Eight Strategies to Awaken Your Imagination

True confession: Writing taps me out when I do too much of it. As a reporter for a weekly paper, I was regularly mentally fried when the cycle of story finding, interviewing, writing, re-reporting, and revising ended each Wednesday night. But editing, when it’s all that I do, doesn’t quite satisfy me either, so I’ve got to keep writing or deal with a visit from The Angry Authorial Muse, who wants to know just when I’m going to stop editing other people’s stories and WRITE ONE OF MY OWN, FOR A CHANGE. (She’s a little, um, excitable.)

I’m lucky right now to have a job that incorporates both writing and editing, but I still have moments where I feel about as creative as a rock. A big, heavy, grey rock. Coffee (and chocolate) usually helps, especially if I am on deadline and subsequently chained to my laptop, but I’ve developed a few other tactics over the years to give my creativity a boost, especially when I think I'm fresh out of ideas. If you think your inner creative genius is in hibernation (or simply scared stiff by the economy), here are eight strategies to awaken your imagination and enrich your perspective on your life at home and at work.

Replica of Ghiberti's doors for the Baptistry in Florence, Italy.1. Visit a museum. Living in the Washington area gives me a tremendous wealth of traveling and regular exhibits all year long: paintings, sculpture, crafts, even Muppets—and I do my best to see what I can. Seeing great artists’ work in person is a completely different experience from looking at a photograph in even the highest-quality art history textbook. I took a semester of art history in college (a class I mainly slept through, I must admit. A 90-minute 8 a.m. class where the professor immediately dims the lights for slides was not such a good choice for me, an avowed anti-morning person), but I was stunned when I saw these works in person in Florence, Italy a few years ago. Their beauty and artistry was amazing.

2. Get outside. We spend so much of our days with our fingers on our keyboards and eyes fixed on the computer screen. When your creative—and physical—energies are flagging, leave your office. Take a walk. Go for a run. Schedule a hike with a friend.

3. Find a ‘secret garden.’ Wherever I have worked, I have always found a “secret garden”—a place to where I can retreat when I need to refresh my mind. Past locales have included urban and suburban parks, an upscale garden store filled with beautiful plants, a local shop with a French market flair, a nearby public library branch, or a friendly coffee shop with frighteningly irresistible double-chocolate-chip cookies. A simple change of scenery can open your eyes, mind, and heart in ways large and small.

4. Read a book. Say what you want about the Internet: I will never give up my books. Whether it’s a novel or nonfiction, the best-written books have the ability to transport you into new worlds, where you encounter times, places, and people you would never meet in your ordinary life. I’m thinking of books such as Living Lolita in Tehran or The Kite Runner, which gave me a view into Iran and Afghanistan that I never saw in any news story. I’m remembering novels such as Wicked, a wildly inventive book that left me marveling at the author’s imagination. And since this is a craft journal, after all, let’s not forget all those fabulous knitting books. Between the luxurious yarns and beautiful photography, those books make me want to order a room’s worth of yarn.

5. Search out new blogs and revisit old favorites. Craft blogs, whether they focus on sewing, knitting, cooking, or other crafts, represent an endless source of inspiration and motivation to me as I attempt to develop my own creativity. Some craft bloggers such as Susan B. Anderson or Amanda Soule are almost unfailingly upbeat; others take a more sardonic view. Whatever their approach though, these writers push me to keep writing and creating in my own life.

6. Pick up a new magazine. I am an unabashed print magazine junkie, and while I have my favorites, I love discovering new pubs and their approaches to storytelling, photos and illustrations, and the overall package of the magazine. Flipping through the unfamiliar pages always gives me fresh ideas for content, editorial treatments, and stories. My latest discovery: Where Women Create, published by Stampington & Company.

7. Travel. With the economy struggling, elaborate trips may no longer be in your budget, but weekend adventures can still give you the break you need. Take the train to the big city, drive to the mountains, or borrow a friend's beach cottage in the offseason. We all deserve the occasional escape from the piles of laundry awaiting our not-so-eager attention at home.

8. Take a risk. As we grow older—and allegedly smarter—it’s so easy to get in a rut and do only what is comfortable for us, what’s easy, what we know won’t make us feel stupid. That’s the safe way to live, but who really wants to measure out one’s life in coffee spoons? So learn how to do colorwork. Register for a 5K race. Pick up a paintbrush. Yes, it will feel awkward and uncomfortable at first—ask my husband about my nonstop cursing the first night I turned on my newly purchased sewing machine and attempted to sew a straight line—but it will slowly become easier. Your fingers will learn to handle the strands of yarn, your body will know to surge with speed just before the 3-mile mark, and you’ll stop worrying about how your painting looks, and instead smile with pride at your progress you’ve made in your life. 

Sock Skeptic

I fully understand the lure of sock yarn. It comes in such festive twists of color, from watermelon pinks to variegated mixes of violet, peony, daffodil, and piney green. And, if the colors don’t get you, the names will. I want to order skeins of Tiptoe Through The Tulips, Cherry Bomb, and Peeps for their colorway names alone.

There’s just one thing stopping me.

I’m not sure I LIKE knitting socks.

