As quilters, we artists share a love of fabric, fiber, color, texture and design. Most often that gets expressed in art quilts for the wall, bed and lap quilts for our loved ones and dear friends, charity quilts made for strangers and all manner of fiber and mixed medium artistic creations.

Does your creativity get expressed in other ways? Do you crochet, knit, embroider or do needlepoint? What about paper and fiber collages, scrapbooking and custom card making?

Do you venture into unusual, nontraditional creative projects? Do you paint your floors or line your shelves with fancy wrapping paper? Does your creativity propel you further afield? London Kaye creates yarn art pieces in public spaces. In the Nevada desert, Burning Man creators are totally wild and uninhibited. We are creative. We get inspired, we have unexpected, novel and unique ideas. We pursue them.

Recently I was talking with a friend, a former Electronics Test Engineer. While she loves art, her inspirations do not get expressed in fabric and fiber. Her creativity flows more along technical lines. She excels in thinking “what if.” Her inspiration is to build a hardware device, learn a new software language, create something tangible.

Beside my passion for quilting, I love science and technology. My husband is very technical and very much a happy “geek.” In the early 90’s he belonged to the Seattle Robotics Society. One summer I went with him to the Robothon Northwest convention. While the techies were busy, I took a class there and built a robot. I decorated her with roses and lace, programmed her to speak and to move back and forth in time to music (“The Stripper”) and won First Place in the Robot Floor Exercise contest.

Recently I have been looking for nontraditional creative projects to challenge my mind. I pulled out my robot (Rosebud), found new batteries for her, and got started relearning how to program her movements and speech.