37. Sketchbook Fears: From the Blank Page to Creating Magic

Let's explore the transformative power of sketchbooks - this isn’t just about drawing; it’s about making room for your creativity and transforming that daunting blank page into a canvas for your imagination.

Learn some methods of working in your sketchbook that will help you to get moving in spite of fear, break out of blocks and perfectionism, and elevate your creative practice. Whether you're embroidering, drawing, or simply dreaming, this episode will help with the fear of "but WHAT do I DRAW?!" when you crack open that big blank book.

Magic Threads Embroidery Course

Enchanted Blooms Stitch Series

Transcript

Introduction

Welcome back to Stitch Wish Radio. Today I want to share my favorite ways of using a sketchbook to amplify my own visions. So this isn't about how to draw, or what to draw, or when to draw, but really about managing the feeling of And I have this quite frequently nowadays, that feeling when we have a bit of time to do our own thing or develop some new ideas or just get, do, we just wanna get some clarity on the page and we open up our sketchbook and we see that bright white page staring back at you as your brain suddenly feels like it's gone completely blank.

Your brain is now as blank as that page.  The clock is ticking. Your hour of free time is now at 55 minutes. The pressure is on. What do we do?  

Magic Threads Course Overview

So this episode was inspired by the recent updates that I made to my Magic Threads course. I added weekly sketchbook exercises to enhance the creative practice that helps open up the visual language.

So Magic Threads is actually an embroidery course. It's a 10 week course on bringing your ideas to the physical realm through the art of embroidery. But such a significant amount of our growth in embroidery art happens off the fabric and on the page.

It's like the speed with which we can work in our sketchbook with pen or marker or whatever. This speed allows us to work through ideas and inspiration and turn them into a part of our own language that then gets to find expression through embroidery. So the weekly lessons in Magic Threads also include deep dives into a new stitch each week, And the multitude of ways that these stitches can be expressed.

And so even if you already know the stitches, you're going to love learning new ways to use them. . But more important than the nuts and bolts of the course is the impact that it can have on your creative practice. I've been offering Magic Threads for about three years now, though I started designing and creating the course in 2017 and I keep expanding it, like I just did this spring, like a huge expansion on it. 

Student Testimonials

But here's what some past students have had to say. So from L. B.,  Magic threads was fantastic. The entire perspective was a total new one, way beyond your normal. Okay, here's how you do the stitches type of class, but also still having the how tos for stitching in it. Just a fantastic welcoming place to be.

I've already recommended your course to other  fiber minded people who I know. Thank you so much. Heart, heart, heart. From Stacy C. I really needed something to ignite my embroidery practice into a truly creative and expressive act, and Magic Threads Course did exactly that. It took me from stitching other people's patterns to imagining and creating my own, and it unlocked how to create an image in my mind and translate it into thread.

Now I can see inspiration everywhere, and I can bring my own story to my work as well. So grateful to have found Christie and Magic Threats. If you're interested in magic threads, check out the show notes for the link. 

Free Resources

If you want to sample my teachings for free, you can check out the enchanted bloom stitch series. So I took the stitch along that I did earlier this year.

If you haven't heard of it, I did a 10 day series on designing and stitching your own bouquet. So , I turned this into a little mini course delivered via email. You can take it at any time and you'll get. access to the first lesson immediately after you sign up. You can also find out all about Magic Threads and Enchanted Blooms in the show notes. 

Overcoming the Blank Page

Okay, onto today's episode. Sketchbooks. Where do we start?  Whether you're working with an old notebook or you've cracked open a brand new, sparkling new one, you'll inevitably deal with this problem. The white page. The giant, gleaming, in your face, blank space full of potential. And worse, full of expectations. 

We feel this so often on untouched materials. From the blank page to the uncut or unstitched fabric. The blinking cursor, all of these have this overwhelming weight that comes along with them, that if we start something the wrong way, then what? It's not going to be good enough. We won't be good enough.

We'll fall into a black hole to never return. We'll be consumed by the medium entirely. 

Strategies for Starting

So in my opinion, when experiencing this, you have two choices. Well, you have three, but we're going to go over the first two.  You can skip the first page. Turn to page two or even three and let these pages exist without pressure.

Save them for later, save them for never. Just move on and play around knowing you didn't feel like you effed up on the first page. Or,  this is my favorite, you can intentionally mess it up. Make a mark, any mark. This is a must do at some point in the creative process. Just start drawing. When you make a mark, any mark, you defile the purity of the untouched materials and suddenly it becomes so much easier to make a second mark and a third.

And next thing you know, ideas begin to take shape with plans and future steps and future marks, all of these more clearly laid out for you because you took action.  I love doing this in pen or marker, having these bold, definite lines, not a meek, maybe I can erase it later pencil, commit, make your line.

