I spent the majority of last week at Stream Health, a conference that my company hosted to elevate dialogue about technology and healthcare. This was clearly for my day job, so you are probably wondering what it has to do with sewing and quilting. Well, one of the activities was called Ignite. Ignite presentations are essentially 15 slides that auto advance after 15 seconds. I did mine on A Day in the Life of a Healthcare Consumer. It was a lot of fun, but the one I want to write about today was by Lonnie Lardner of Creative Voltage on How to Become a Creative Superhero.

In her presentation, Lonnie gave tips on finding your inner creativity and growing it to its greatest potential – something that is important to me for my day job AND for my sewing business. One of her best pieces of advice is to find ten minutes a day to do something creative. It could be anything – art, music, writing, etc. what is important is finding ten minutes or exercise that area of our brain. Before you say you don’t have ten minutes, think about all the time we spend chit chatting at work or watching the boob tube at night.

For me, this is a habit I started a long time ago and was one of the reasons I started selling my quilts and projects. I found myself working way too many hours and set aside 30 minutes a day for sewing. I started to expand the time a little and found myself feeling less stressed and creating better pieces. When I travel I sometimes bring hand sewing, visit local shops, sketch, or photograph things that may be quilt inspiration later. Now, I have that time to look forward to every day, no matter how busy I may be with work. Lonnie’s presentation was terrific with numerous other good ideas. I will post a link when our full conference recap is live. In the meantime, here is a visual snapshot of some of the discussion from our conference.