Winter Creative Kindness
Continuing to share my incubation strategy
Welcome to my wee corner of Substack. I am a seasonal artist living on the Isle of Arran, off the west coast of Scotland. I am the custodian of approximately two acres of land that includes a woodland, a meadow and my wee garden. I offer a seasonal book arts project for paid subscribers if you are interested and you can read more about that HERE. Grab a cuppa and lets delve into our relationship with the shifting seasons….
I have shared quite a lot already about my winter incubation strategy and often stated that it is through this strategy that I do my best thinking of the year. The question I get asked a great deal is how do I know it is my best thinking? It is a good question. The answer is relatively simply.
My best thinking gives me a business that I love and the finanical rewards I need to live the life I want to live.
January is the heart of my incubation strategy as December is just too busy as I run my own Etsy store so there would be no chance of clear thinking then. January is also busy in store as I make handmade journals for a living but I am stocked up in advance allowing January to be much slower. Here is my recipe for best thinking ‘Incubation pie’ -
A bowl full of ‘slow’ time
A tablespoon of creative reflection before another tablespoon of seasonal affirmations using the method I shared HERE.
A sprinkle of art journaling to release some new creativity - reference HERE
A clean and decluttered studio space - I always tidy up at the end of each session so it is never really that messy but it does need a January clean
Tea, lots of it
A good handful of ‘Creative Kindness’ activities
Mix together and bake on a low heat for days and days. Serve with vegan custard.
It is the last addition to the recipe ‘Creative Kindness’ that I want to focus on in this piece. All the ingredients in the incubation pie are equally important and if one is missing the pie falls flat. If I am not mindful enough the one that is in danger of being missed off the list is Creative Kindness. However, it is the one element that really calms and soothes the busy mind as we emerge out of the festive period. It also reaches deep into February. So what is it?
Creative Kindness is permission you give yourself to create and work on small projects just because you can and you want to. It is no more complicated than that. The other ten months of the year I am busy working on creative projects for my business but not in January and February. These are the months I set aside to do just what I want to do and no more. If I am honest it used to just be January but, in the last couple of years, it has permeated well into February and I am rather proud of that.
It takes some planning. Autumn and the first month of winter have to be very structured to ensure that I can free myself for the two months that tumble out of the festive period. By doing that the rewards are truly immense and I use that word wisely. A well spent January and February sets me up for the next ten months in a way that is paced, focused and creatively and financially rewarding. Creative kindness is at the heart of these rewards.
As January appears on the horizon I set up wee boxes and baskets of projects ready to work on in these slower and much calmer months. The selection of projects is important and I use some guiding principles to include -
Projects that are relatively quick and easy to complete
Projects that stir my creative soul and make it feel better
Projects that have a repetitive quality to them
Projects that I am not interested in moneterizing
Projects that bring colour into a winter’s day
In December I liken myself to the red squirrels that we are blessed to have on our Scottish island. I dash about with my supplies to find somewhere to put them and try and remember where that is! It is joyful, truly. Come early January I clean and tidy my studio and then off I go to find my project supplies and put them in containers on my desk and see which one speaks to me first. Invariably it is the beautiful vintage linen covered buttons waiting in the recycled jam jar that my hands move to first.
Inspired by the vintage postcards resting in a wee envelope I can lose whole hours just picking out the colours of the postcard and painting the buttons. Who does that? I can tell you that high end fashion houses still do it as colour matching has to be perfect. Sometimes this can only be achieved by hand. I don’t work in the fashion industry but I am a textile and mixed media artist and buttons are very important in my world. The joy of this creative kindness exercise is that it also brings colour into dull winter days.
Another firm favourite is a small but perfectly formed scrapbook page. I use a Pink Pig 6x6 square sketchbook for this purpose. A cornerstone of my teaching is art journaling so I am careful to avoid this becoming an art journal exercise. It is literally just lovely scraps I have gathered and a bit of glue and about half an hour. Job done. I find this feeds the part of my brain where my inner child resides. If I don’t get glue in my hair or on my clothes it has not been a good session.
You absolutely know that somewhere in one of the project baskets is a book making project. My thinking isn’t easily organised although I do my best. I find that my creative thinking tends to meander around a topic but it in this meandering that I find my unique creative voice so I allow it to happen. To feed that thinking I make a batch of wee meandering journals and have them ready on their own small book shelf as the year begins to unfold.
I think it fools my mind that I am organised for the year ahead. Organised for meandering, at least…..
My last example is, perhaps, the most important. I stitch. I can’t winter without stitching so I set aside some small projects that I can stitch easily and without any fuss or complicated embroidery. This winter my Patrons have joined me and we have been making wee contemplation books as the winter days pass by. I also always make a single stitched book using the sewing machine with absolutely no idea what will feature on the pages. That is for the year ahead to decide.
It is when I am stitching these wee books that I feel at my calmest. The activity allows my mind to settle. It can take days or even weeks to settle the mind after a busy period and I am accutely aware of that but I just let the wee books work their magic. I can now add making wee paper books to my list of creative kindness projects as that is what my paid subscribers and I have been doing all winter in my Substack book arts project. Joyful.
There are more creative kindness project baskets I could share but maybe I will leave it there for now. I hope the underlying message is clear. Do things that you love because you can and you want to. Let the ‘doing’ settle and calm your mind. Only after that time has passed do I pick up a large piece of paper and thick marker pen and let planning commence. I can not tell you how easy planning has become as a result of my creative kindness projects over the years and my winter incubation strategy as a whole. I hope there are some take aways for you in this piece to support your best thinking.
Until next time,
Fiona x
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Amen to all this! 🙏🎉😌💚
So much beautiful inspiration here 😍🙏🌿