This week has found me mostly playing with dogs.

I happened upon this photograph by Eunice Gibb, entitled Ball of Wolf:I love the way the photograph captures how the wolf has curled himself into a perfect circle, enclosing his own warmth, his back turned on all sides to the cold surrounding him.

Then I chanced to look down at Brian the dachshund – and saw a slightly pudgier, less fluffy version of exactly the same thing, happening right there in my own kitchen!

Anyway, it didn’t occur to me at the time to capture a photograph of the “Ball of Brian”, but I did immediately think that I wanted to capture that perfect pose in fabric.

You can judge for yourself whether I succeeded!

I  didn’t have any dachshund-coloured fabric to hand, so I got out the woolly hairy stuff I’d used before to make my raccoons and this moon dog:I had no pattern and no guide, just the picture (and Brian, whom I’ve spent far too long gazing at, gooey-eyed, as he sleeps, because he is so cute).

It turned out that playing around with something without any expectation of it really coming to fruition, was exactly what I needed.

As you may be aware, I do tend to suffer from the January blues. I find it hard to rouse the creativity that seems to pour out of me before Christmas.

Why it should be such a struggle I do not know; I’ve tried tricking my brain in all sorts of ways to nudge it out of it’s winter torpor, but mostly it doesn’t want to co-operate. It feels like my creativity has gone into hibernation.

So to stop myself getting down about it I take good care of myself, eat healthy food, exercise, get outdoors with Brian when I can and remind myself that this fallow period is normal and natural and that creativity will blossom again before too long.As Ann Wood puts it:
“Clenching down hard on trying to make something awesome … is not usually effective at bringing your personal magic into the world.” I couldn’t agree more.

It’s too easy to start piling the pressure on, to feel guilty at my lack of output and to start feeling the weight of that dragging me down further into the mire.

Ann’s solution to getting past “the musts and shoulds and assumptions that can limit you creatively” is to “try starting with silly”, to “mess around, be absurd” – in other words, to play around with something without expectations.As well as Ann’s blog, I also read a really interesting feature and interview with the artist and illustrator Carson Ellis this week. At one point Carson talks about being inspired to become an illustrator by a book (Outside Over There, by Maurice Sendak) because although it was a picture book (and therefore automatically classified as being for children) it appealed to an indeterminate audience. And how we all, as adults, classify things and make up rules for how stuff has to be, whilst “kids are open to anything”. That book, for her, transcended classification; which made her feel free to pursue her own vision.

This struck such a chord with me. It echoed this idea of needing, somehow, to give myself permission, as an adult, to just play – without worrying about what comes out of it, even if nothing results from it.

As soon as I did that and had that small starting point, it was like a weight was lifted and I could give myself permission to just play. And then another thought occurred to me…

Which is to stop getting so hung up on how what I make is classified – whether it’s art or craft, worthy or not. It made me think: if you can have picture books for grown-ups, you can have dolls for grown-ups.

So I’m going to do some more playing. With dogs and with other things. And I’m not going to feel guilty about it.

I’m sure Brian will approve. ♥