onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “crafting”

12 Jan 2025

Making bad art. And also great art. As one does.

I finished my lined zipper pouch. It was (is) absolutely hideous. And kind of hilarious. But I love it and am proud of it. And people on social media told me it looked kind of like a baked potato. 

So I modified the pattern, and changed the colors, and made a freaking adorable baked potato zipper pouch. With a fabric lining and crocheted butter pats and chives on top. I’m still considering how to crochet a dollop of sour cream for a little zipper accessory.

One of the most important lessons I learned about art is that you have to be willing to make bad art to make great art. And that not all your art is going to be great, even if you are a great artist. 

That was a lesson I heard, but did not *get* until I had my eating under control and I was no longer drugging myself with sugar. 

When I was eating sugar and drug foods compulsively, it really felt like I would never eat again if I didn’t eat that thing (cake, cookie, piece of pizza) right now. Like that was the last one on Earth and it needed to be mine.

I crafted in a similar manner when I was still eating sugar. Obsessed. Obsessive. Frantic. Inspiration was fleeting. And without the discipline of keeping my eating under control, I didn’t even understand discipline. You want me to STOP and then START AGAIN?????

Addiction felt like I would literally die if I  didn’t get my drug (sugar.) And similarly I felt like I would literally die if I stopped working on that project.

And because of that the art I made was often rushed and half assed. I didn’t want to do the mundane parts. I didn’t care about the details. I just needed to get it done!

When I gave up sugar and put boundaries around my eating, I learned that there was always another meal coming. Not just was told, but understood! And that let me be calm enough to focus on other things.

Now, when I make art, it is a vehicle for the details. I even IRONED the fabric lining for sewing and just general neatness. Who even am I???

I have some more ideas. More things I want to make. And perhaps some of them will be hideous. But it feels good to make some creative leaps early in 2025. 

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01 Dec 2024

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.

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02 Apr 2023

A process not a project

Not too long ago, I started knitting a gift for a family member who is getting married next year. And I got about 1/10th of the way through (used 3 of the 30 balls of yarn I bought and spent several hours knitting it) and then I just sort of stopped working on it. And finally, after some time, I realized I wasn’t working on it because I didn’t like it. That I was unhappy with the design I chose. And I unraveled it and balled the yarn back up. (Thank heaven for my yarn winder so I didn’t have to wind the balls by hand!)

It is one of my favorite lessons from getting my eating under control. It does not matter how much work was done, how much time I spent, how much energy I expended. If I am unhappy, it is worth it to undo all of that progress and do it again. 

And there is the other side of that same coin. That I can leave a mistake. That I don’t need to be perfect. That if I *don’t* want to unravel a project, I can leave a flaw right where it is. I can even call it a “design feature” if I’m feeling saucy. 

Since getting my food taken care of, so much of the trajectory of my life has to do with the way I subconsciously act when I am actively working to take care of myself. When I first started to go to meetings, people would talk about “smart feet.” They didn’t *think about* getting to the meeting. They just let their bodies take them. They let the momentum of recovery guide them to the things that are best for them. 

In the beginning of arresting my food addiction, sometimes something would go wrong with a meal. My scale would turn off in the middle of weighing my meal. Or I poured the oil too fast and too much came out on my food and I could not get enough off to fix it. And the answer was to throw the food away. Even when the ingredients were expensive. Even if I spent a long time making that meal. Even if it was the last of my favorite thing in the house and I had to have something I liked less. Even when there are children starving in the world!!! I learned that my commitment to myself was more important than anything else. And eventually I learned to 1) be more careful, and 2) throw it away without a second thought if it could not be salvaged.

Understanding how to let my life be a process and not a project or an object has let all the things I do be part of a process too. Progress is more important than perfection. 

I could have struggled through the original blanket design. Maybe. But the truth is, I might not have. I might have ended up with over $200 in yarn and a twinge of guilt over knowing I bought it for a gift that never got made. All because I could not give up on the time I spent on my first design.

But now I can let things be what they are and make my own judgements about them, and take my own actions accordingly.

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14 Aug 2022

I couldn’t do it alone

I had another crochet doll breakthrough this week. And it was an interesting reminder about how other perspectives from other actual humans can change things so drastically for me.

