Heidi Parkes: Habits as a Maker

How can we observe our habits and how do we create change? This VIDEO lecture investigates habits around creativity, bodily movements, and more. Heidi approaches this with background knowledge in hand quilting, art education, and yoga therapy. This lecture will not tell you which habits are good or bad, but will instead pose questions for self-reflection so that you might be better able to see and understand your own habits. Then, it will offer practical techniques for creating change. This change can help to break through limiting beliefs, and can help in areas where willpower is not enough. 

Before Heidi was born in Chicago, IL in 1982, her grandmother organized a collaborative family quilt to commemorate her birth. This set the tone for a life centered on the handmade, where sewing, mending, cooking, canning, woodworking, photography, ceramics, painting, and plasterwork were the norm. 

Now based in Milwaukee, her quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories and shared experience. Often using specific textiles, like an heirloom tablecloth, bed sheet, or cloth teabag, Heidi adds subtle meaning and material memory from the start. Ever curious, she works with a variety of quilting techniques including visible hand piecing and knots, improvisation, patchwork, and applique.   

Heidi pursues her passion for teaching by lecturing and leading workshops across the country and shares her creative process with thousands on Instagram. She has exhibited in art and textile museums across the country and was an Artist in Residence at Milwaukee’s Lake Park through the ARTservancy with Gallery 224 in fall 2020-21. Additionally, Heidi lives a handmade lifestyle, sewing her own clothes, fermenting, eating from pottery she made a decade ago, and practicing hand yoga, which she shares with other creatives on her YouTube channel.  See this 3-minute Studio Visit on YouTube:   https://youtu.be/s3Q-XxWrcYQ

website: https://www.heidiparkes.com

instagram @heidi.parkes