– by Jessica Edney
Last weekend, I spent most of Saturday in bed with a horrible cold. When I say horrible, I mean it felt like I had eaten sandpaper. Colds are miserable aren’t they? You feel disgusting and utterly unwell, but you can’t moan to any of your friends because chances are they’ve caught it as well. The only good thing about this miserable affliction, is that it gives you the perfect excuse to stay in your pyjamas all day and take it easy.
In my last post, I talked about my personal experience with studying art at school, and how it almost killed my creativity. Well while I was feeling pretty miserable with this cold, I came up with a silly little creative ‘exercise’ (for want of a better word – I don’t want it to sound too academic!) that I do when I want to do something arty, but I don’t have any solid ideas. It’s a very simple process:
- Find a magazine with lots of colourful pictures
- Cut out anything that catches your eye
- Arrange your cut-outs on a page, in unusual or unexpected ways
- Choose whatever material you like – paint, felt-tips, crayon, pastel, thread, glitter…anything!
- Pick out features of the composition to emphasise, censor or exaggerate. Just have fun with the arrangement.
As you can see, I stitched all over my cut-outs. Stitching on paper is something I do a lot, probably because I like textures. I also like how the stitching goes through to the other side of the page, and echoes the magazine cut-outs in reverse, although the cut-outs themselves are invisible. 
I put these funny cut-outs into what I like to call my ‘book of ideas’, although technically it’s more a book of starting points. The ideas will (hopefully) emerge later, inspired by this playing around with images. I would like to use these pages to inspire my weaving, when I get a moment to set up my little loom! It turns out attending a full-time university course is rather time-consuming…who knew? 
I hope you all have a great weekend! Mum is coming up to London tomorrow and we’ll be going to the Knitting and Stitching Show on Sunday – maybe I’ll see some of you there.
