It’s a rare, gray day in Colorado. Snow is falling. While I type, my wrists are warmed by the flax seed pillow at the edge of my keyboard. The oil-filled seeds give off a nutty aroma and radiate gentle heat. I have my muse to thank for this small comfort. If you don’t believe in the idea of an artistic muse, you can call it a creative impulse. Whatever it is, as I work to better connect with what drives me, I rediscover how grateful I am for the luxury of making art.

In fact, I’m thinking about 2016 and all of the things I’m grateful for. Like joining the Colorado Creative Co-op, where I’ve enjoyed sharing my finished plates, making new friends, and selling a few pillows like the one I’m using now. I make the pillows with a flax-filled inner packet and a colorful pillow case trimmed with quilt tape. They got me back into sewing, and what a great way to use my Spoonflower samples.

Because my muse is nothing if not complicated, making simple pillows led to a more elaborate project. As early as July I was hunting for a way to design fabric for holiday ornaments. Doodling in my sketchbook, the doodle took the shape of a mitten, which reminded me of a bird, which made me think of “A Partridge in a Pear Tree.” Can you make sense of this? Because it just looks chaotic to me.

In two days, I had twelve drawings. I gave one or two a “local” touch. This maid is milking bison. She must be one tough chick.

Rather than draw eight maids or twelve lords on a tiny mitten, I snuck the number of the verse into each illustration. Can you find the seven?

It took two weeks to complete the illustrations in ink, watercolor pencil and colored pencil. I wanted a palette of harmonious colors, and worked to keep those colors consistent over the twelve illustrations. My only regret turned out to be using too much yellow and lime green – they ended up looking almost the same when printed.

I pushed hard to finish the paintings because I didn’t know how long it would take to get the fabric from Spoonflower. And I still had to scan each illustration and adjust it in Corel PaintShop Pro, size the mittens to get the most from the yardage (sixteen to a fat quarter), build in a seam allowance, create a matching solid for the mitten backs, and cross my fingers that it would all work on the first try. I was delighted when the fabric showed up. Printed on Spoonflower ultra cotton poplin, it washed like a dream. I’d made some prototypes from muslin and iron-on transfers, so I was ready to go into production.

Over the next few weeks I sewed sixty-four mitten “sandwiches” of fabric and quilt batting. I experimented with different kinds of trim, finally settling on a collar of colorful grosgrain ribbon. My muse egged me on, whispering that she wanted more sparkle. Ah! beaded dangles! So in addition to sewing all those mittens, I spent another week or so hand-beading. After that, the decision to spritz them with fabric glitter didn’t seem as over-the-top as it might have at the beginning. I wasn’t really in charge.

Ordinarily, this kind of silliness would suck up all of my studio time. Instead, time expanded around the creativity. I designed more fabric, sewed more pillows, and illustrated. This year’s art calendar features ten new finished plates, something I haven’t managed since my days in botanical illustration classes. I finished most of them between July and November.

It’s a gift I’m truly thankful for, and if inventing a muse helps me understand how I work, then why not. Apparently I need both crazy production projects and the counter-point of meditative colored pencil work. Did I mention I learned a new way to bake bread while all of this was going on?