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This week's article takes a meandering route from the pendulum swing from neutral colors in my last series to bright colors in my upcoming series to Kona clubs to get the tools I need for designing series color palettes to the professional mindset from Steven Pressfield to minimalism of getting only the supplies you need and will actually use. All these topics come back to respecting your self expression and finding ways to support your creativity and make it easier to stick to your specific creative practice. Let's get started.

My Compassion series ends on 2.23.17. So I am starting to think about what I would like to do next. This dilemma reminds of the pendulum swing I wrote about in the article Pendulum Swing of Series. As predicted, I find myself drawn to brighter colors for my next series. My Compassion series was based on winter neutrals of grey and tan with just one accent color. I can just feel the bright colors bursting out of my fabric shelves ready for me to use them in my next series. I have a lot of solid fabrics on my Studio shelves.

In 2016, I signed up for a monthly Kona solids fabric club where I received packages of fat quarters of Kona fabric each month in 2016. I currently have every Kona fabric color there is. My goal is to use only the Kona fabric I have on my shelves again for 2017 as I did in 2016. This helps my impulsive nature about designing my next series. I just go to my shelf and start pulling the colors I like. If I had to wait to go to the fabric store, (where the solids are very limited) or order them online, I would have lost my design momentum.

Having a wide range of colors available in my studio has helped me unleash my creative possibilities. Whatever colors I may have imagined in my mind are nothing compared to the 303 colors of Kona fabric on my shelves. I like to use different values of the same color (light, medium and dark) which I now have because of the Kona club.

I'm not affiliated with the fabric shop who runs the Kona Club, Quilter's Square in Lexington, Kentucky, but just letting you know I feel like it's really helped my creativity. Interesting, I found out about them through Instagram since one of the quilters I followed had gotten the full year of Kona fabric from Quilter's Square the year before. I signed up by just giving my PayPal email address through their Instagram comments. Then I paid through PayPal each month. So simple.

On a related note, I've been reading Steven Pressfield's blog about having a professional mindset. He just finished a four-part blog post called The Professional Mindset . He is well known for having written the book The War of Art which is about resistance to just getting it done. His ideas have helped me stick to my creative practice. He builds on the words I shared last week of Isabel Allende to just show up. He identifies any motive to not do the work as resistance. And it comes in many different forms. In the past, one of my resistances has been... I don't have the right fabric. So I decided to treat myself like a professional and stock up with a wide variety of color palettes just like an oil painter would buy many different color tubes of paint.

I am really a minimalist at heart, so I'm not trying to encourage people to spend money or buy things they don't need. This is just a way of saying...

Treat your artistry with the respect it deserves. Have good tools. Have good supplies.

Perhaps your supplies could come from thrift stores like my friend Chris English. You can find him @afullenglish on Instagram. He is such a prolific quilter with such a signature style. I asked him about where he gets his fabric.

I use a mixture of thrift store (charity shop) shirts, found fabric and some new fabric. I use the shirts as the basis for my quilts and add other fabric around that starting point. -Chris English

This is not about spending a lot of money but just getting the supplies that help you feel your most creative and kick your resistance to the curb.

The message from all these various topics in this week's article comes down to respecting your form of self expression and maintaining that professional mindset to support your creative practice.