Today I thought I would share with you how my ideas and the items I make are born.  Everything, EVERYTHING!, starts with a doodle.  I am a queen doodler, and if you ask my students, in so many of my classes I tell them to doodle, doodle, doodle!  It is the best exercise for the creative mind.

These doodles above are from one of my many sketchbooks, and they were done years ago. Would you believe they served as inspiration for the staircase that leads to the classroom?

I’ve had this bench hanging around for 12+ years.  My husband built it and it had been painted many different colors, many different times.  My dogs even had a go at chewing on it once!  It needed a makeover, and now I wish I had taken a before photo, so it hit me one day to paint it to match the staircase and use it in the classroom!

Now I can’t get the design out of my head, and I want to build on it.  Last week I was working on mono printing some hand-made fabrics for possible classes in 2017, and while I was printing I wondered if I could use the same printing technique on wood.  So I gave it a shot on some small scrap boards for signs, and it worked!

On the sign boards I printed the background and then added some of the doodles from the bench and the staircase! Voila! A new idea was born.

As you may have noticed, on the staircase and the bench, I added an inspirational saying, so the signs needed to follow suit.

My next step is to print the doodles, rather than paint them, for use on fabrics.  Maybe a new quilt design, a glass piece, a piece of pottery????  Where will this design go next?  Knowing my creative brain it will be all of the above!

Peace, love and creativity!