other sweet things from felt, and I just so happen to have been attempting to do the very same thing with a pile of old sweaters. For a couple of weeks I’ve been sporadically cutting out flower petals and setting them aside with a plan to bead the edges. I beaded one and decided I wasn’t crazy enough about the results to invest the time in doing them all. So Friday afternoon, when I had planned to work on the outline for a new book I’m working on (inevitably the time when a creative urge strikes!) it all came together. I found myself obsessively cutting flower petals from felted sweaters and socks (Yes, socks!), and mixing and matching shapes, colors, and textures to build a few spring flowers of my own.
It turns out that the raspberry sherbet colored socks I unearthed last weekend during a spring clothing purge were the missing link. The color paired perfectly with the pastel orange and medium purple I’d been fooling with. And now here they are, ready to adorn a hat, pillow, or iPad case. I think my favorite might be the abstract version above made from the sock scraps. Here’s hoping that by creating these wool versions I’ll help spur on the sprouting and blooming of the real thing. Happy Spring!
Kari Cornell 