You deserve to make art. That line deserves to exist on the page.  Sorry, I got a little carried away there. Oh, so the potential third option, you could make the best piece of art you've ever created on this page. But how boring is that? Then what about the rest of the sketchbook? You just expect to keep getting better on every single page, better and better.

 Doing the best work of art you've ever made on every page. That kind of pressure is completely unhelpful and completely unnatural. Sometimes we don't even realize we're putting that pressure on ourselves. But think about it. Nothing in nature grows like that at a constant rate of improvement.

And to expect that from yourself is to expect yourself to act like a machine or a computer or otherwise not human.  Release yourself from that pressure.  So then what about the rest of the pages? Oh, I totally forgot to mention in the intro, um, my upcoming book, The Art of Embroidery Design, which comes out in January 2025, and is now available for pre order.

Um, so my book also has sketchbook prompts for each section to explore the different elements of design through both sketchbook and stitching. And while you'll have to wait for the book to come out to read those, here's some other ideas for working in your sketchbook to explore the world around you. So one thing I love is plant prints.

This can look so many different ways, pressing the plant, like actually getting a leaf of a plant, pressing it into the page, tracing its outline, maybe doing a rubbing on it. This is a great way to really explore intimately the plants that you're surrounded with. You go beyond just like leaf shape, leaf shape with serrated edges and start to feel in a really tactile way, what this plant is made up of.

Bonus points because this sort of interactive movement brings out the smell of a plant and the feeling, the touch of the plant. So it's a much more sensorial sensory experience.  Next up, try dividing the page into 12 or 15 or whatever, making a grid on the page of like, you know, 1 inch, 2 inch squares, and then filling in each of these squares as fast as possible.

This gives a little structure within which to improvise, and these smaller spaces releases some of the pressure of everything needing to look good.  When you have 12 different designs that you have to make, and let's say, like, 3 or 4 of them are great, and the other however many, what is that, nine?  Eight or nine are not that great.

Um, all of a sudden it's like a whole lot, you're not really concerned about those other eight or nine. What you're focusing on are the three or four that are really working.  Next up, pick a single shape and explore its potential. How does this shape lock into itself as a pattern? How does it look when it overlaps?

When it radiates out from itself? Whatever, just explore all those different ways a single shape can, can work.  And lastly, if you're an artist of many stripes, maybe you do a lot of writing or you, you'd like using your sketchbook as a place to record research instead of having multiple books for different purposes.

How can one sketchbook take on multiple purposes?  How can you organize it in a way that makes it easier to navigate?  I mean, I still have multiple sketchbooks I'm working in at one time, but for example, I have one sketchbook where I like to use.  the left page for research. So any sort of, um, imagery that I want to tape in there or writing that I, any research that I have, notes that I'm taking basically are on the left side.

And then any artwork or ideas that I've created from this are on the right side. And that way it's easier for me to refer back to and I can, that way I can kind of distinguish what are my ideas and what are things I've gathered from elsewhere.  Another example would be using it for drawing on the top or writing on the bottom.

Just thinking of different ways to use your sketchbook for multiple types of art.  So, whatever you do within the pages of your sketchbook, I hope you know that your designs are worthy of taking up space. Your visions, your ideas, your dreams, let them out on the page. Don't wait for them to get better before expressing them.

A. Wow, that's a lot of pressure. And B, they aren't going to get anything, as long as they stay stuck in your head in this fearful mindset.  I know it's easy for me to say I've been studying art my whole life.

But you know how scared I was when I went to my first day of arts high school, that first day walking the halls of the visual arts department, seeing all the upper class people with their sketchbooks all like watching them filling it with their personal style. They all had these like really distinct styles that they had developed by this point.

They all had really, what seemed to me as just so much. Super developed skills, like I could see the raw emotion that they managed to channel on the page. And if it hadn't been required by my teachers to fill up the pages of my fresh, fancy new sketchbook, I would still be sitting in that fear and wishing that I could just do that, do it right the first time and get it right the first sketch.

And thank God I made the first mark in that fancy new book, because that processing idea of ideas, that personal space where I was able to unleash all my fears and desires would continue to be a nearly daily experience for me. And it's one that I get to look back on at this point, it's probably thousands of pages and at least a few dozen well worn covers.

And I get to see exactly how far I've come. And maybe more importantly, I get to see exactly what hasn't changed at all.  I get to see the things that continue to drive and inspire and amaze me, and I get to see where I was when I was learning about these things. So  the value of keeping a sketchbook or processing the imagery in our brains and in the world around us, this value can't be measured as such a rich opportunity to create memories.

And in some cases, a sketchbook gets to be the non digital form that endures digital tragedies.  So take, for example, a trip to London I took in college. So this was shortly after my father had passed away and I used part of that inheritance to take a four week summer school session at Central St.

