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?

One thought on “Do you Doodle?”

  1. Yes, I doodle. I have ever since I can remember. Nothing is safe. My frustration with it is that it does not translate into quilting. I quilt on a domestic and it seems to always be very geometric. Your quilting is amazing!!!

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