Oh, it’s not the double-pointed needles. After a few pairs of mittens, I can handle the DPNs and secretly feel a little like a knitting ninja when I use them in public. And knitters seem to be so excited about socks. Just look at the Yarn Harlot and friends, who organized a whole Sock Summit. (Its motto? “Taking Sock Knitting Almost Too Far.”) Knitting books and blogs talk all the time about how handknitted socks are supposedly a dream to wear, how “sock yarn doesn’t count as stash,” and remind readers that socks, which typically require only one skein, are a great chance to try a luxury fiber without spending a fortune on yarn.

First Sock: Will It Ever Be Done?That all may be true—I wouldn’t know, given that I am still working on my First Sock—but so is this: A knitted pair of socks contains many, many, many stitches. A frightening number, really, if I look very closely at the tiny stockinette Vs on my aforementioned First Sock, which I only began in 2007.

Two years, a zillion stitches, and one sock. Like I hinted, this relationship may be doomed. 

Turtle on the Move

Caution! Knitter working: turtle in progress.I am delighted to report that Sheldon the Turtle is coming along swimmingly. We are finishing up the body and soon will be knitting up his limbs, much to the relief of the Little Supervisor, who doesn’t understand how Mommy could possibly have anything else to do. “Mommy, make my turtle,” she likes to say. (Unless, of course, she is coloring, in which case I am also required to have marker—or crayon—in hand.)

PS: KnitPicks offers several variations for Sheldon's shell to ensure this is always one fashionable knitted turtle, no matter the occasion. After all, a turtle with his own blog must always be properly attired, because you never know when the paparazzi will be around.

Moments to Remember

My mom turns 71 today, so last week (OK, yesterday), I dug out my stamps and voluminous paper collection and got to work on a hand-stamped birthday card.

Happy Birthday, Mom![NOTE: Obviously my photography skills need some buffing up for these close-up shots. The magazine editor in me is cringing at this photo, but the card is already signed and sealed (although not delivered. We, um, tend to run a little late in the Rice clan when it comes to gifts and cards. Because you know, we’ve only known when each other’s birthdays are FOR OUR ENTIRE LIVES), so this image will have to do. Sigh!]

I wanted to do something special—after all, Muriel Irene did give birth to me, an event for which I give her WAY more credit now that I've had a child of my own—so I decided to skip the all-birthday, all-the-time treatment in favor of a collection of images, each with its own meaning.

The birthday cake is self-explanatory, given the occasion, but here’s the story behind the rest of the stamps.

• Paris: My husband and I spent Christmas 2005 in Paris with my parents. It was their first trip overseas, and the week was just as loopy and in the end, fabulous, as one might expect.
• Footprint: This stands for the arrival of the Little Supervisor who adores her "Granny Whoa" (long story) as much as her grandma dotes on her.
• Mittens: When you grow up in Minnesota, mittens are a fact of life. This image of mittens-on-a-string reminded me of snowy childhood days and how Mom would greet my sister and me with hot chocolate and buttered toast after an afternoon of sledding.

I have many more memories related to my mom, of course. And no, they aren’t all idyllic—I was a teenage girl once, remember? But after nearly 38 years, I'm glad I can finally appreciate her and all the gestures of love and crazy memories that still make me smile today.

In Praise of Paper Engineers and Magical Lives

Strega Nona visits her friends in the village.This Christmas, my aunt gave my daughter a wonderful book: Brava, Strega Nona! by Tomie dePaola. Like all of dePaola’s stories, the illustrations in this particular Strega Nona book are colorful and charming, with Nona’s chin and nose as prominent as ever. “Always be proud of your family,” she advises. “It’s where you come from—and my big nose and chin come from there too.”

But it’s the pop-ups—a giant three-dimensional family tree, an overflowing pot of spaghetti, a tiny spinning fountain—that bring a new level of delight and wonder to this already loving story for kids and adults. My mouth fell open when I turned the page to the book’s second spread: a family dinner under Strega Nona’s grape arbor.

The “ingrediente segreto,” as Strega Nona might say, turns out to be Robert Sabuda, creator of Winter’s Tale and countless other pop-up books, many with Matthew Reinhart, who also worked with Sabuda on “Brava, Strega Nona!”

Curious to know more, I turned to the back to the book to read Sabuda’s very short bio. His title? Paper engineer.

Now there’s a job you don’t exactly hear about during Career Day in high school.

But you know what? We should. Not everyone wants to grow up to be a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer (sorry, Dad!), a nurse. We also need dog walkers, yarn store owners, bicycle shop mechanics, speech therapists, chefs, sewing instructors, computer experts, personal trainers, and yes, children’s book authors and paper engineers. The more people I meet, the more I realize that the world holds as many jobs as people have interests, and again and again, one can find a way to make a living—and a life—doing what they love. Too often, we limit ourselves to the familiar, unwilling to encounter the practical difficulties or the personal resistance of trying the unexpected at work or home.

Strega Nona would not approve. “Always share your love,” she says, “and it will bring you a magical life.”

How in the world does someone become a paper engineer? Visit Robert Sabuda’s blog for the answer.