Crafting for Survival
Keeping my hands busy
My trick to surviving is making things with my hands.
In the wake of a horrible mood episode in 2017, I picked up bullet journaling. The habit of creating beautiful notebook spreads sustained me for years until 2020. I spent the early COVID years making visual art from my childhood bedroom, picking a new medium to explore every few months. While my mother tended my grandmother who had survived a near fatal bout of COVID in our guest bedroom for most of 2021, I painted with watercolor and gouache, made paper dolls, created resin crafts, sketched with Conté crayon and colored pencils. Eventually, I briefly designed and sold my own note cards and other small, easily shippable crafts through an Etsy store I ran when I wasn’t working on my dissertation.
Almost every shift in my creation journey is marked by a life disaster. When my dad went to the hospital last year, one of many visits since his health began to decline in 2019, the only way my hands would stop shaking was if I held some art supplies. I had canvas tote bags left over from my Etsy store and POSCA markers. I doodled all over them for days until the choking sensation in my throat finally subsided.
Given my track record, I don’t think anyone was surprised when I picked up crochet after I left my teaching job in May. I sent in my notice and was in the local Michael’s two days later.
Though I had not really crocheted (my kindergarten teacher did try to teach me once), I wasn’t new to fiber arts. My first year hallmate, Emily, taught me how to knit when I was in college. I loved it; I had picked it up very quickly and made myself a very nice selection of scarves over the course of the next couple years. My interest faded quickly. Knitwear looked beautiful but it took so long to create and making things in shapes other than rectangles were not intuitive to me at all. I couldn’t figure out how to make patterns my own or freestyle.
I’m the type of person who reads the instructions once and then does my own thing.
At some point, I saw a sunflower granny square on the internet and I got it into my mind that if I made enough of those, I could stitch them together into a blanket.
Who wouldn’t want a blanket made of sunflowers?
So I did what any reasonable person who has never crocheted before would do: I got a hook, got some yarn, found a tutorial, and learned how to make a sunflower granny square.
Over the course of two months, I made 120 granny squares. Every time I amassed ten squares, I sewed them together until they made a long line and then attached the line to the one I had made before it. This was me tricking myself: I knew if I waited until I had all the granny square to start sewing everything together, I’d jump ship after 15. But seeing the blanket grow row by row was just the dopamine hit I needed to keep going.
When I was done, I accidentally put a thin purple border on my blanket backwards (the wrong side of the border was out with the right sides of my granny squares). I kept right on going. My dad helpfully told me he liked it better the way I had done it.
I wanted a scalloped border, so I watched videos until I could do that skill and finish off my blanket.
Pride doesn’t quite cover how I feel about the sunflower blanket. It is riddled with mistakes. There are several ends that I simple never wove in. Many of the squares are uneven because I couldn’t be bother to block them. I don’t let my dog lay on it because I’m afraid if he scratches it even once he’s going to undo one of my very poorly made early granny squares that I made before I figured out how to secure loose ends and do a reliable sewing stitch.
It is also terribly beautiful.
I have made few things quite so lovely and so unmistakably mine.
This blanket, for all its imperfections, is mine. You need only glance at it to know.
I’ve been a professional writer for about five years, longer if you consider all of my time in grad school. In that time, reading and writing went from my life long hobby to my job. I now trade my beautiful words for money, and while I’m grateful to be able to do so, it meant that I no longer had things to satisfy my own personal need for creativity.
Even when I picked up art making more consistently, folks often asked for me to make them things and because I love to be able to do that, I obliged. But making paper goods was a much different activity than fiber art. Once I made the initial art piece, it was no trouble to scan it onto notecards or postcards, prints or stickers and send it off.
Fiber arts is a slow art. It’s rough on your hands, and as someone who already does a lot of typing, at the end of the day, I don’t often want to do more repetitive motions. And if you go too hard, it’s easy to end up with an injury. Back and neck are also vulnerable to crochet injuries, especially if you don’t sit well (which I will readily admit I do not.) (I am currently typing this post in a comfortable but egregiously un-ergonomical position with my laptop perched on my crossed leg.)
I can’t afford to injury myself and risk not being able to write.
So I go slow.
There’s also the fact that I only started crocheting six months ago and I don’t think I could go faster even if I wanted to, but I like to think that I have intentionally chosen slowness. That this is part of my recovery from the relentless pace of girl bossing in my twenties.
Learning to chose a slower pace every day, living with imperfections that still create something beautiful, and choosing to only make these things just for me as a way to respect what my body can reasonably do is a healing practice. These choices tell me I’m learning how to make better decisions for myself.
I’m not just proud of my blanket; I’m proud of myself.
In six months, I’ve made seven projects. The sunflower blanket, a red beret and a white cropped pullover made of willow granny squares are the items I use the most. I gifted a small monstera leaf to my mother, a tiny heart pouch to my six year old neighbor, and made a cozy mat for my dog.
I just finished weaving in the end on my second wearable, a sunflower cardigan. Unlike knitting, crochet has proven to be much more intuitive to me. It’s easier to make shapes and imagine garments into existence. It didn’t didn’t take much for me to figure out that a cardigan was just five large rectangles sewn together with ribbing and pockets. I found a stitch that I liked the look of and used that for the body. (Everyone knows a knitter who didn’t want to crochet because they thought the stitches looked clunky. I was one of those knitters. I apologize. I did not realize how annoying I was until I started crocheting.)
No pattern, just tutorials to teach myself how to make the moss stitch and attach ribbing. I measured myself and the panels to make sure it would fit. (I still somehow managed to make one of the front panels bigger than the other.)
I worked on it for forty-five minutes or an hour a day for two months until the election. Then, I was crocheting hours a day. All of sudden, those rectangles were a cardigan. The next day it had a gold border. Two days after that, it had pockets and a little sweet sunflower on the back.
Then it was done and I had survived several days.
Soon, I will make something new, and I will survive several more.
