My capacity, my attitude, and the internet
I spent the majority of yesterday drawing. I took two short classes on YouTube, including doing the assigned homework, and then did some more doodling. I did a spiderweb again but this time considered gravity and added dewdrops. And I played with some other little techniques.
When you are doing something like knitting or crochet, (or drawing) there is a long and varied history of technique and practice. It’s not open to interpretation. So you may be doing something with yarn, but that thing is not knitting or crochet unless it results in a specific product. And in the 80s and 90s when I was a kid, you could take a class in person for money, or you could be taught by a family member. And you could potentially learn from a book, if you are the type who can learn from a book.
I learned to crochet when I was 8. But all I learned was the basics. That was all my aunt really knew. And there was nobody else
in my life to teach me more than that. So sometimes I crocheted and sometimes I “did some stuff with yarn.”
When I picked up crochet again in my 30s, YouTube existed. And it changed everything about how I could learn. And I mean everything. It was free. If I couldn’t learn something from one person, I could try another. Again, for free. I taught myself to knit exclusively from videos. It took over a year (on and off) to learn because I didn’t know what I didn’t know enough to find a solution to my issues. Like trying to find a spelling in the dictionary when you don’t know how to spell the word. But, just like the dictionary, I managed.
What’s funny is, now I just “know” that if there is a technique I want to learn when it comes to yarn and string, I can. I don’t think twice about it. I live in the world like I am a great fiber artist. Because I am. Do I know everything? Absolutely not. I have barely scratched the surface. But I don’t debate myself about whether I am capable of doing anything with yarn. Some time in the past decade, my capacity just stopped being an issue.
But I have lived my entire 49 years thinking I was terrible at drawing. So obviously I was surprised at how good I was at drawing yesterday. But there is another part too. I took a class. That literally started with drawing rows of parallel lines. Baby steps. Foundations of craft.
I need instruction. I need reinforcement or redirection when I get to a question or situation I don’t have the answer to. And I need to hear the people on the other side of learning mirroring back to me my fears and inadequacies and saying that’s normal. Like the woman in the drawing lesson who pointed out the straight lines that she accidentally made on her own circles and what she does to fix that, or how her up zigs are straighter than her down zags, which looked like my own hooked, down zags. Not that these things were correct, but that their wrongness didn’t say anything about me.
I learned to knit officially when I found the video of a YouTube creator (Very Pink Kints) who explained exactly what a dropped stitch looked like, and how to fix it. She also explained how to make sure that I put the stitches that fell off my needles back on without twisting them. I didn’t know these were things I didn’t know. Putting them together with what I already had made whole thing finally click for me. But I needed to get past that fuzzy confusion about this thing I couldn’t name or really even “see” because I didn’t know what I was looking at. I needed the distinction between a stitch on backwards and a stitch on correctly. I needed the distinction between the stitches I was actively working across, and how they built on one another down.
And for me the learning is not just crafts. Physical therapists on Instagram have entirely transformed my hip problems. I learned from a super short video that I had limited internal hip rotation on my short leg, and then even later than that found daily exercises that elongate and loosen up my hip on my shorter leg.
The other thing that was different about me as a crafter and artist in my 30s and continues to help as I end my 40s, is having my eating under control for the entirety of it.
If you have ever heard of the writer who tried to beat the bottle (tried to write as much as they could before they were too drunk), I was a maker who tried to beat the food coma.
Now there is no sugar and no compulsive eating for me. There are 3 meals and all the time in between. To take a class. To fail. To learn. To design. To make.
There were 3 things that changed drastically when I put boundaries around my eating. My capacity, my attitude, and the internet. (Your welcome.)
