35. Riffing on the Slow Nature of Textiles + The Creative Process

This episode shares clips from interviews that I’ve done with some amazing artists, talking about inspiration, and the artistic process, and all sorts of good stuff.

These interviews took place over the spring on Knit a Spell podcast and the Making and Mending podcast - if you haven't already tuned into these, hope you enjoy these snippets!

Mixed Color Monthly Membership (closes August 9th and doesn't open again until November!)
Knit a Spell Podcast
Making and Mending Rituals Podcast

p.s. Why am I closing the membership doors? 

I prefer to spend my time creating new lessons rather than trying to create new promotions (all of my business buddies out there know how this feels!) and I'd honestly rather not be hitting you up every month about it!

Transcript

 

Introduction to Stitch Wish Radio

I mean, there's such a softness to textiles and such a tenderness to them. And also they are, I think I constantly kind of coming back to this, it's like they are ephemeral. They do not last for hundreds and hundreds of years. Um, and they, so within the greater span of time, they are these Textiles can be the sort of fleeting moment. 

You are listening to Stitch Wish Radio, a podcast for crafting your own magic and threads. I'm your host, textile artist, author, and teacher, Christy Johnson.  Hey there, and welcome back to Stitch Wish Radio. Today, I wanted to share some clips from other people's podcasts. So interviews that I've done on other people's podcasts, and all of these are amazing artists, um, that have their own podcasts.

And we're talking about inspiration, we're talking about the artistic process, we're talking about Slowness and textiles and all sorts of good stuff. Now, before we get started, I just wanted to let you know that my 

Closing Membership Announcement

membership will be closing until November on this Friday. Y'all be gone till November.

I'll be gone till November. I'm sorry about that. I can't leave out a song reference. I had to do that. Uh, anyways, so  just know that I will be closing that. So What I love is that bringing consistency and inspiration to your creative practice was a big part of the reasoning for starting the membership, and luckily it's also added consistency and inspiration to my own creative process. 

It's giving me a great excuse to expand my resources, like my book collection, my exposure to textile artists, which are hard to come by thanks to the art establishment ignoring so many talented artists, and my own use of the skills I teach. And I love sharing all of these teachings with my members, with my students, and there's also a private monthly podcast episode, so if you love this podcast, you can hear more from me in there.

And It's very affordable, way less than if you were to buy one of my courses. So this is a great option if you are on a budget, but the doors close Friday, August 9th at midnight. So be sure to get in now. Okay. First up, 

Interview with Knit a Spell Podcast

this interview from the Knit a Spell podcast. I had so much fun talking with Katie and Jim.

So this clip begins with them asking me about the dedication to my book, Mystical Stitches.  The dedication of this book is very cool and I want to share it with everyone. It says, to anyone who's ever been told they aren't creative and that their art isn't good enough.  Why do you think this is such an important message as an artist and a teacher?

I have seen so many students who are like, ah, I used to embroider. I could never do it right. I would like to make my own designs, but I just can't draw. And I'm like, if you have the capability of holding a pencil in your hand, you can draw. So much of the work that I 

Creative Expression and the Essence of Art

like to share in my workshops, like examples of different work from around the world, none of these people stopped what they were doing because they said, oh, I can't draw.

This embroidered hanging that I have behind me, the person that made this may not have been able to sketch a face perfectly with all the shading, but they could pick up a pen and draw patterns onto a fabric and then go ahead and stitch that. And so I found that very important to just remind people we need to move past the Western idea of only artists are allowed to make art or only people who have been trained in something are allowed to do that.

Unless you're talking brain surgery, do it.  Give it a try. You don't have to be trained in it. You don't need to know every single stitch to Put a piece of thread in a piece of fabric. This is all done in one style of embroidery stitch. You can do so much more than you've been led to believe that you can.

It's such a hugely important message. I know this too, as an artist and as a person who can draw in a way that is less negatively judged, people look at my drawings and instead of being inspired to draw more, they're like, I can't draw and I'm like, Oh my gosh. Yes, you can. People say, I can't sing. And I'm like, if you can speak, then you can speak even if it's off key.

