Sometimes I work when I look a helluva lot like I’m not working.
Doing the dishes, I consider how to open my essay in the most engaging way. Eating a nectarine, I ponder whether I need to factor as a character in this one, if this is a personal essay, or just an essay (and get the fuck outta there, writer lady!).
Cross-stitching is my pet lately. It serves two purposes, aside from making something damn awesome. It gives me something to do while my boyfriend watches one of the fifty billion “man” shows on TV at the moment. More usefully, however, it punctuates my day with something both productive and productive. Productive in the creative, making a lovely cross stitch way, but also productive because it gives me space to think.
Sometimes I just need to get in my head, and let my hands do the thinking. There’s something about working with my hands that frees up the mental space for breakthroughs. I’ve heard a theory about physical movement and the way your synapses fire away, but I think perhaps that was in relation to more strenuously physical things, like running or cycling.
Anyway, here’s my project, and it’s helping me think.
Do you have ways of thinking about your work that aren’t writing?
Sam van Zweden 
30/01/2013 at 5:55 pm
I use drawing to engage my mind and sometimes the shading takes me outside my head a little as my problem is generally over thinking it. I also crochet but that’s for fun mostly 😀
30/01/2013 at 5:59 pm
Isn’t that funny, that you get the opposite?
Thanks for the comment, Yen. x
31/01/2013 at 7:22 am
Woah – scary picture. Great stitching though.
31/01/2013 at 10:05 am
Firstly, amazing work! Secondly, cycling makes you happy, and it doesn’t have to be strenuous: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-cycle-path-to-happiness-8422706.html
04/02/2013 at 6:50 am
Love that cross stitch design!
04/02/2013 at 10:38 am
Great stitching Sam. The artist looks familiar, where’d you find the pic? Or is it one of your own?
04/02/2013 at 5:11 pm
Thanks, Shan! I got the pattern from a book called “Twisted Stitches”, which I got off the Book Depository. It’s a great book, some very cool and amusing patterns.