how to BE a (quilt) designer

How many times have you been trapped (maybe even without knowing it) in the subjectivity/objectivity divide?

You know the one…

Where objective ‘science’ is the right answer and subjective ‘creativity’ is the wrong answer.

I was recently struck by this and how it applies so directly to what we do as (quilt) designers, what we do as creatives.

I mentioned this idea in this journal post about the idea of being creative as somehow ‘indulgent’. It’s seen as a luxury, a ‘nice-to’, not a necessity, by a large swathe of society.

The message seems to be:
if you’re not producing SOMETHING USEFUL, then you’re not worth anything.

This was definitely a view I took for a long time as an engineer. I can now use my engineering viewpoint to see value in what we ‘produce’ as designers as well.

But I want to talk about the process not the product when it comes to designing.

process or outcome

The inherent value is in the process and not the outcome. And if we want to go deep here for a minute, it’s the tension we feel between being and doing.

I have been learning/practising meditation for about 6 months now. And I struggle BIG TIME. You know why? Because I find it extremely hard to just ‘be’ and not ‘do.

I had been treating my meditation practice each day as one more thing to check off on my ‘to DO’ list, and then I started wondering why I wasn’t really getting any kind of benefit from this 10mins of sitting and ‘meditating’.

Something twigged one day when my meditation instructor talked about not doing anything.

I was flabbergasted. What do you mean: don’t DO anything I’m here aren’t I? DOING this meditation?

I had been trying and trying to DO something: meditate. When ultimately meditation is about just letting everything BE as it is and not to DO anything.

cancel your TO DO list

The flip from DOING to BEING is very hard. Well, for me anyway. It requires letting go of this ‘outcome driven’ paradigm, where every living moment must be in pursuit of production of some kind or another.

After all we all have TO DO lists, and not TO BE lists, right?

Productivity training, how to be more PRODUCTIVE, how to DO more, how to tame your TO DO list.

What if all this productivity is really just busyness?

What if actually stopping DOING and just BEING is really the crux of everything?

I don’t mean we all get to go and sit cross legged on some hillside and not DO anything ever. But, this line of thought led me further down a path towards the real purpose of my role as entrepreneur.

the currency of the entrepreneur

If you become a quilt pattern designer and want to go on to sell your quilt patterns or grow an online business around quilting, then you too are on the path to becoming a creative entrepreneur.

Ultimately as an entrepreneur, ideas are your currency.

What do I mean by this?

Entrepreneurs are people who come up with ideas. Ideas for businesses. Ideas for how to connect with their audience. Ideas for making something.

So, if we are always DOING and not BEING (aka thinking thoughts and ideas), then how could we possibly BE BEING an entrepreneur?

taking things slow

All that busyness, all that ‘produce, produce produce’ meant I had no time to stop, think and have ideas. Whether these are creative ideas for my designs, or whether these are those big ideas that really give you the bang for your buck as an entrepreneur.

This is where that subjectivity/objectivity stance comes into play.

Where is the VALUE in the creative process, when there is no tangible PRODUCT?

It’s easy to get stuck in this trap, and view the design part of creating a quilt pattern as this ‘nice to’, ‘luxury’ part, where we shouldn’t dwell too long for fear of being labelled indulgent.

Yet, in fact it is this subjective, creative part that is THE most important part of the process.

We all want to rush from idea to finished quilt pattern, so we can start sharing it and shouting from the rooftops LOOK, COME AND BUY IT.

But ultimately we need to slow down a little, and return to the importance of this starting point, this embarkation point: DESIGN, which is born out of that BEING time, not that DOING time.

how to BE a designer

How can we do more BEING and do less DOING when it comes to designing? Here is an important consideration that might make all the difference for you: and it’s something we inherently know.

How many times do you start something in pen? Do you have the same feeling as me that pencil is much less definite, that it suits the ‘just starting to have an idea’ stage much better than the finality of pen?

I do.

I even start my written drafts for these journal entries in pencil.

why?

Because ‘soft ideas need soft lines and hard ideas need hard lines’.

This also underpins the reason why I design everything analogue first. I sketch on paper, I use pencils, and paper (and sometimes colours and pen) BEFORE I go anywhere near any kind of digital tool.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

soft ideas – soft lines

When we’re starting something new – a new draft, a new quilt design – we are less certain about our direction. That uncertainty can be expressed better, through softer lines.

