Inspiration

Where do people get their inspiration and ideas from?

Although I enjoy looking at the art quilts and other textile work that people are making and showing us on their blogs and webpages, it’s not where I get my ideas from. One of my favourite ways of finding new ideas for quilts is to use the vaste source of information available on the web. I think of a word or phrase and do a google search on images. The things you turn up are sometimes quite surprising and for me it’s a kind of visual brainstorming. From the many images that appear, I then choose about 5 – 7 with a maximum of 10 to save for future reference. Obviously the images never get translated one to one into a quilt, that would be piggy backing on the creativity of others, but from them ideas are born, which I then allow to ferment in my brain. And some of them finally make it into a quilt.

Another source of inspiration for me is looking at paintings by various artists. There is a series of easily affordable books by Taschen called the Basic Art Series. They have excellent photographs of the paintings and plenty of them. Again just browsing through them from time to time puts new ideas into my head. Other books I enjoy browsing are catalogues from art exhibitions that we have visited, and books of photographs (those coffee table books!).

And finally there are the many photographs and slides from our holidays and my favourite photoblogs on the web. We are currently in the middle of a marathon process of scanning in all our slides. So that is one more resource that will be more accessible to me in the future.