Martin's. This is a school I always wanted to go to, but I couldn't afford attending it for obvious reasons. Um, the course that I took this, this four week course was so incredible. I met so many amazing people from around the world. The teacher was just like a beacon of light, just hilarious and joyful and really helped us work through our ideas.

And it was just a really wonderful way. for me to get out of my grief.  I had a friend who was in Amsterdam at the time or in Holland at the time. So I planned a quick weekend trip up there. I flew into Amsterdam and I went to Rotterdam where, where my friend was saying, well, due to an unexpected security threat, um, this was a couple years after 9 11, so airport security was already at the max, and then there was, uh, there was some sort of threat of security that happened, and so they made me check every single thing on me except for my credit card and my travel documents.

I think I maybe even had to check my actual physical wallet, I just had to take everything out of it and put it in a clear Ziploc baggie. They even made me check the book I was planning to read on the plane.  I didn't know any of this was going to happen until I got to the airport. There was no frequent checking of email or the news.

My little flip phone could barely tell me what time it was, let alone what was going on at the airport. I only knew of the security threat because I noticed a newspaper headline the day before I was flying to Holland and was like, oh, I should probably get to the airport early. So, since the airport was total pandemonium with all this extra checked baggage, my bag was probably something small and not very much like a luggage, it was probably just a bag.

Since it was a weekend trip, my luggage ended up getting lost. Along with my cell phone, my mp3 player, this was before the days of smartphones so all of these were separate, and my camera. 

All of my photos from three weeks of London, gone. Forever.  But, since the course I was taking was so reliant on keeping a sketchbook, that was a really important part to the teacher, was to, and if everywhere we went, all the museums that we went to, we would bring sketchbooks and we would sketch everything.

I actually had saved an incredible amount of memories on paper.  And it gave the trip an entirely different coloring in my memory. So instead of memories like snapshots, it was more dimensional. Memories in ink and pencil and washes of color over fabric. No shots of me in front of the Thames River, or in stalls on Portobello Road, or, you know, images from different museums from the V& A, but instead, architectural details.

Doodles of plants I'd never seen before. My own interpretation of artwork that hung on the walls at the V& A. The shapes of the taxis that looked like they were from a totally different era. These shapes  illustrated in various forms and designs.  This is what my sketchbook got to do for me. It was just such a beautiful experience and like, wow, this is, this form of memory is totally different than the quick snapshots that we are so used to at this point, even more used to now.

Side note, another blessing of this security issue was having the somewhat kismet experience of just getting to run into my friend on the streets of Rotterdam since I had my phone taken away. 

I ended up having to kind of freestyle my way through the trains and buses. I realized once I got to Rotterdam, I was like, Oh, I never actually figured out how to get, or once I got to Amsterdam, I was like, I never actually figured out how to get to Rotterdam. Um, I was just going to call him when I landed.

So instead, I just kind of ended up freestyling my way through the trains and buses and trying to guess where he was based on strangers. Some of whom happen to know English, thankfully. I ended up spending that weekend wandering around Rotterdam in a boy's hoodie and skate shoes that were four sizes too big for me, because the sandals I showed up in were no match for the wet streets of Holland.

Anyway, enough reminiscing about the past. My point is, not many people will want to steal your sketchbook, I'll tell you that much.  Your cell phone, on the other hand.  Interestingly enough, the paperback book that I had ended up having to check did eventually get returned to me months later, and I was like, really, you could have, that, that probably cost more to ship than the book cost, but whatever.

Probably could have kept that.  Okay, where was I? I think I'm done. Thank you for following me down that little road to the past. So yeah, closing up, my Enchanted Blooms free stitch series is available anytime you'd like to take it. Ten days of designing and stitching a magical bouquet of your dreams.

Magic Threads, my 10 week embroidery and and design course is open until September 30th. And my upcoming book, The Art of Embroidery Design is now open for pre order. Um, I will be sharing more about that in the coming months. Obviously you won't be able to stop hearing about it. I'm sorry. I'm just very excited.

I spent many years working on this book.  I just got a physical, physical copy of it, and I am so stoked with how the photography came out. So I included a giant chunk of my own personal collection of vintage pieces as inspiration. So I sent those off to my editor. Um,  The team did an amazing amount of close up photos of these pieces so you can also get inspired by them and see like up close what the actual stitches are like.

Um, there's also almost a dozen other artists who are profiled in the book sharing their design tips as well and I will be interviewing some of them in the coming months leading up to the book and I can't wait to share everything about it.  But don't worry, you'll hear more.  Alright, I'll be back in a couple weeks.

Thanks so much for listening and I hope this really helps your practice. Bye!