Tips for Taking Care of Your Hands and Body with Artist Heidi Parkes

The whole point of 30 Days of Dopamine is to make creativity work for our brain and boost our mental health. But for the past three weeks we’ve so focused on our creative process that our body is feeling a tad left out. For most of our crafting, especially if you’re a quilter, stitcher or knitter, it’s easy to give yourself injuries from bad posture or a repetitive motion. Let’s give our creative bodies a break with a little Hand Yoga and Heidi Parkes.

Heidi Parkes is a quilt artist and certified yoga instructor, and those two things go together more than you think. She’s talking to us about how best to take care of your body while you’re at your most creative. Getting hunched over the sewing machine on a marathon sewing spree is great, until it isn’t. Heidi has tools and special videos as part of her Hand Yoga series so you can feel good while you do your hobbies and creative projects.

Heidi is the master of hand quilting, so she has tons of ideas for how to work out your hands while you’re in the middle of making. Watch Heidi’s full chat on our YouTube channel here.

It’s our last chat with someone for 30 Days of Dopamine. I know you’ve dropped everything and listened to the other videos, but just in case you can’t with this one here is tldr version:

• Your tools don’t just impact your craft, they impact your body. Make sure you aren’t damaging your body trying to make the wrong tool and notion fit.
• Hand Yoga grew out of therapeutic, but purely mechanical, movements. Heidi has put together short, medium, and long flows for you to stretch your hands and arms.
• Schedule breaks in your sewing and put things in your sewing kit to remind yourself to get up and move.

It’s our last week of 30 Days of Dopamine. How did you do? Did you start to look at creativity differently? I will admit that making time for it every day or at least thinking about how I can make the mundane more interesting helped my brain. So for this our last week, your assignment is to do some Hand Yoga with Heidi! We’re taking care of our brains but don’t forget that hot bod. Till next time fellow Creators.