And it's Monday

A friend of mine was expressing some frustration with her son's inability to grasp the cyclical concept of time. Specifically days of the week. Monday follows Sunday, Thursday follows Wednesday, he gets that. He can rhyme off the days of the week like nobody's business. But what happens when you get to the end. Sunday doesn't come after Saturday, it comes before Monday. It doesn't come AFTER anything at all. He knows what happens on certain days - Monday is school, Friday is cubs, Saturday is pizza... so I suggested she make him a days of the week clock with pictures of what he knows for each day. After cubs comes pizza, after pizza comes church, after church comes school. It worked!

Looking at things in a different form reveals unexpected insight. Same with context. Wandering around Paris, if you bumped into your son's friend's mother's neighbour, you'd immediately connect, just by virtue of the fact you were two people with a common *something* in the middle of an uncommon situation. At the grocery store, it's unlikely you'd even acknowledge her, or she you.

Now how could I apply this to my creative process? One example comes to mind. I bought a chunk of acid green and rasperry batik a few years ago. I love this fabric - the combo is unexpected and wonderful. I was with Dona when I bought it, and while she liked it too, she could never imagine being able to use it because of the strong colour of the green. I pulled a couple more deep reds, heading toward purple and suddenly that green wasn't harsh, it was luminescent. Leaving that green on the shelves with the other greens made it challenging and uncomfortable. Throwing it into a mix of easier reds, putting it into a new context gave it a completely different quality.

And different form? Well that's easy. Kaleidescope quilts are the epitome of something being more than the sum of its parts. The most gawdawful prints become persian tapestries and delicate snowflakes when their form changes. Someday I'll do a kaleidescope. I'm not a fan of the stack and whack quilts in the style we see them most - stars or hexagons with setting triangles or squares , sashed and individually contrained so they look like a collection of pretty plates of the wall. My kaleidescope will be un-set, un-sashed, un-constrained so that the hexagons bump right up against each other. It's in my head, and it's beautiful. One day I'll see if I can get it out.

I have to remind myself of context and form when I get bogged down. I have to see with new eyes, because everything looks different when it's not where, or how you expect it to be.