For your creative listening pleasure

I'm home today, taking a much needed vacation day, a scheduled mental health day. I'm really liking my new job (4 months yesterday!) and feel like I've learned enough to stay busy and be useful. But between AshLee's activities and Husky football, we've been away from home almost every weekend since August and I was desperately in need of some Nikki-time at home. So, I'm here working on my Simple Still Life project and puttering.

Electronically wired as we are here in the Rey household, the vast majority of the entertainment media is downstairs in the living room. Up here in the sewing room, there's just the computer. I like to have background noise when I'm creating. It occupies the pesky part of my brain that loves to overthink things. I suppose I could play a dvd on the computer and Dave has devoted hours to ripping our extensive cd collection and loading it onto an external hard drive, so I could listen to music. But my entertainment of choice for creating is web-based audio creativity programming.

Today I've been listening to the archives of the weekly audio programs at Artella. The programs are on the paid membership part of the site, but I'm currently enjoying the free one-month membership recently offered to ClothPaperScissors subscribers. Each program is 10-15 minutes long and they cover a variety of creativity issues.

For quilty content, Quilters News Network offers 24-hour-a-day programming and they've added several shows to their lineup. It's mostly traditional quilting fare, but hey, we're talking background noise here.

My favorite site is Delona Lang's HeartsArt. Delona does hour-long interviews with mixed media artists like Lesley Riley and Claudine Hellmuth. I've listened to most of the interviews in the archives, but they are so well done that I enjoy listening to them more than once.

Listening to these programs helps reinforce a creative mindset and keeps me focused by keeping my brain from zinging off in a thousand different directions. Yay focus! And now it's time to pick another program and get back to sewing...