Healing Stitches - How Your Art Imitates Your Life'
Wendy L. Huntington and Mary Sullivan Holdgrafer

Personal awareness is the means to advancing creative work. Commitment to the creative process will bring feelings of fear and other sources of creative blocks to our awareness. Confronting those fears and developing strategies for moving through creative blocks in the challenging work of creating are applicable to life in general. This workshop provides a safe forum for personal exploration through a variety of creative experiences including the creation of a textile work of art.

Comments from our students
We received an article about Healing Stitches from a student who was not only new to the course last year, but who had never sewn--either by hand or machine. She described her pre-course anxiety about the lack of sewing experience and the discomfort she felt in her body, her mind, and her spirit about how she had blocked her inherent creative process for so long. She was aware of being “wildly creative” as a young child, and how gradually her creativity had gone more and more asleep and perfectionism and product had taken the place of the process of curious exploration. The student then described how her impatience and self-doubts kept popping up during the beginning of the course, until she decided to “try something different”—to breathe into her genuine curiosity, connecting as others shared their struggles and successes in re-awakening their own creative energy. Sewing was not the point, she realized as she dove into her work with enthusiasm, (still punctuated by impatience at times). She rekindled her creative spark, and currently holds “Healing Wednesdays” with friends in her home to keep her flame going. This student ended by saying she will return annually to Healing Stitches for a “reward” to herself each year.

We think this article describes what many participants experience in our courses and were warm with the sense of growth and connection—We hope you will join us for the first time or a repeat time, and invite friends to join you this year!

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