As many of you know, I’m changing up the way that things are happening around here and working through Patreon support to help sustain Crochet Concupiscence and make it more of the site that you might want it to be. The way Patreon works is that people contribute a monthly donation, as small as one dollar. In exchange, they get personal rewards and the site also reaches milestones. Thanks to the first bunch of amazing Patreon supporters who have agreed to try this out, we’ve already reached the first milestone, which is that as long as I’m getting $100 / month in funding, I’ll add a new crochet for creativity exercise to Crochet Concupiscence. Some of them, like the one you see today, will be from my book Hook to Heal but unpublished elsewhere. Others will be brand new. Like this idea? Contribute here. You can always change or cancel your funding amount.
About Letting Go
Hook to Heal is a book of crochet exercises designed to encourage you to think about crochet in new and different ways, using it to challenge yourself and support yourself to improve both the world around you and the world inside your mind. One of these chapters is about “letting go”. As I explain in the book, it’s about
“Letting go of expectations. Letting go of obligations. Letting go of self-criticism. Let go of the end product, release control, be willing to make mistakes. The exercises in this chapter are all about using crochet to release ourselves and relax.”
My Own Difficulty Letting Go in Crochet
Image by queen_babs
Each chapter in the book begins with some thoughts about the topic and how it relates to my own personal experience. In this chapter, I share a lot about the impact that all of the “shoulds” in life had on my experience of depression and how I had to learn to “let go” of so many things in order to move away from depression. I also share how I had to learn to let go specifically in crochet in this excerpt:
“It is horrifying to me when I think back on all the “shoulds” and expectations and stresses I’ve had about my crochet work. I crochet for fun. I crochet for myself. I crochet for no other reason than to relax, heal and enjoy my time. And yet, in the past I’ve managed to make a painful mess of that experience by having “shoulds”. Some of the crochet “shoulds” I’ve lorded over myself have included:
- I should crochet more often.
- I should use more colors when I crochet.
- I should not have knots in my work.
- I should weave in my ends the “right” way instead of the easy way that I actually prefer.
- I should crochet more for charity instead of just for myself.
- I should go back and frog a piece when I realize I’ve made a mistake instead of just fudging it and moving forward like I usually do.
- I should learn to block my work properly.
- I should photograph my work more expertly so it looks better on the blog.
What the heck?! Why am I using all of those shoulds to make my creative life less fun? Why would I do this to myself? Because the truth is that what underlies all of these “should” messages is the message I tell myself that I’m not good enough just the way that I am. And it’s not true. What I make in any given moment is exactly enough for that moment. If I only crocheted once a month in a single color, never weaved in my ends and never fixed my mistakes, it would still be perfect because it’s clearly exactly what I needed to do at that time. Crafting shouldn’t be stressful; it should relieve stress.
When we put these pressures on ourselves, we actually cause pain in the world around us. When I essentially say to myself, “you’re not doing this craft you love good enough” then it’s a message I send out into the world that there’s a right way to express creative urges and no other way is acceptable. Even if I never say that out loud to anyone else, it’s part of the energy that I’m emitting around me, and it infects other people. Everyone around me starts to feel like there’s a “good enough” and a “not good enough”. This feeling hinders their own creative process because they can’t match up to what they think they should be doing. We all suffer as a result.
If we want to improve our own quality of life through crafting, we have to learn to let go. We have to stop seeking perfection. We have to stop saying that where we are at is not enough. We can find ways to strive to make our best work without beating ourselves up for its perceived flaws. We do this by letting go of controlling the end product and focusing on the creative process. And there are many, many ways to do this through crochet.”
Letting Go Exercise #4: Rip It, Rip It, Rip It
Here is one of the exercises from the Letting Go chapter in Hook to Heal …
image via stelcrochet
The exercise: Crochet something to the end then frog it. (Frogging it is the term that crocheters use when they take apart something that they’ve been working on. Rumor has it the term comes from the fact that you “rip it” back, and your “rip it, rip it” sounds like the sound a frog makes.)
The purpose: What better way to let go of the end product than to completely eliminate it?
In depth: This exercise can bring up a lot of emotions around letting go. What happens when you make something and then it disappears? What do you feel about birthing a creative item that’s never going to see full life? What comes up inside of you as you rip back your work? There are some powerful life/death cycles that can be invoked through this process.
Exercise steps:
- Choose a pattern for an item that you think you would like to have. The point is that you’re going to have some attachment to this item in the end but you’re going to destroy it anyway.
- Crochet the pattern with love. You don’t want to cut yourself off from the potential feelings of loss. You want to enjoy the entire crochet process so work it with yarn you like. Pretend it’s something you are creating as a special item for yourself or a loved one even though you’re not going to keep it in the end.
- Photograph the finished item. This is a way to retain the memory of the project without its physical self.
- Prepare a calm, safe space in your home and frog the work. Unravel everything that you’ve created until your work is completely gone.
- Sit still and really reflect on this process and what it means for you to undo what you’ve created.
Tips:
- This exercise can bring up a lot of emotionality around life/death and letting go. Be prepared for that and have a support system in place.
- Work with a yarn that is easy to frog. Mohair and some novelty yarns tend to catch on themselves and are difficult to frog. Cotton and smooth acrylic yarns usually frog easily.
- Find a special use for the yarn that you have left at the end of the project. This will help you honor the process of creating without feeling like you’ve wasted precious yarn. You may use it to make another special item or you may re-wind it and donate it to a cause that you care about. However, don’t simply re-make the item that you frogged, as that breaks the letting go cycle.
Taking it further: Make a shrine to your artistic self using images of the items that you create through this exercise. Create special items, photograph them, then frog them. The shrine is a way to recognize and honor artistic potential, mourn the loss of the artistic projects we’ve let go of in the past and move forward through celebrating the process of art instead of the product.
This post was created thanks to Patreon support. The next milestone, at $200 per month, will see the return of monthly vintage crochet history posts going in depth into the amazing changes in crochet throughout time, year-by-year. Support this here.