Using pencil also has less of a feeling of finality about it -l there’s something comforting about knowing we can rub it all out with an eraser.

hard ideas – hard lines

Once we develop our idea further, we may want to become more definite in our sketches. This is often when I start to use pen, or colours to make more definite design decisions as my ideas progress.

analogue to digital

Only once I have a well fleshed-out design do I take my design to a digital format – often this is when I start defining scale and dimension.

Why?

Two reasons:

1) there are SO many things you can do digitally, it would be incredibly inefficient for me to start sketching in a digital program without an idea of what I wanted to do first,

2) the immediacy of the brain to hand connection that exists when you can sketch something onto paper. You have only 1 element that stands between your idea in your head and your idea on paper – the pencil.

When you start designing digitally, you have less direct connection – there’s the screen, the tool you are using (pencil, mouse), the digital selection of tools to use… you have to open a new document, save it, name it… all distractions from getting that idea immediately out onto the paper.

For these reasons, I ALWAYS work on paper before moving a finalised (or very nearly finalised) idea into a digital program (want to read about what my preferred software is to design and write quilt patterns? check out this journal entry).

different stages – different skills

The designing stage on paper is such a different process from the drafting stage in a digital program, that keeping these two processes separate is imperative in my creative practice.

And it’s really this designing stage that YOU as a designer should focus on the most to begin with – not the digital part (that comes later).

This comes back again to that idea that ‘design’ or this subjective, soft part is something to be skipped through, brushed over because, gasp, god forbid we would indulge ourselves too much in this pleasure, or that we wouldn’t manage to produce something efficiently like a machine.

The drafting or PRODUCTIVE part in digital software comes later and is really a whole different skillset.

being vs doing in a digital age

There is an incredible parallel here too with human vs AI.

Humans are generating the ideas, we’re the ones designing. It’s AI that should be the tool, and should be drafting/producing.

Your ideas are your currency.

Your digital skills are important, but not as important as the time you take to marinate in your ideas, and curate the creativity that can then pour from you.

It’s not indulgent. It’s imperative.

It has taken me time to accept this. I would put all my ‘creative’ work on the backburner all the time, and focus instead on the doing – the implementing.

But if there is no idea to implement, then what is all the doing for?

If I don’t take the time to come up with an idea, sit down and write about it for my journal post, then how can I share something with you each week, even if my journal post publishing system is well honed and I know everything about publishing a wordpress blog post?

How can I publish quilt patterns if I don’t take the time to work creatively, taking the time to come up with ideas, working through them, developing them to the point when they become valuable enough to spend time producing in a digital format?

how can you implement this

There are a few ways you can create an environment in which you favour the subjective, the marination, the creative.

Set up a creative environment that allows you the space and time to just be and create – have your creative tools ready to go, so you are not switching from the ‘efficient’/seeking for things/organised mind to the creative mind when it’s time to make. This can be as simple as a box with paper and pencils in it, or a tray with your creative tools on it.
MAKE the time to be creative. Ideas, generating ideas, designing is MORE important, being is MORE important than doing when your currency is ideas. Put this time in your calendar and commit to showing up.
Let go of the idea that you need to PRODUCE an outcome from your creative time. Your creative time is that time to marinate, to stew in your ideas, to try things out, to play. It is IMPORTANT. It is as important as the to DO tasks you have.

Create, with pleasure, without guilt, and savour the difference.

the bottom line

Allow yourself the guilt free time to create, to design. This is ultimately the first and very important step in designing-writing-selling your unique quilt patterns.

It pays to spend the time upfront coming up with a great design, when you are going to put all the work in afterwards to get it out into the world.

Think, play, meander with no end in mind.

This is why DESIGN is a huge factor, a key element of my Quilt Design Code program.

I don’t just teach you the software. We spend the first 2 weeks of the program focusing on design.

If you just want to learn how to produce a quilt pattern, then there are other programs for you.

But if you want to design, to create, to place the importance that it deserves on this BEING part of the process then join the waitlist to be notified when I open registration.

QDC is as much about the BEING as the DOING.

MAKE the time for your creativity. MAKE the time to savour the creative process. MAKE the time to be.

I’d love to know how you feel about this: Leave me a comment and let me know, do you feel that pressure to produce 100% of the time? Or are you able to be creative without that feeling of guilty indulgence?