Worth a look…

I love the creative process. It’s amazing to me to see how creative the human mind is — especially when it’s about ideas and exploring our imaginations. The images below aren’t really puppets, but they involve hands and images…so it made me think of puppets.

Creativity in Crisis?

A friend just shared with me a very disturbing Newsweek article, “Creativity in Crisis.” For years, researchers have been studying and measuring, in quantifiable ways, creativity in children and adults. (They actually call it measuring your CQ as opposed to IQ.) Apparently, creativity scores are a better indicator than IQ scores for future success — something that should make everyone in academia sit up and listen. For years, the CQ scores of each generation has been higher than the previous. The disturbing news is that, according to a study done at William & Mary, for the first time EVER scores for American children have gone down.

It’s a long article but worth a read over a cup of coffee or tea.

I say: Let them build puppets! And puppet shows!

Reefer Madness

Wow.

We are up in DC this weekend with performances at the Smithsonian Discovery Theater. We’ve been here the past four years for the week of Thanksgiving. It’s fun — except the whole traffic thing. This year we are doing something a little bit different by staying in DC for Thanksgiving.

In the past, we’ve commuted to Jersey or Richmond for family gatherings, but this year we wanted to just stay. My mom will be commuting instead and coming up here for our fabulous hotel Thanksgiving. We have an oven. I even packed my Dutch Oven. (Not kidding.)

After my two performances today I played tourist. I wandered around, sort of aimlessly, and found myself in front of the Natural History Museum. I was once a docent there and gave tours to Kindergartners in the dinosaur hall. (That was fun — such small children with such big dinosaurs! We even did a puppet show!)  But the wow? The “wow” comes from the surprise of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef.

Backstory: I have been having a love affair with fibers — specifically wool roving and raw silk — of late. Don’t worry, Sam knows all about and puts up with it.  Now I’ve known about this Crochet Reef for years. I stumbled on this knitted and crocheted coral reef on a you-tube clip and just loved the idea. It’s a giant, behometh of a coral reef that has been knitted and crocheted by people all over the world. It was started by two sisters who had a concern for the oceans and nimble fingers.  I can’t explain it, but I was so excited to just stumble upon it today. To see it all in person. I even called some friends. Nobody was home! My family was off at the zoo for the day — it was just me!

My family, for some reason, did not seem to share in my ecstatic joy. Oh well.

I could hardly contain myself.

This just confirms my fiber addiction problem. I need help…or shopping fiber therapy, perhaps. I think that would work. I could just live in my studio in December…maybe my family wouldn’t notice? Hmmmmm……….