When the Cup Feels Empty
For every woman who has sat in the silence of her craft, waiting for the spark to return.
There are days when you sit down to create and nothing moves. The tools are in your hands, the ideas circle in your mind, but the spark is gone and you wonder if it will ever return.
Every woman who creates knows this ache. The season when the well feels dry, when the work you love turns distant, when even your own hands seem to betray you. It hurts. And yet this silence belongs to the journey too.
This is the part of the creative process we rarely talk about: the block and the exhaustion. The moments when nothing flows, and the ones that feel even worse, when something does come, but it lands flat, hollow, disconnected from the truth inside you.
And still, this too is part of the path. As much a teacher as the bursts of inspiration and flow..
The hidden fullness inside emptiness
The spark hasn’t left you. It only hides, waiting to be seen in a new shape. You know this when you look at a piece that feels flat, when nothing sings back to you and yet your hands still remember.
They carry the long nights when you almost gave up but kept shaping anyway, the moments when a mistake forced you to start again, the quiet devotion that no one else saw. That patience hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there, folded into you, ready to rise again even if you can’t feel it right now.
As painter Charuka Arora confessed during her own block:
“I felt like I was in this dark alley… I just could not find light. It was so hard. I felt like the night was not ending and I was afraid it would never end.”
Her words capture the depth of that silence. And yet the spark is only hidden, not gone.
It can feel like the well has dried up, but the source is still there, waiting for you to tap back into it.
The weight of emptiness grows heavier when you feel you’re carrying it alone.
Loneliness is one of the quiet companions most creators know.
Painter Georgia O’Keeffe
“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again and for the work to come. It is a kind of loneliness and it hurts.”
Her words remind us that this ache has always been part of the artist’s path.
Sometimes it comes as the ache of pouring hours into work that no one sees, your pieces sitting unnoticed while you wonder if they matter at all. Other times it shows up in the silence of your own studio, when you long for the company of other women sitting beside you, sharing laughter or a story while the work slowly takes shape.
Without that circle, the room feels heavier, and the pauses in your craft feel even longer.
Textile artist and Painter
Isa Catepillán remembers how in her childhood in Chile
“it was normal… that most women would do something by hand. They would sit around with aunties, grandmas, and neighbors to talk, laugh, and make something.”
Once, making was done side by side. Women gathered in kitchens and courtyards, their hands moving steadily while their voices carried stories, advice or songs that stitched the hours together. The work was never just about the object; it was about the company that made the labor lighter.
Today, much of that togetherness has thinned. Many artisans sit at their tables in silence and when inspiration fades, that solitude can turn the pause into something almost unbearable.
But creation was never meant to live unseen.
It asks to be witnessed. It grows stronger when it is supported and it comes fully alive when our efforts are celebrated alongside others.
The pause before clarity
The silence can creep up slowly until it turns into paralysis. You sit down once, then again, and nothing moves. Soon you don’t even want to sit anymore. The will is there, but inside feels hollow, and the weight of that emptiness is heavy.
So you wait for clarity, but it never seems to come just by waiting.
It doesn’t come by forcing either. Sometimes it slips back in through the smallest gesture: a brush dragged across a surface, a word scribbled with no plan, a stitch made simply to feel thread in your hands again. And sometimes it returns when you step away, tending to the well inside you. You might find it in the rhythm of a walk, in a book that stirs your imagination, in cooking something slow, or in the quiet of writing your thoughts until the noise eases. t might mean surrounding yourself with beauty, tending to your space,.Even rest, taken without guilt, can be a doorway back.
What matters is the spirit behind it. A simple act, when done with presence and care, can begin to refill the well. Often it isn’t one thing but a season of gathering small ways of nourishment until balance slowly returns.
When the soul is tended to, the art finds its way back.
The spark has many doors in.
Heartbreak as teacher
Even when inspiration flickers back, the path doesn’t suddenly smooth out. There will be moments that sting.
You might finish a piece you’ve poured yourself into and watch it sit unseen.
You might feel left behind as others find success while you’re still struggling.
And when you finally dare to share the work closest to your heart, only to have it overlooked or misunderstood, it can feel like the hardest blow of all.
These heartbreaks make you question whether it’s worth continuing. But over time they carve something in you. They strip away the need to please, the urge to bend yourself into shapes that don’t belong to you. What remains is a voice more honest than before.
That rawness isn’t a flaw. It’s what makes the work alive — human enough to be felt, and strong enough to touch someone else’s heart.
“The work itself is the path. It is so hard sometimes that I feel my heart will break. But it is the only way I know to find myself.”
Sometimes the way back isn’t about pushing forward but about softening inward. It’s remembering the child who once made without asking the work to prove anything — who could lose whole afternoons in the feel of yarn, clay, or color on her hands, satisfied with the simple joy of making.
Textile artist Isa Catepillán calls this intuitive design. Instead of forcing an outcome, you let your hands begin, and the material answers back. A rhythm emerges, not from rules or patterns, but from being present with what’s in front of you. In that exchange, the pressure eases, and the act of making turns into play again.
Play is not frivolous. It carries memory, joy, and freedom — and it can guide you back to the place where you first began.
The devotion of small steps
What matters isn’t forcing yourself harder but finding ways to return that actually nourish you. Creation was never meant to wear you down; it’s meant to keep you steady, to remind you that you’re alive. Even the smallest movement, a sketch made without expectation, a few minutes at the wheel, or a stitch done just to feel the thread again, can be enough to plant the seed for what comes next.
This is the emotional courage of small acts: showing up when the ground still feels shaky.
Moving forward often feels anything but graceful. You may feel caught in the in-between, no longer where you were but not yet where you’re going.
And yet, even then, you are still moving. Quietly, awkwardly, imperfectly but moving all the same.
Nora Kovats, multidisciplinary artist,
calls joy her
“insurance policy against burnout and self-doubt”
reminding us that even one faithful, joy-filled step is enough.
The return of the spark
Then, almost without warning, something shifts. At first it’s only a flicker, a small idea that feels different from the emptiness you’ve known. You try it out, and even if it’s fragile, it carries life, like a flame beginning to take.
What returns rarely looks like what you had before. It comes with its own shape, its own rhythm, often in ways you never planned.
This is the gift of the journey: the cup may feel empty, but it is never truly dry.
Your hands remember. The craft that once felt far away finds its way back, and little by little you find yourself again.
And even if you’ve carried the fire in solitude, you were never carrying it alone. In this living web of women, others have been tending it too.
When we meet each other in that truth, the path doesn’t feel so heavy. The blocks and pauses, the heartbreaks and sparks, all become easier to hold when they are shared.
As Isa Catepillán reminds us, making has always been strongest in circles of women: places where laughter and silence, effort and rest, are carried side by side.
Creation is gentler here, more encouraging, and far less lonely.
Anni Albers:
“You start from zero. There might be a long silence, but then something happens. The thread begins to talk.”
Why Made by Her exists
Made by Her began from the belief that every handmade piece holds more than what you see on the surface. Each carries the soul of its maker, the pauses and doubts she’s lived through, the persistence that kept her going, the quiet visions and longings she poured into the work.
A handmade piece is never just craft. It is her expression made tangible.
Because creating carries so much, it can feel heavy to hold alone.
Made by Her is where you meet others who know that weight. Some are standing in the thick of it, others have already found their way through, and both can offer something.
In this circle, support and encouragement make the hard seasons lighter. Leaning on one another turns isolation into connection and reminds us that none of us were ever meant to carry the journey of making alone.
Here, the pauses matter as much as the finished piece.
Stories move with the objects.