Who cares? That's like a judgment. And wouldn't it be great to just express yourself?  It's such a specifically like Western idea that only people with a specific amount of training and something are allowed to do this. And it's to the point where I have had to untrain a lot of the drawing styles that I've learned, because especially studying fashion, you probably know, Katie, it's like, you are trained to do these nine head figures, these like really tall, elongated humans.

Yeah. That don't actually exist in the real world. And it's like almost a fantasy. to the actual human form and when working with drawing animals and drawing objects, I don't want it to be perfectly drawn. This is a recent piece that I did these horses and I just quickly sketched them on like a one inch scale.

And I was like, Oh, I like that. These horses are like chunky legs and like weirdly thin in the middle. And like, you know, the hair is going off to the side. And that for me was something that was like, how do I introduce a little bit of that playfulness back into my work? It feels a little bit more freeing.

Oftentimes it looks a little bit more stylistic than trying to get every stitch right. I'm not sure if I included it in the book or not, but there's a quote from an embroidery book that I have that says, to replicate a bird feather by feather is barbaric. To illustrate its essence is divine. I really discovered that through the stitching of mystical stitches, where I was trying to really replicate the rose, and how can I best illustrate the rose?

I'm like, you know what? People have done that before. Plenty of people have made perfect roses and made perfect patterns for those perfect roses. I don't need to perfectly replicate the rose. What I want to do is create the essence of a rose through a few geometric forms and keep it more simple. And so that the page that the rose is on the botanicals page, one of those floral spreads, I think I redid it like three or four times and just kept doing it, ripping stitches out.

I realized I was just overworking it. I was trying too hard to make it look like a rose and it just needed to be more of the essence of the rose. When you showed the picture of those horses, it reminds me of a time when my granddaughter and I will draw together. We'll get a great big piece of poster board and we'll work together on the poster board because it's big enough.

And we'll have all the markers and the pens and everything. One day we were drawing and she drew a unicorn and I drew a unicorn. And then she says, Wow, I like your unicorn. And I said, I like your unicorn. And I drew a unicorn like she did with a big boxy shape and have funny legs. It was like a little kid's drawing.

And she tried to draw a unicorn. Like I drew a unicorn and it was such an amazing experience. What I noticed in her was she was validated that her way of drawing was just as cool as mine because I wanted to emulate her and then she would emulate me. It's a way for me to get out of my, like a unicorn must look like a horse with a horn.

We can look like how little miss Hazel does it. It's really cool to see that. And when I look at your horses on that piece, they're very folk. It also lets it be accessible to me. Do not make me do a photorealistic embroidery of anything, please. Amazing to look at finished, but it looks pretty tedious.

Yeah, totally. And one of my early art teachers, this is like when I was in elementary school, she would say, the camera's already been invented, you do not need to recreate what you see in real life. And I was just like, that's it. So smart, yeah. And then I spent 20 years trying to figure out how to recreate.

What I saw in real life, uh, realistically, and  I'm just unpacking that. It's a great example of, it takes time to build your own style, and sometimes that is going through many versions, and not comparing yourself to others, but being inspired by their work to see, oh, maybe that's a direction I might like to go.

Because as soon as you start comparing yourself, or thinking you're not good enough, you just shut down. We all have to learn, at some point, And if you're not willing to be in that student mindset, you're going to be one of those students that just feel like, I should know how to do this already. Why would you know how to do whatever this is already?

How? Embrace the student mindset. So this kind of reminds me of your first chapter when you 

Impact of Crafting on Brain Waves and Relaxation

talk about intention, you talk about the science of slowness. Tell us more about that.  Yeah, basically the actual brain waves, like the length of our brain waves automatically start to slow down and lengthen out, get longer as we start to do these handcrafts and as we start to use our brain in that way.

And it really, it's like, it is Physically soothing to the body, but it also allows you, yeah, there's our wavelength.  And  so if you look at the bottom that gamma wavelength that's up and down up and down up and down That's really great If you're doing something that it requires a lot of high energy and tension But we do not need to live our life in that state and we end up living our life in that state way more than We need to.

