Skills issue
I have been making friendship bracelets, which is a kind of macrame. It’s one of those crafts that is easy to do but it takes patience and a kind of precision to do it well. And it also has a range of complexities. The number of colors, the intricacies of the particular pattern. From simple to mind bending.
And it’s exciting. All of these ideas buzzing around, thoughts about the different ways to use these techniques on a different scale. My brain is coming up with all of these fun, half formed, colorful ideas. Big abstract weird ideas. I could do X! I could do Y!!!
And now is that part where I remind myself that I can’t do X or Y until I do the ABCs.
My creative eyes have always been too big for my practical abilities. When I first got back into crochet as an adult with my eating under control, I decided I wanted to crochet a dress. I knew how to crochet a square or a rectangle and decided it would be easy enough to just try my hand at a dress. Not a dress pattern. Just a freehand dress.
Needless to say, I did not have the skills. And I never actually did crochet myself a dress, but I absolutely could now. Yes even free hand. And I have free-handed some really spectacular doll dresses. Because I learned to do complicated things one step at a time. Over years. I needed to do a bunch of skill building. And that comes in steps. First things first.
I have written before that getting my eating under control taught me to be patient. Gave me enough clarity to learn. Taught me to understand how I learn best (symbol charts are usually the best way for me to understand what I am looking at when I am first learning a new craft.) Gave me the time to do something in between my meals.
But it also made it possible for me to enjoy the doing, in the moment. The undoing the imperfections. The perfecting. The getting it right.
I’m not a perfectionist. I even love a lot of the imperfections in my works when I knit and crochet. But as the beginner of this new craft, I want to KNOW it. And part of that for me is at least some period of doing it over and over and/or undoing and redoing it until it is perfect.
That level of attention and presence is more important to me as a maker and artist now than it ever was before I got my eating under control. And that presence and peace is only there because I am not thinking about my drug foods all of the time.
onceafatgirl 