Much Ado About Making

I am a creative person. It could be argued, by me, that I am that, and every other adjective in the English language. It could also be argued, again by me, that everyone else is also all the things, and most certainly creative. I will not bother with providing any further information on my claim, that I and everyone else is everything, because so far no one finds these claims offensive or possibly even interesting enough to argue with me about them. This brings to my next self proclaimed adjective. I am argumentative!? Yes! But no, that's not the one. I am a complicator! An overdoist? A think-to-mucher? A word makey uppity-doda. Yes to all! A lass of abundance! Abundantly abundant! Abundant to the abundantth power?! I digress. As a creative and a complicator my chosen medium is quantum physics... jk. Comedy... believe it or not jk again. Sewing. It's sewing guys!

Sewing and designing clothing. Wielding Irons (typically one), slashing threads and wrestling fabric into submission. A true battle of the ages. Or one should think so considering the agony it has caused me since the day I met my ego. She's a lot. She has convinced me to dabble in a multitude of "hobbies" (she would argue that they are more like necessary skills that upon mastery will lament our existence...like I said, she's a lot). To name a very few; baking, tinkering, poetry, furniture rearranging and trying to uncover secrets of the universe. Current unsolvable question: What the hell were those Mayans really counting? Try as I might to do something more complex, sewing is what I always come back to.

When I accepted that sewing was gonna be my thing I did so on certain conditions. Sewing was gonna have to prove it was worthy of my precious time. I decided to start by pinpointing its exact shortcomings. Basically, I landed on sewing was not complicated enough while also being too complicated (a common complicator predicament). I decided I could work with it. All I needed to do now was come up with the concept and the system. The ultimate goal being to fix the fashion industry, create jobs for the millions of creative complicator sewers like myself and obviously save the world and all the people in it.

At the time I described it in less extreme terms. Something like sustainable fashion, low bar to entry, with the flexibility of a lean start up model and potential to franchise. Less extreme. I was certain I was onto something. I was inspired. Drawing my energy from copious amounts of business and self-help audio books I had been listening to on 2x speed (a tip I picked up from said audiobooks). Clearly, the business books were to prepare me for world domination. Less clearly, self-help books were something I unintentionally wandered into and seemed to be more about preventing my own self destruction. In my defense self-help and business books have a lot of overlap. Unbeknownst to me I was attempting to bandage the ever-growing confusion and low self esteem triggered by becoming a new mother and wife at practically the same time. I held onto the illusion that I was fixing problems out in the world in order to not address my own, which weren't actually all that new. My beautifully complicated plan required perfection and nothing less to begin, and that was the point of it. To never begin. My planning and obsessing did end up accomplishing something. It took all the joy out of creating. Go figure.

Luckily a secondary quality of being a complicator is being unrelenting. Whew. I stuck with it as long as it took (almost 2 years of agony if you don't count the lifetime of indecision before) to realize grand plans were not necessary for me to feel justified and worthy to create. At my own pace and in my own way. I found that I really don't want to save the world, at least not right now. I want to enjoy my son and my husband. I want to spend the majority of my time creatively complicating their lives.

Now when I make art I do not do it to prove my worth. I do it because I love to experiment and I love a (controlled) challenge. Most of all I do it because I can and the power in that gives me access to a joy I haven't known since childhood. Like it or not, when I create my insecurities come with me. Better I let them ride shotgun and not drive.

My big world saving hobby:

Upcycling used and imperfect formal dresses. :)