Being able to bring ourselves into situations that allow the wavelength to lengthen out a little more, allow us to calm down some, it really physically alters our ability to adapt to stress. And it allows our brain to have that downtime of not having that really up and down reaction to things and allows us to think a little bit.

deeper about things and allows us to sleep better, for one,  to more easily access those lower states and to return to that state more frequently. Just like a magical pathway. After you do it once, it's much more easy to access that path again. Right. Totally. The reasons I resist doing art is because it doesn't seem, I'm just realizing this now, sometimes I'm like, I got to get stuff done.

It seems like a waste of time. And I'm like, no, this is. What you need to do. Your book inspired me to go and buy a bunch of embroidery supplies to start embroidering. Mm-Hmm. And I'm super excited about it because it's this idea of no, this is your meditation. Yeah. I pay somebody to help me. She's amazing.

She both knows how to stitch and she's really great with my daughter. And so I pay her, she comes once a week and she'll help me out with some stitches when my daughter wants to be with me, and then we'll hang out with Juno in the backyard or whatever when I need to get stuff done. And she was over and I was like.

Okay, I got to do this. I got to do this. And then I had about 20 minutes left at the end of the day. And I was like, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do?  And I was like, you can sit down at your chair with your markers and you can just make something  just go ahead and color spend that 20 minutes.

Just coloring and what I ended up coloring was not good. I was like, I could never see this again and be fine, but that Act. That 20 minutes of allowing myself to just go there. It was so calming and I was able to return to my life. I was in such a better mood. I wasn't feeling frantic and I was able to be like, Okay, baby girl, let's go hang out now.

And they're like, No, let's us go outside and have some fun. Instead of being like, Okay, no, I got to do this and that. Yeah, it just really, those, those, those Common creative acts just help us return to that state. 

Conversation with Yarrow on Making and Mending Podcast

Next up is an interview with Yarrow of the Making and Mending podcast, where you'll see I've decided to take that experience, that 20 minutes of bad drawing that I just talked about, and start to turn that into a must have for my creative practice.

And we also continue the theme of slowness working within textiles as well. So yeah, I wonder, like, what, what is feeling alive and exciting for you at the moment? How do you find time and what feels important to you?  Yeah, I mean, I have always kind of worked just whenever I felt drawn or called to do something.

And I always work a little bit popcorn y where I'm working on this and that and dropping this and then picking that up. Um. And now with my 15 month old, um, it has been a really interesting experience to get, um,  to have to really reapproach how I work with my, not only my business, but also my creative work, um, and also allowing my creative work to have time since my business is creative, I can.

Find myself spending a lot of time on the business and thinking that I'm doing creative work and being like, wait, no, I've just been like editing websites and like re uploading PDFs and courses and correcting materials and like have not actually stitched anything. Um, so it's been 

Insights on Creative Practice and Motherhood

for me, my practice has had to get really a lot more rigid with my time.

And it's interesting that that sort of  Honing in on, uh, or like kind of, um, how would I say that?  Bringing it in to start to expand. So creating a container basically that I can expand within. Cause I was a container list and I was trying to spend many months trying to just fit in work here and there and not really being totally present with my daughter.

Um, and so now just saying, okay, how can I, um, make time that I'm actually working and make sure that I get what I need to get done in those hours and then leave a little bit of time at the end to also, or maybe at the beginning sometimes, if I know that I'm, I'm going to keep working on my business thing for as long as I can, I'll say, okay, I'm going to make an hour at the beginning to do my creative practice.

And so it's really just been getting really systematic about, um, about where I put my time. and what I do with it and making sure I don't get distracted.  Yeah, that makes sense. I relate to that so much. My work is also creative, but  yeah, I definitely also have these days where it feels like there is a lot of creative flow, but then I haven't done anything really with my hands or anything just for myself.

And I just really know that Those hours nurture all the other work that I do so much, and they're really absolutely necessary. And that's kind of new in a way for me in the last few years, because I think so long I've been living in the story of like, well, you know, like authentic creative expression is a luxury.

And I should just be grateful to do any kind of creative work.  Yeah, it's different, different kinds of creative work. Definitely. You talk in your work so beautifully about the kind of central aspects of textiles and the slowness of them as well. And I wonder if you have any thoughts to share about like what that means for you at this time and, um, how it maybe helps you navigate what the world is, but also what motherhood is and what it means to be a small business owner and yeah, like how are textiles holding and supporting you? 

