Last night, I was trying to come up with a topic for my weekly Instagram Live. As your typical Type A personality, I keep a list of topics and concepts for Instagram Lives… but this week none of those seemed to fit. I asked my husband, Austin for ideas and he said, “Why don’t you talk about your creative process?” Insert pause. I hesitated and responded, “I don’t have one.”
Do you ever feel like that? Like you’re supposed to have it all figured out, yet you feel like you have no clue what you’re doing? I never thought I had it together enough to say that I have a “creative process” but once I started to think about it, I realized that I have a lot of similar steps in the process that I create things. So maybe, I do have a creative process after all… I think we all do.
Finding Inspiration
Like most creatives, my process begins with inspiration and for me that almost always begins with fiber. Sometimes, my process begins with a particular color (like the mauve in the photo above) and sometimes it begins with something I saw in the aisles of Target. Regardless of where the idea comes from, every piece and every aspect of creating should inspire you. I find inspiration in my favorite yarns, tools, and of course my gorgeous wooden hooks. Using beautiful materials and tools make me slow down and appreciate the process of creating instead of rushing toward the end goal.
Aside from sitting down to design and crochet, one of my favorite parts of being a maker is wandering through local yarn stores. I love that each store is completely unique, with different fibers, colors, and atmospheres. Once I fall in love with a yarn, my brain goes into overdrive to conceptualize a design for it. In fact, I typically won’t buy a yarn unless I have a design in mind for it before I leave the store.
Last weekend, I got the chance to check out a few yarn stores while visiting Minneapolis and fell in love with a limited edition yarn. This yarn was everything I love, it was gray (my fav), alpaca (also my fav), and made as a collaboration with a New York farm and fiber mill (you guessed it – local yarns are also my fav). Check, check, and check – that’s everything on my fiber wish list. But I walked away. I talked myself out of buying the yarn for a bunch of “practical” reasons… like the fact that it was too pricey and not accessible enough to create a pattern with.
But days later, I couldn’t get that yarn out of my head. I loved everything about it and felt so inspired at the thought of getting to work with it. I decided I didn’t care if it wasn’t logical, I just loved it and it embodied all the things I love as a maker. So I ordered it.
Finding Your Style
What I realized through my yarn purchase last weekend is that it doesn’t really matter how practical your idea is. It also doesn’t really matter where it came from. It doesn’t matter if no one else is going to “get it” or if you’re going against the grain. What matters is that you love it. And that’s it.
When you find something you love – whether it’s a fiber, a tool, or a design concept – do NOT let it go. It doesn’t matter where your process starts or ends. It doesn’t matter if you work backwards from what everyone else is doing. Hold onto the thing you love and it will carry you through your creative process.
All that Matters
At the end of all of this, I realized that I do have a creative process and I bet you do too. They might look completely different, and that’s okay.
If you take one thing away from this post, let it be this: Your creative process can be whatever you want it to be. All that matters is that you love what you do.