Creative Juices Flowing

I must say that I have been having so much fun with the blocks I am making for the Sewn Together Bee this month! Flaun wanted us to do our own thing with her blocks this month giving us a few pictures for inspiration and only a few parameters. Anything goes for her as long as it has a modern bent. She created this Gallery of Inspiration for us.

Six months ago, when I finally learned how to quilt, I never would have thought I would be capable of such creative inspiration when it came to piecing. I knew I could sew, but who knew I could quilt. I am really starting to feel like a Quilter. I am gaining more confidence in my ability to put colors together. I am unafraid to tackle, even the most difficult, paper pieced blocks (although they still frustrate me). And the two bees I joined have really helped my skills grow in a very short amount of time. I can barely wait for the Hope Circle to fill up in my third bee so we can get the party started! Stop me before I join another bee!

I am absolutely loving making these blocks. It's really getting the create juices flowing, and it doesn't hurt that she has the same tastes I do. Coming back from Europe I have been feeling really inspired and creative so this challenge came at just the right time. After I looked at Flaun's gallery I started searching my own inspiration folder. I recently discovered the RSS reader on my Mac that feeds directly into my mail application. I had been using Google Reader up until this point and whenever I would see a post that inspired me in some way I would "Star" it but I couldn't figure out a way that I could organized the starred posts so I could sift through them easily. Having the RSS feeds come directly into my mail application is genius! I was able to create a folder (with sub-folders - yes, I am that anal. I am a producer, what do you expect?!) and I can simply pull my favorite posts into the folder to save them. So now when I am looking for inspiration for my next quilt or color scheme or bee block, as the case may be, I can just go into my Quilting File and pull up my favorites. You can see that I even made a file to help inspire me as I was making Flaun's blocks. I can easily move those posts into other folders when I am done with that file.

What do you do when you see another blog post that inspires you? I can't be the only organized creative type out there.