Yeah, I mean, I  do feel like,  hmm. 

I mean, there's such a softness to textiles and such a tenderness to them. And also, they are, I think, I constantly kind of coming back to this, like, they are ephemeral. They do not last for hundreds and hundreds of years. Um, and they, so within the greater span of time, they are, these textiles can be this sort of fleeting moment.

Um, and so I think that that's something that I've really.  wanted to explore a little bit more of that concept, especially when thinking about like upcycling clothes and, um, textile art. And what, what long term textile art means, uh, you know, how textile arts last long. Like for instance, I used to work with natural dyes a lot, and those are very, the dyes are somewhat fleeting.

They don't, they're not permanent. Textiles are also not permanent. Um, my time is on this earth. It's not permanent. And so just this idea of, um, that sort of this sort of shifting and moving and.  Reinventing and, um,  repurposing, I think. tends to reflect out from my practice into how I approach my daily life.

Um, and also like I said earlier, like trying to stay present with my daughter and just being like, okay, this moment is so fleeting. This, you know, this moment where you say, ah, and that's like the one word that we have. And you say it over and over again, it's the sweetest thing. And, um, sometimes the repetition can get annoying.

Just being like, there's going to be a day where I'm just going to, like, want to capture that little, you know, that little voice in a bottle and just drink it. So,  yeah.  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. That is really beautiful. And I think the thing, um, maybe that's bringing kind of a gendered aspect into the work with textiles.

I really loved reading this book, Women's Work, the first book. 10, 000 for what years? Yeah. Yes. You have it. That amazing.  I've got it right on my desk.  Yes. And there was so much in them  that  didn't feel like gender essentialism to me or like, you know, Wasn't very prescriptive, but it was just interesting to think about how this work can coexist with other care responsibilities because you can put it down and pick it up and  you almost kind of weave your everyday life into it as you work on a piece over time, which is so cool.

But yeah, I wonder,  yeah,  you seem to live in like a really beautiful environment and I would love to hear more if you want to share about where you find inspiration and because your designs are so striking and I have this strong sense that you really have found your voice.  I think that you have some art training, is that right?

Am I misremembering that from your podcast? No, I do. I, um, studied,  I went to a magnet arts high school, which in the U S it's like a public school that you apply to go to. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's, it is public. It's not like a private school or anything, but you do have to apply to it. You have to be accepted into the school.

Um, so yeah, I went to public arts, um, middle school and high school, and then I studied art in college, but I never thought I was never quite  feeling like I was an artist. Um, I always felt more of like a designer. Um, and that's why I ended up studying fashion design. And I think it was just because the way that I was. 

that I felt that I was shown that what art was supposed to be was you're supposed to come up with an idea and then you try your best to get to that idea and then you have this finished work of art and my the way that I worked was so much different than that it was kind of backwards where it was just like I just made I made art I made art I made art and then an idea would come up and rise up from the surface and so to me that felt like oh I'm not an actual artist because my you know I didn't have this great intention that I then actualized um and as I, you know, explored more about what, um, the, what the sort of professional art world,  how that differed from just making art in the way that people made art for millennia before, which was just because we wanted to, and because we were playing with the materials, and we said, oh wait, this, when I do this with the materials, and I get that, oh, and that would actually be the perfect way to describe the wing of a bird, and since that's, that would be a great thing to put over here, and a lot more, a lot less of this, you know, prescriptive, like, I need to have this decisive way of being, um, Which feels very kind of patriarchal, like we have to do it this way, and um, it just feels more in tune with nature to just be a little bit more exploratory, um, and more just letting the visions come up, letting the work arise out of the actual process instead of letting the visions dictate the process. 

Oh yeah, that is so beautifully articulated. Um, thank you. I, I've not been to art school and I've definitely had moments in my life where I felt jealous or like, should I have gone, should I do not, should I do that now? You know, am I even ever really an artist? And I think,  yeah, you know, there can be some truth to that.

And then I also know people who found art school really hard in some way and who kind of, you know, Took time afterwards to really found what they wanted to do. And I think you strike me as someone who kind of has the best of both worlds. Like in your book,  you give us some really practical examples of like, this is how you put, um, you know, a color palette together.

