Do you Doodle?

If you don’t, you totally should. 

My mom gave me the Totally Tangled book for Christmas in 2009, just after I bought my HandiQuilter16 sit-down quilting machine. I saw the potential instantly. Here are a few of my doodles from around that time, including some that I did in thread. 

I’m a compulsive doodler. When I take notes, I doodle in the margins. If I box something important in the notes, the box gets doodled. I’m constantly accenting my to-do lists with doodles and quirky little things that make them uniquely mine. 

Recently I went to the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) Conference in Nashville, and here are some of my notes. I took over thirty pages of notes that look like this: 

Or this:  
 

If I’m just listening without the need to take notes, this is what my doodles usually look like: 

 
Or this:

My notes at school for students to look at/copy when they’ve been out look like this:

 

And because I embellish everything and play with colors all the time, I can transfer these ideas to thread and fabric pretty readily.    

Here’s a Zentangle I did five years ago… I definitely have a “style” that has remained relatively consistent.  

And here’s my first Zentangle quilt, which I donated to a silent auction around that same time. It only got $55, which makes me a little sad, even now.   

During faculty meetings, these are what my doodles look like. I can tell you who was talking and what the topic was when I see this doodle. But because I was at school, they’re typically more academic in style. This one has an underlying Fibonacci spiral in its structure.     
Do you doodle? Shouldn’t you?