
Are you creative? That question has been echoing in my mind for quite some time. Let me tell you how it came about.
In need of new oven mitts, I cycled to a shop and found a pair I liked. Only, they hadn’t been seamed properly and the wadding peeped out in several places. Asking a shop assistant if they had another pair, she asked me in return, ‘Are you creative?’
Am I creative? Uhm………………………
What she meant was, are you skilful enough with needle and thread to repair them? In the end I got the oven mitts at a discount and got ‘creative’ with them at home. I’ve been pondering the question on and off ever since (and that’s been a while as you can see from the state of those mitts).
Are you creative?
Well, basically I just like making things.

I don’t think I’m more creative than most people, and definitely less than some. I like following a pattern and cooking from a recipe. Does that matter? In one sense, not at all. I don’t need to be remembered as that wonderfully creative person. I’m fine with being ordinary. But in a different sense it does, because I have a kind of itch inside. Do you know that feeling? As if there is something inside that wants to get out but you can’t quite grasp it.
Compiling these blog posts scratches that itch a little, but it feels as if there is something more. I’d like to find out what that is. Pondering how to go about that, I’m starting a needle-and-thread project that would count as hugely creative by the shop assistant’s standards and not at all by mine.

Why? Because I urgently need a dose of colour! There are a few pops of colour in the garden – bright yellow winter aconites, purple and cream crocuses and magenta-pink cyclamen coum.

But on the whole, everything still is mainly brown with some green. I took the picture below in Giethoorn the other day. I long for those hydrangeas to show their blues, pinks and purples again.

Waiting for spring to touch the world with its magical paintbrush, I’ll stitch some colourful stitches, knit a few cosy knits and try to find out what to do about that niggling question.
Are you creative?