The Urge to Create

All children have the urge to create - as soon as they can hold a crayon they love making marks on paper and any other surface they can find! Later, their expressive drawings are an indication of where they are in their development. Many of us adults, however, have become too busy to give time to creating anything or think that doing anything creative is somehow something "childish" that they have, or should have, grown out of. The creative urge is repressed, buried deep down, but never, I believe, gone entirely.

As a child and a teenager, I loved to make things - I used to draw, paint, sew, knit, write and illustrate stories. I took Art at A-level and even thought of going on to study it in some form but I never felt I was "good enough". My father was an artist and I knew that I did not have his skills with drawing, so I went on to study an academic subject and get a series of jobs, finally settling on teaching. Through my twenties I kept going with my interest in art, took up pottery and kept knitting - I even made my husband a fair isle sleeveless sweater. With the arrival of my children, however, the time to do creative things was squeezed out and my creative urge was pushed still further down.

It did rise to the surface from time to time - in my enjoyment of decorating my childrens' birthday cakes and modelling little figures for them out of icing - and in my dreams. I had a recurrent dream where I would discover that there was one or more rooms in my house that I never knew about or used. My dream dictionary confirmed my feeling that this meant I was not "inhabiting" or using all the parts of myself. Yes, it was my creativity that was nudging me through my dreams, wanting to be used.

Then, about a year ago, I discovered Scrapbooking, by happy chance. Immediately I loved it and felt inspired. I also felt I could do it and didn't even have to draw! This has led to an awakened interest in other forms of art and crafts. As you have read in previous posts, I have got back into knitting and I am also experimenting with various mixed media techniques. And guess what ? Now that I am honouring my creativity, I haven't had a single dream about the unused rooms...

This layout, which I did at the end of last year is about my re-awakened urge to create:





And here is one I did about those birthday cakes...





Thanks for reading this long post