My mother is a textile artist. She works within the vocabulary of quilting. For many years, my mother has said that each piece of work she creates has a life of its own, meaning that the journey from inception to completion is never a straight-forward path. The process always meanders.

She finds it very important to remain flexible and open to possibility, whenever she sits down in front of her sewing machine. Everything can and will ultimately change as she pieces the quilt together. Sometimes fabrics will not work well together. At other times, she decides that the pattern or concept she began with is too dull.

Over the years she has collected a stash of fabric – drawers and drawers of yard-long swatches – that she draws upon whenever she gets stuck and needs to find an alternate choice to the fabric she initially started with. This stash facilitates the process.

She dives into those drawers even when she doesn’t have a specific problem to solve. She can rummage through those swatches just to stir her imagination. Every time she looks through them, she is also reinforcing, in her own mind, what those drawers offer – so that her mind can more quicky jump to inspiration whenever she hits a stumbling block in her design process.

No matter what medium of art we work in, we all need our own stash. It might be a good library at arm’s length, so that the writer can reach for a line of poetry that she finds particularly compelling. Or the painter might fill studio drawers with sketches and old photographs in order to enliven the mind.

Take some time to create a stash for yourself. You might not have empty drawers available. A sturdy cardboard box will do, where you can store items that have personal resonance for you and your art. The muse will thank you.