Here comes Halloween

Featured in this post is my Happy Ghosts design, available exclusively at The Textile District as fabric. Click here to visit their website and get a few yards- I will get a commission for any fabrics you purchase from their site that were designed by me.

Once again another holiday has totally snuck up on me! With four kids I should probably be all over it with a Halloween Advent calendar, baking spooky cookies and sewing up Halloween costumes. My kids haven’t had a single pumpkin spiced anything yet and neither have I, although I did put some cinnamon in my coffee the other morning. That’s a start right? BUT now that I’ve realized I’ve only got 15 days until Halloween, the hourglass has flipped and I’ve got to make the most of it before we move on to the turkeys!

I’m going to write about something I haven’t shared publicly… I always feel nervous about offending family member who might read my blog- but I don’t think they read it so here’s a bit about me and Halloween and why I love it so much now as an adult.

I’m originally from New England- Connecticut to be precise, where when the seasons change, they really change! When I was really little I remember having to wear my winter jacket under my Halloween costume, talk about ruining the wicked witch look with an ugly pink jacket! Halloween was a big deal, the decorations, the build up, the parties and then trick-or-treating. I loved it.

When I was five my mom and dad divorced and eventually my mom re-married. Soon after the trick-or-treating stopped. Instead of occasionally going to Catholic mass with my Polish grandparents, we went to a new church with my step-dad, a louder church where people spoke in tongues and REALLY loved Jesus. My step-dad would let us hand out candy but we couldn’t participate. The magic stopped. Magic we were told, was evil- any tv shows with reference to magic, my magical toys (rainbow bright, the smurfs,) eventually disappeared too. I never bought into this new lifestyle though, no matter how hard I tried it just didnt make sense to me and it wasnt fun. I would look forward to weekends I could spend at my grandmother’s house, she had a stash of witchy books with spells and stories of magical things and she would encourage it- soak it up, here’s another one! Was it that she loved to see me read or she felt like I needed some magic in my life? Whatever it was, it kept my imagination flame going.

Why was Halloween taken away from me as a kid? Because of religion… I don’t want to put the blame on Christianity as a whole because the Catholic side of my family loved and has always celebrated Halloween. Some people use religion as a guide and some people become consumed by it. In my case, my step-dad was (at the time) really religious and we went to a church that had a lot of influence over him and my mom.

Halloween’s origins are Pagan. It began as the Celtic Festival of Samhain celebrated on October 31st, the transition between the summer into the cold dark winter, when it was believed the boundary between the living and the dead was at the thinnest. Eventually the next day, November 1st was designated by the Catholic church to become All Saints Day. I don’t think my step-dad knew this or would have put much thought into it, because according to the preacher, pagan was pagan and pagan was wrong. But I’ve always known better.

So when I say I love Halloween, it’s not just a simple “ooooh spooky time, so much fun” kind of “I love Halloween.” It’s a celebration of the strong-willed child that I was who always thought for herself and remained curious no matter what.

Flow, the Wild Horse

©2018 Jacqueline Hurd

When I talk to people about my job as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, I always get asked “where do you get your ideas from”. That’s a complicated question with a lot of answers that can go in several directions so I never know exactly how to answer it but i’ve been thinking about it and here’s a short version of my answer. 

Creativity seems to be the simple answer but it's not that simple. Creativity comes from within and flows through each individual differently. For some it’s music, for others it’s gardening and for me it’s the art I make digitally and on paper. If you ask any master of their craft, they’ll tell you in these words or others, creativity cannot flow without being fostered. Creativity often starts out as a wild horse in serious need of training. When I was a kid, I had a strong desire to draw but most of the time all that will come out were eyeballs. By the time I was in high school, I was really good at drawing eyeballs! Beyond eyeballs I was lost and that feeling of not being able to take it further was very frustrating. 

I went to college and got my degree in Illustration thinking it would help me get things flowing but even with a degree in hand I still felt blocked. Feeling blocked was agonizing. Then something happened that completely changed everything for me. 

I came across an online course website called CreativeBug that has daily art challenges. There’s a free trial and then a low monthly subscription fee. I signed up for one of their Daily Drawing Challenges and every day for 30 days was given a prompt. One day it was lamps, another it was fish and so on. I would draw a page full of fish, paint them, color them in, bring them into the computer and vectorize them- I tried new things whenever I could with each prompt. At the end of each day I would upload them to Instagram as encouraged by the class. By the end of the 30 days I felt inspired and found it much easier to draw new things. 

Around the same time I found an Instagram challenge called The 100 Day project. By now I had discovered pattern making and that was a skill I wanted to improve so using the next 30 day challenge for inspiration, I decided I would use my drawings to make a pattern a day for 100 days. What a commitment! But I did it. I learned so much.

While working my way through the 100 Day project I had lots of questions about pattern making so I signed up for Skillshare. I took the Skillshare classes by surface pattern designers Elizabeth Olwen and Bonnie Christine . I found both of their classes to be extremely helpful and inspiring. While on Skillshare I found a few classes on Linocuts and dove head first into it after buying and reading Andrea Lauren’s beautiful book, Block Print. 

At this point I was drawing something new every day, turning it into patterns and practicing linocuts. Without knowing it, I had put myself into my own training plan and formed an unbreakable habit of practicing every day. In less than a year the wild horse that was my creativity became a beautiful well behaved horse that now does exactly what I need it to do- flow.