Keep your creativity going!

Here’s a great little video about creativity:

29 Ways to Stay Creative:   http://vimeo.com/24302498 

How many do you do regularly to nurture your creativity??

Here's something I'm planning to do that would go under the category of "practice, practice, practice."  Sharon Boggon, an Australian needle artist, is organizing "Take a Stitch Tuesday" though her blog:  http://www.pintangle.com   Each Tuesday, beginning January 3rd, 2012, she will post a new embroidery challenge stitch.  Then participants will practice the stitch and see if they can come up with new ways to use it in their needle work.  Sounds like fun, doesn't it?  If you're interested, go to her amazing blog and scroll down to the info for the challenge.


There are spots available for my class at The Elly Sienkiewicz Appliqué Academy in February: http://www.ellysienkiewicz.com

Now you know what Santa can bring you for Christmas!

Beautiful Fall!

We spend part of the year in Boone, NC where the Fall leaves were spectacular this year.

This was taken at the Bass Lake located in Moses Cone Park where  my husband and I go  each morning to run. 

Scenes like this always remind me of “Spring and Fall,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) that was one of my favorites to teach to my high school students.

“Spring and Fall”

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah, as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Now, the Fall leaves don't spark thoughts of my own mortality but there is something about their unbridled beauty that makes me a bit weepy.  Just look at these colors:

We have since made our migration to Miami and I have been stitching as much as possible.  I'm working on the center block of the quilt in progress.  It will probably stay under wraps until after I show it (hopefully) at Appliqué Academy in February.  But here are some of the flowers all prepped and ready to stitch.

Wishing you a wonderful stitching Sunday!