I hate that what do you do question as I have often wondered how to describe my various creative activities.

How do you describe yourself as an artist? One moment I am doing one thing that could be described easily as Art and the next I am doing something else that is craft! One moment my curiosity has lead me to to look at something quite strange as beautiful like the mould that grows on food in the fridge and the next I am looking at something most people would find familiar and boring and finding it fascinating like the bubbles in the washing up water.

Have you noticed that the term maker is being used to describe the activity of various people who may in the past be referred to as crafts person, or applied artist? For instance the British Crafts Council provides some interesting and thoughtful reading but in the Makers in Focus which looks at the working environment of West Midlands people producing crafts, the term ‘maker’ is used to encompass practitioners who variously describe themselves as craftspeople, or applied artists.

One of the ways I try and make sense of what I do is by defining what ever it is, as clearly as I possibly can. I think most people do that. The way I see it is if you can’t talk about what you do, or haven’t taken care in how you think about what you do, how do you expect others to respect the way you spend your time? Or how do expect people to respect what you make?

OK there is a few questions in the passage above but this month the challenge question is what do you call yourself and why?

Hopefully this will have everyone scratching their head but if you don’t like the challenge question you can elect to use the colour scheme instead.

Once again I came up with it by using ColourLovers and the palette was inspired by a crazy quilting block ( below). Remember that the colours can only ever be a suggestion as computer screens display colours differently. The aim is to be as close as possible to the colours on your screen. From ColourLovers you can download swatches to use is Photoshop, Illustrator, or in a CSS file. Have fun with it!

If you are wondering where the idea for the swatch came from it was this block and request for some pink that provoked the colour scheme. Once again click on the image and it will take you to a larger image.

As usual when you have worked the idea swing back to this page and leave a comment with blog or flickr address so that people can take a look at what you have been working on or done. There is a flickr group for the Take it Further Design Challenge and Debra Spincic has set up a another TIF blog. Please remember if you use Debra’s tif blog to swing by here too!

I also have some news as I have two classes on offer at Joggles.com. The first is called  Studio Journals: A Designer’s Workhorse This is a new course which aims to help people keep and use a studio journal. If you are interested follow the link to find out more about it. The other course that is available is the Encrusted Crazy Quilting which is still popular! Once again follow that link if you are interested in learning how to do crazy quilting.