This is how you might think about composition. And I had been touching on those things in my web design work, but I hadn't ever really.  Thought about them in those practical terms and also not in a flat design that I could touch. And that was a different element to that. So that was really cool. And I was like, yeah, the rest of the work.

And then, yeah. And then you also have this like really distinct style. And I think I could pick out an embroidery that you made out of a hundred and be like, this is, you know, a design that you made basically. Yeah. So I, I don't want to, um, Just keep banging on the, on the book, but can you maybe tell us a little bit more about how you teach people this process of like having an idea, maybe liking some colors or having a symbol or intention that feels important, but then what happens next? 

Right, I think it can be a really, I think we, it's important to stay really open ended at it, and the way that I usually work is very, it's open in the beginning and it's kind of inviting, um, lots of different, I like to pull out a lot of different colors and a lot of different materials and then edit it down, um, or sometimes it's just, you know, a pile of threads that are on my desktop and I'm like, oh that, I love the way that those colors look together.

How can I what, what fabric would those work on and allowing that to work out? But, um,  for  For me, it was really about taking the  most important, most commonly used ideas about art and design, um, that can be used by anybody and it doesn't have to be very prescriptive. Um, I, I learned, because I studied fashion, I learned a very prescriptive style of drawing and I feel like I spent like the 15 years, um, after college.

unlearning that  before the book came out. So it was like, yeah, it was a lot of sort of unpacking how, um, how I draw a figure or how I, how, how realistic something needs to look. And also looking at folk art for me was a really great inspiration for that as well. And realizing that we do intuitively have a sense of color and a sense of design that we can explore.

Explore throughout our artistic practice. And I think that the actual act of creating is probably the best art school that you could go to , who's just playing with the materials over and over again and seeing what happens. Um, yeah.  Yeah. That's so true. And I think that commitment and consistency to practice is really difficult for many people to get to.

Right. Like I just.  in myself and in many people I love, love and I'm close to there as like a great sense of wanting to express insights that people have had in the last few years. We've all been through so much and then how do we make time now to actually sit down and touch the material both spiritually and physically. 

All right. I had so, such a great time talking with all of these people about artwork and about my books. And if you go ahead and listen to the full episodes, you can hear me talk a bunch more. Yappin on. Um, and I also talk in both episodes about my upcoming book, which comes out January 2025. Um, so you'll be hearing more about that for sure.

I don't want to say too much about it now, but you can hear me talk about it in those episodes. Um, and if you enjoyed this episode, you will love both the Knit a Spell podcast and the Making and Mending podcast. I highly recommend you check those out. You can get those also anywhere where podcasts are found.

And just a final reminder, sign up for my membership. Bye Friday at Midnight, if you want to join before the end of November probably, is when I'm going to be opening it back up again. So, um, so yeah, I would love to have you in the membership space. There's weekly motivation, ranging from stitch lessons that go deep into how to do the stitch, you Um, two lessons telling you how to get more creative with that stitch, how to bring that into your own artwork prompts for creating your own designs.

And we also have monthly live meetups. Um, so this membership is really here to support you in your creative practice. We just had our first meetup last week and there were some really beautiful discussions and discoveries. So, um, I've scheduled a weekday and weekend meetup options to accommodate different schedules.

If you're interested in that right now, it's at Wednesday and Sunday from two to 3pm. Um, Eastern time. I think I'll probably keep it that way. Um, so yeah, the month of August is all about hand applique and creating a shrine or an altar to your creative practice using the art of hand applique and looking at how applique can combine with an embroidery practice, um, in a way that is really supportive and expansive.

So I hope to see you there. And, um, and yeah, I'll be back in a few weeks with the next episode. Or you can join my membership and get definite monthly episodes on creativity and they will be ad free because well, my only ads I do on this podcast are for my own stuff anyways. And since I'm already in my own stuff on, in the membership, I don't have to like advertise stuff.

So you won't have to deal with this intro and outro. Um, but I hope you enjoy this. I hope you appreciate everything that I share with you. Um, I spend a lot of time doing it. So anyways, um, I'll be back later. Bye.