A better outlet for anxiety

I've got to be honest here, although vague: I've been going through some challenging times in my personal life. My path is obscured a bit. I feel a little lost and unsure. My creativity, my energy seem to be sapped from my life a lot more than I hoped.

When life feels like it's falling down around me, I take solace in creating something beautiful to offset any urge for self-destruction to which I am prone.

One tangible, the other not, my two latest creative endeavors fulfill vastly different emotional needs of mine.

The tangible: Beauty, comfort and security in the form of a quilt. Old jeans, washed and worn until soft, deconstructed into strips only to be reconstructed into a warm blanket. Broken-in denim, sewing project scraps, donated Bahama shorts and indigo material from Africa, all cut freehand, unruly, sewn messily together to create a blue and purple evening sky palette. The back: extremely soft blue flannel, an old bed sheet now put to another use. A great resource for reused crafts: http://craftingagreenworld.com/.

The intangible: A weekly class that I sense will bring out the charismatic goddess inside of me. Time to cast aside the shy outer shell for protection, this class is pushing my boundaries, both physically and mentally. Fun, supportive and challenging, it forces me to live in the present, forget my troubles, become my alter-ego for an hour and focus on the beauty we all have inside by bringing it to the surface.