My Process

My inspiration can come from any direction. Seldom and I mean seldom do my inspirations come from places like Pintrest.
Instead I find patterns in a coaster or bathroom tiles or an advertising in a magazine. Then I ask myself which elements drew my attention? How can I capture and use those elements in something I create? Was it a color thing, pattern, texture?
Then what method do I want to use? Painting? Quilting? Metal? Drawing?
Next I sketch a design that has those elements. certain lines, shapes, colors, textures...
I play with color combinations unless the color combinations are the elements I want to keep.
A recent example would be a series of golden diamonds on a teal, turquoise background.
Deciding if I wanted to use squares on point or create diamonds, how many shades of yellow/orange/gold and teal/green/aqua/ turquoise. and then it is a hunt to find the colors. In my stash or not.
Scale is yet another component.
And so I found some fabric, and then the next week I found more fabric that was even better in matching my vision. Finally when I sat down and designed and cut and sewed the pieces together I found that they did not satisfy what I had in mind. I have decided scale is the problem. I ended up with a piece about 20" x 20". What I think would be more to my liking would be a piece about 8" X 8".but that will entail sewing tiny pieces of fabric together. Not my favorite thing. And so it sits waiting for me to get back to it in the stack of other pieces languishing in similar limbo.
But wait,
 Look a cool picture. Not the dog, but the way the light reflects on the water around him. I wonder how I can capture that cool ripple effect in mixed blues and purples. Paint, fabric?  I'm still figuring it out.

The story of my bone bin

Long ago and far away in a land under the midnight sun...
Once upon a time I was making jewelry and I had a vision; slices of antler carved, polished and set with real gems stones like ruby, sapphire, garnet, amethyst, and diamonds. So I bought a couple of antler pieces locally and bought some gems on Ebay for cheap and began. I loved them and it was great fun so I found folks on Craig's list who had some more antler for sale and I bought it, sliced it and made more pendants. I invested in sterling chains and wire and created some lovely pieces that I sold to coworkers and at bazaars.
I even bought a box with whole moose and caribou antlers as well as a couple of pieces of bone from steppe bison that lived here thousands of years ago. I bought some sheep horn at a gun show and some mammoth ivory at the fair. In all I made an sold about 30 pieces. Then we moved and I lost my work space for making jewelry in this way, but the antlers and horns moved with us.
The next chapter started when I saw an add on Craig's list for some lynx skulls. I was working at a school and asked if the science teachers were interested. "Yep" they said so I bought several. I saved 3 for me.
I gave one of them to my nephew, cause he likes cool stuff too, and the other two sat on my shelf for a couple of years. Then one night I had a dream.
I saw myself painting one of those skulls.
And I did. It took several days as I needed to let each color dry. I was using some stray paints I had left over and some water color brushes I borrowed from the art teacher.
As I was painting I just paid attention to the process and tried to match my vision. As I painted though I knew this was not a skull I would keep. It felt like it belonged to someone else. By the time I finished it was quite amazing; not only did it have many bright colors but I had done a lot of over work with black ink lines and I had set 3 rhinestones into the bone.
About this time I knew just who this skull belonged to.
We had a friend with a brain tumor, who had a biology background like me and like me loved animals and even found the bones and skulls cool.
We gave her the skull while she was in the hospital recovering from yet another procedure.
It became one of her favorite things and still holds a place of honor in the house after her death.

I soon painted the other skull and started seeking more to paint. It was the process that spoke to me. and often left me amazed that the end products could be so beautiful because I just painted things as they wanted to be painted. I seldom have that kind of clear vision of the end product anymore, instead I let myself be lead from one color to the next and one pattern or texture.
I acquired way more skulls since then of all types.
 beavers, lynx, wolf, coyote, fox, otter, elk, cow, porcupine...
And so my bone bin has grown. I have no idea where my vision will lead me next.
I do have several skulls in process and several skulls on the market.
One of my favorites is the pronghorn skull my brother gave me after his hunt last year.

Too Tired to be creative?

It feels like long hours and restless sleep cause by the stress of those long work hours leaves me brain dead when it comes to being creative. But I am not sure if it that or if I am just too aware that I will not have the time to execute anything outside of a very limited scope in terms of time and energy. So there is no point in putting thought into big projects or intricate exacting work.
I recently acquired a stack of jewelry magazines and as I flip through them I do not even let myself consider trying anything I see. Too much time, too much effort, too much learning curve, too much money, too many other pots simmering on the back burners.
I want to sit down and develop some long term plans for my creative endeavors. start taking classes instead of thinking about taking classes. start investing in tools rather than making do with what I have. Develop a structure of time that puts my creative self front and center of my daily routine instead of grabbing time in between other people's priorities.
Unfortunately I think that one way I have tried to justify my need for creative endeavors is to try making them marketable outcomes. I can always sell my bead work so its ok to spend time doing that. I can always give things as gifts so that makes it ok to do it. But the truth is that I have started becoming more invested in processes like quilting where I tend to like and keep the things I make with no other plan for those items. So do that just start to give me the mental space to take classes in glass fusing, mineralogy, jewelry design, and metal smithing. 
But these are thoughts for another day when I do not have the pressure of time pushing me to get enough sleep for that next long day at work.