getting messy
Take chances, make mistakes, get messy.
That’s Ms. Frizzle’s refrain, in the popular Magic School Bus series of books and television episodes. She’s talking about science, and about learning by doing: trying things out, failing, picking yourself up, and getting messy all over again. No learning is neat and tidy, her mantra says. And it’s all about getting deep into the muck of it.
Ms. Frizzle could just as easily have been talking about the creative process more generally (and maybe she was: have you seen Ms. Frizzle’s dresses?)
In a recent interview, Alabama quilter, Yvonne Wells, shared a little about her own creative process, and in particular about making a mess:
LR: You’ve spoken about the importance of disorganization in your practice. Why is disarray key to the success of a quilt?
YW: I’m so glad you can’t go back in my room and see the junk that’s all on the floor. It’s the way I operate. When people come over, they want to come through that door. I can’t let them back in there. This is who I am. I don’t want to be told that I need to straighten this up, get this off the floor, pick up the needles and threads.
Once you see something out of out of order, you can always see something else out of order. If a quilt doesn’t work, I put it down on the floor, and if it still doesn’t work, I throw it back in the trunk, and I’ll use it for something else. I don’t know any other way to make. The more clutter, the more I see.
All of this resonates with me because I, too, am a mess maker. I see clean, organized office or creative spaces, and I wonder where the creation happens, because I work best with chaos around me. I learn from bringing disparate and unexpected things together. I figure things out by touch and feel and rhythm and texture. I shuffle. I explode. I rearrange.
Papers. Sticky notes. Dog eared books (with lots of marginalia – as long as they’re not library books). Markers. Notebooks. Scrap paper. Paint. Jot notes for possible future projects. Fabric. Printed out drafts. And always at least 150 tabs open on my browser.
Current status of one side of my desk. Three excellent books: Chantal Braganza’s Story of Your Mother, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk (both of which I have to return to the library), Childbirth by Choice Trust’s No Choice: Canadian Women Tell Their Stories of Illegal Abortion. A children’s abcedarium I received as a baby: A is een aapje, which features all white children and adults except for three ‘dark brown’ figures who are all plantation workers preparing coffee bags for the merchant (!), an as-yet-unopened pack of index cards, some cyanotyped fabric, my agenda, and a folder of ‘important stuff’. It’s all important. I promise.
My mind isn’t linear. I’m squirrelly. I jump from idea to idea, texture to texture, and I pull at every thread that I can see. I tangle. I unravel. I pull. I twist. I braid. And then bit by bit, piece by piece, I start to put things together again.
Like Yvonne Wells, “the more clutter, the more I see.”
Looking in the space between my laptop and my desktop reveals more treasures: several journals for several projects: writing, stitching, teaching, and board committee notes.
For Wells, playing with fabric and patterns and pieces is storymaking:
LR: As you move the quilt from floor to frame, what changes?
YW: I stand over my quilt as I’m in the process. I look at it and talk to it. And believe it or not, it talks back. People say I’m crazy, but that’s okay. If I think that green piece down there is good, I’ll turn around and look at it again, and suddenly it doesn’t look right, and I have to move it out the way. It could be used in something else that’s coming up. Now, I have about four quilts in progress. Sometimes the story sings, it’s poetry, it’s all of that. To me it is, anyway, and I enjoy that immensely.
Sometimes a story sings, it’s poetry, it’s all of that.
And sometimes things don’t work and I have to toss things aside, turn them inside out, and start all over again.
Take chances. Make mistakes. Get messy.
That said, I do really need to sweep my floor, because right now that floor is getting in the way of my quilting.
This particular fabric pile is surprisingly organized. Rust and tea stained fabric, some speciality printed organza that is absolutely gorgeous, but I’m terrified to use, and then a stack of cyanotypes…
p.s. I’m also a spreader, but that’s a story for another day.
© Sonja Boon, 2025
