Stuck

OK, it's time to confront this. I'm not working on any quilts right now. And, honestly, I haven't worked on anything since I finished up the Heffalumps quilt and my Journal Quilts last fall. Ugh.

Yes, I've been playing with lots of little things, I've experimented with mixed media and collage, I made First Frost (which I'm quite happy with), I've made class samples, I've finished up some more traditional UFO's. And doing all those things has enabled me to avoid thinking about the fact that I don't have any major work in progress.

For the past two years at least, going back to when I started Is That an Indian?, going back to when I started to be serious about developing my skills and trying to design my own stuff, going back to when traditional quilting stopped holding my interest long enough to actually finish a quilt, I've had something major in progress, something that I haul around, something that I'm working on. (wow, excellent run-on sentence!). And not having anything makes me feel itchy and restless.

It's not a creative block. There are literally dozens of ideas. Some of them have even become sketches. But every sketch I've made is somehow dissatisfying and I can't make myself start working in fabric on any of them. The only work I've been able to get done is stuff like First Frost, where I just want to try a technique and I start playing around with no expectations.

So, I've been finishing UFO's, playing with bits and pieces, messing around with other media, telling myself that as long as I'm getting something done, I'm moving in the right direction. And that may be true. Maybe it's just that I'm struggling with my inner control freak, trying to move toward a more intuitive way of working, but not quite able to just jump in without some idea of where I'm going. There's been some discussion of this on the QuiltArt list lately and the word that keeps coming up is: FEAR. Yep, the control freak hates fear. The control freak tries to control everything and minimize the unknown in order to avoid fear.

I don't really know where all this is going. I just know that it makes me feel itchy and restless and I don't like that. So I'll keep writing in the hope that articulating some of this will help me to organize my thoughts and figure it out. Yes, that's what I need: CONTROL! LOL!