Necessity is the Mother...

One of the wonderful things about hanging out with creative people is getting a first hand view of how endlessly creative they can be. Every painter I know has a variety of widgets and gizmos they keep in their paint kits for various purposes and to achieve certain effects. When I was studying watercolor with Betty Lou Schlemm she taught me this really cool trick to make great water effects. She kept a piece of hard but flexible plastic in her paint box and when she wanted to make the reflection of the side of a building or a pier in still water she just positioned the plastic strip directly below the edge to be reflected and made a quick swipe across the paint. Voila! A perfect reflection.

My sister Lisa is a talented quilter and she is always telling me about her latest tricks for making perfect corners or precise piecing. Her work is gorgeous and when I hear some of the inventive things she comes up with to accomplish her goals I’m always impressed.

I spent most of Sunday evening in my little sewing room turning a pair of luscious 100% cotton brocade sheets into a lovely duvet cover. I was using a flat edge screwdriver to make sure the corners came out neatly when I had to laugh at myself. I wonder how many other seamstresses and crafters keep their toolbox at hand when they are busy with their hobby. The truth is, I’d bet most do. People who are creative in one area tend to be creative in many ways.

This reminded me of a discussion on a knitting list I used to belong to about winding yarn. Those of us who are lace knitters know a lot about this because laceweight yarn almost always comes in skeins as opposed to pull-out balls and has to be wound. The conventional way to do this is with a yarn swift and a ball winder which is fine if you have a yarn swift and a ball winder but if you haven’t made that investment yet you get to be creative. I recently got a big bag of gorgeous handpainted laceweight wool from Handpainted Yarn and spent the better part of a rainy afternoon winding and winding and winding.

Unlike the mermaid in the drawing above I don’t have a tail and so my method is just to place a large fluffy pillow on a chair with a low straight back, place the yarn over the back and start winding. It is peaceful work. However, the inventiveness of some of the women in the list amazed me. One woman came with an utterly ingenious method of using her kitchen mixer to accomplish this and detailed the method she devised, complete with photos, in her blog. This was picked up by About.com and is available at Make Your Own Yarn Winder. I actually tried it using my hand mixer and it was fun but I really just like doing it by hand.

But my favorite method was described by another member of our group. She used her husband’s power drill and a chopstick. She inserted the chopstick into the bit of the drill, taped the beginning of the yarn to it and - vroom, vroom - began winding. This proved moderately successful but, because she didn’t have a yarn swift to hold the yarn she kept having to stop to unwind yarn from the skein. So her creative juices kicked in and she took one of her living room lamps and placed it on the floor. She looped the skeined yarn over the lampshade (you have to have one that flares out at the bottom, she explained) then loosened the screw-down finule so the lampshade could spin around as the yarn unwound.

She said she was blissfully at work congratulating herself on her creativity when her husband happened to walk into the room. There sat his wife with his power drill complete with chop stick winding up yarn as it spun merrily off of a whirling lampshade. She said he laughed so hard she thought she’d have to stop her work to give him CPR.

People are just plain jealous of the truly creative. ;o)

Thanks for reading.