Coneflower Creativity: Life after the Pinterest Black Hole

Coneflowers

Creativity implies creating something. This, however, is the age of Pinterest and virtual creativity. We create vicariously by scrolling through an endless array of elegantly executed creative concepts. Instead of following our own path we settle for pinning the ideas of others to boards stored in the cloud, saving the instructions for projects that will never be ours or become real. We lose our creative vision.

I started sewing when I was about ten and my mother sent me to the Singer Store on Cherokee Street for lessons. I made a delicate yellow voile dress, lined and with covered buttons, an overly ambitious project that I approached with great enthusiasm until I had to rip out a dart seventeen times. My mother was experienced and knew it was a recipe for disaster. I should have made an apron. But she realized that the dress was my vision.

Those scraps were the beginning of a fabric stash that could take over a small room. Snippets of cotton, wool and silk in bins and baskets. So many possibilities. Perhaps a tablecloth, a throw pillow, or a crazy quilt. Pinterest opened up an ever-expanding universe of projects and the clicks of the keyboard drew me further into the black hole. So many plans and ideas to pin and share.

And then one day, the realization that pinning is not creating.

Time to head up to the sewing room.

I pulled out the batik fabric scraps thinking I would create a table runner that captured the simmering waterlily pond in the yard but a drippy striped sunrise of yellow orange caught my eye. Coneflowers at dawn.

Magenta pinks and shadowy purples for petals, aggressive spotted orange for the bristly center, Chartreuse and retiring forest green leaves. No need to sketch, take a Pinterest break or wait until tomorrow. Pull out the scissors, needle and glass-headed pins.

Coneflower creativity.