I am making a character doll from my most recent favorite series, and this character wears sandals. So I had to figure out how to crochet a bare foot. A bare foot!

Well I mentioned it on a crochet forum online, and lots of people asked to see it. And the first attempt was hilarious. Hilariously awful. But I posted it. 

Now the crochet forum is full of really nice, really supportive people who love crafting. And lots of people said my first try was not as bad as I thought. Which may have been true. But I was not satisfied. And I was not going to waste fancy, expensive, DISCONTINUED yarn to make something I thought was meh at best. (I may be a yarn snob, but I’m still cheap.) But one of the commenters said I should try a particular stitch for the toes. (Popcorn stitch, in case you know or care.) And it is something I never would have thought of myself. But it was perfect! And I am thrilled with the results! I even made her right foot with my fancy, expensive, discontinued yarn!

I am a loner. I love my own company. I am content in my own head. I can go for days and not see another person and be perfectly content. I mean, I do see my husband. But even he, who is probably a bit of a loner himself, can be home with me and we will happily do our own things for long periods of time. 

But this can make me forget how other people can shift my perspective, my thoughts, my choices.

When I was in the food, I didn’t talk about food or eating with people. My eating was simultaneously shameful and deeply private. I did not talk about the crazy things I did. I did not want to say them out loud. And that made me feel very much like I was not only bad, but I was the only one. 

When I got my eating under control, and got into a community of people also getting their eating under control, I heard people say that they did the exact same things that I had. And even some crazy things that I had never done. (Yet. There’s always time. It’s why I still do all of the things I do and I don’t pretend I’m cured.)

I needed a community. I needed to know I was not alone. I needed to know that other people were crazy the way I was. And I needed to know that even those people who had been in it even deeper than I had, had somehow found a solution.

With both design and eating, I have learned that my accomplishments are both mine, and the community’s. I had to do the work. I had to show up, put in the effort, make the mistakes and feel the feelings. But I could not do it alone.

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26 Jun 2022

Reclaiming My Time

When I got my eating under control in 2006, what I ended up getting was a lot of time. Like a ridiculous amount of time. 

So much of my life before that was eating, or planning the next thing I would eat, or getting the thing I wanted to eat, or just thinking about eating. And then there was the body stuff. Trying to pick clothes that hid my body, or trying on everything I owned because I hated my body and hoped that something would look ok.

When I put boundaries around my eating, I definitely spent a lot of time meal prepping. But “a lot of time” is relative. And so I had a block of 2-3 hours once or twice a week to make all the food I would eat for the week. And eating itself took absolutely no more than 3 hours a day. And I did not have to think about my body anymore. I could just put on clothes and go about my day. And I didn’t have to think about eating all the time, because I already *knew* what I was going to eat and when.

Add to all of that the rise of YouTube, and all of the crafting tutorials everywhere, and suddenly, I had the time and brain space to get great. I leveled up in crochet, taught myself how to knit, and acquired new and more impressive crafting skills.

Well, recently I made a dress up doll that looks like a character from the Bridgerton tv show, because I am obsessed with her dresses (and her character.) And of course the show is a huge budget period piece so the dresses are complicated. I decided that I needed to learn to embroider. More specifically to embroider on crochet to make the appliqué designs. Because of course I did.

The point is, I can. I have the time. I have the brain space to learn. I have the desire to do something even if it is complicated.

The other thing that I have is the willingness to do the prep work. I spent many hours crocheting a particular dress, before the appliqué accents. And there was a time before having my eating under control, when I would have watched some tutorials, and then jumped right in and gone to work on the finished dress. And maybe it would have been ok, but maybe it wouldn’t. But I was too impatient to take my time. I didn’t have much time. There was food to obsess over and eat, and clothes to try on and take off, and a body to lament.

But getting back all of that time has made me willing and able to do my due diligence. To make a swatch (or 2, or sometimes 3) and practice. To try new techniques, and decide which worked best. To really play with it. 

Crafting makes me proud. I love what I do. I love the feeling of accomplishment. I love having an object that I can hold in my hand. I love the puzzle of figuring out how to take an idea and make it a reality.

I was always creative. I made all kinds of art through all kinds of media, my whole life. But I never had the patience or brain space to really excel until I put boundaries around my eating and took back my time.

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