Recently I have been reading the dancer/coreographer, Twyla Tharp's, book,
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life, and have taken a couple of her habits and started using them as my own. Every morning she arises, heads to her empty studio across town and starts to move. This stimulates her mind and body to create new movements, dances and fully choreogrphed works. She also explained how the body, not just the mind, has a memory and through repeated exercises, the body will remember, even years later, the movements in a particular choreographic creation.
This made absolute sense to me, especially when I thought about the act of typing. My fingers know where the keys are but my mind does not. Thus, upon arising each morning I now head directly to my studio, sit down at the sewing machine with a stack of already prepared 6" sandwiches of fabric and batting, and start free motion stitching.
In the past week the following series of 6" art quilts has emerged. Every day I am amazed at what comes from my free thinking, morning mind. When the day comes to a close I color the designs with fabric inks. In the hours between early morning stitching and nightfall other works seem to miraculously come to mind and now I have 3 larger quilts in the making...and all this came about from adopting a couple of techniques from a dancer's book.
