Right, Then…. This was planned as a post about pompoms. I mean, I go by many names, and I do have a key ring that was gifted to me some time ago that states this, so I claim that, alongside being a self-proclaimed Crochet Queen, I am also a POMPOM Queen too…
In a very small summation, I LOVE POMPOMS! The story from my childhood goes: ‘You used to fall asleep with a pompom in your hand, touching your face.’ I believe it, and I like to tell it. And everywhere I go, I know, when there is a pompom in sight. I have made it my mission to let EVERYONE know about the improvement on the old-fashioned pompom maker from school (you know, the two pieces of cardboard cut into a doughnut shape). These, well, these are just something extra, and because I WANT you to KNOW about this, I have copied below a tutorial on how to use them, very convenient:
You Are Truly Welcome!
And we love them, and they have SOOO MANY uses, and recently, I have even come across a POMPOM-shaped cushion. No, I do not mean flat round cushion, I MEAN pompom shaped, all round beutifulness, that I shall forever regret not bringing back home with me from that trip. Damn You, luggage allowances…
I also look for them within crochet, suppose in a sense of connecting my two titles, and in a way of always looking and pushing everything to the next possible level, to the next challenge I can force onto anything I have now habituated and need to add on to. I like 3d pattern and space and texture, and the reason why does not matter, as it is not one reason why that I could easily pinpoint… I just like it. And if you have been here for a while, or since the beginning of this blog (over 10 years ago, Blimey!), then you will know I have used and tested and practiced the popcorn crochet stitch wherever I could possibly place it… In fact, in writing this blog I have revisited all old ones and added us some little POMPOM category, if you please, and a little tutorial below, as seems to be the name of the game today:
You’re Welcome Again!
Popcorn stitch looking like pompom, and pompom Chrysanthemums as part of my wedding bouquet, well, maybe let’s finish there, as I have got something entirely different on my mind for today. (Your introduction is too long, my language teacher used to say.. :))
Today, I want to go backwards. Why? Because.
I will tell you why, of course. I have recently shared some of my collection processes with a friend. No, that is not true. I have recently been reorganising my creative space, sorting through old things, and getting rid of some old Visual Art Degree sketchbooks. I decided to share a picture of objects I collect that are lost and break my heart. And last time I engaged with displaying them was in my Degree Show, in 2008, which was nearly 20 years ago now… Oh dear… Bygones. Let’s not dwell….
So I spent a long day organising and sorting, and then shared the reason why I collect them. Pacifiers, that is. During the sort-out day, I came across them, sorted them, and gave them a new, more privileged space and a proud storage area. I remembered them being featured on here, and so I looked and I looked and could not find the photo. Then I looked, and I looked, and could I find the external hard drive from 20 years ago? Where I stored them? If you have not guessed, do not worry. Stay with me. We will get somewhere….
So – after some more looking through various cubbyholes and safe places to store important stuff….. I FOUND THEM. The pictures, that is. Both on the very old hard drive that my computer had issues with recognising long enough for me to copy them over, and the errors in my Archive Work page, which should have been displaying said images, and were not. So, in a way, the stress and flap was worth it for realising there was an issue, fixing it and bringing you back the full spectrum of my degree show spectacle (ISH):
The full story and WHY? for my obsession with the dummies is this, as copied from recent personal correspondence:
So, you will hopefully love this, my friend. My weirdest arty secret collection…. Ever since I moved to the UK, I have been picking up abandoned dummies in the street; it is so weird to me as a phenomenon; NEVER have I seen it in my country of origin. And it does something to my heart… Cannot leave them there. Like AT ALL! Feel so sorry for the poor little thing of comfort, left and abandoned like that, lost, as if it was the child itself who got lost… and then I think of the child, upset because their comforter is lost…. Like two parts of a person forever split apart… cannot bear that! So I save them. I take them home and keep them safe, from any further damage from cars, shoes and whatever… I had crocheted around ones I had all those years ago and put them in my degree show. I will send a pic of the piece, which I still have. And, today I found them, cleaned them, counted them and allowed them a new, tidy, specially allocated space in a tidy box… 88 dummies later 🫀
So there you have it, dear reader.
Now, once I connected the old history carrier, I started looking…. And I found things…. Things that are still the same, and therefore I am presuming are an inherent part of me, beating to my own drum, in my own dominion… You tell me…
I always put myself in my work, surround myself with softness of fabric, as if to protect myself when I am shouting out that which I need to say!
I almost hide behind it. In a certain – it is no longer about me, it is about this thing I have made, and I made it!
And I still, and have then, love a delayed timer on my camera and have a preferred pose of walking towards, nay, falling towards, the viewer…
And, also, I nearly forgot about initially making crochet beads – pompoms’ first cousins.
It’s shaped to feel like the next bead on the string.
So, for the purpose of the nostalgia and remembering where we have come from being an important part of who we are now, let us gawk and remember some more of those old photos, interlaced with some of the new ones and new developments of the old ideas, the old dogs doing new tricks, if you please, humour me:
Full disclosure: I was always dubious about original thought. There is so much information in the world in 2026, and whenever I connected and reconnected ideas into a new way of working, a pattern, I could usually trace it back through all the steps of how I got there. Which made me wonder if there is such a thing as an original thought. Then recently, a few things have become apparent about my brain’s ability to organise and habituate. And, after the well-being adjustments that followed, I had a unique moment…
I can’t redesign a pattern in my head; I can feel it in my hands. Even if I forget, I appear to approach recording and displaying my creations in a repetitive/ modular/ habituated fashion. I can’t map out a construction on a chart; I can fold a piece of crochet and suddenly see the whole garment. It’s a bit of lateral thinking; it’s a bit of enactive thinking, cognition that happens through doing, not planning (REF). For the longest time, I assumed that meant I wasn’t creative, not really. That I was just a magpie with a good memory, stitching together scraps of everything I’d ever read, watched, or listened to in an attempt to feed my dopamine‑hungry brain.
But then, recently… after treatment, after diagnosis, after the fog lifted just enough, I had a moment! A small, bright, startling moment. A thought that didn’t feel like an amalgamation of anything I’d consumed. A thought that felt… new.
Interesting, I thought!
It wasn’t grand. It wasn’t life‑changing. But it was mine. And it showed me that my creativity has been shaped by more than just the tension between my own inherent/ internal drumbeat (the inherited pattern) and the embodied experience of my environment (the emergent pattern); it’s also shaped by the spaces between them. The echo and the epiphany. The beat and the break. There is power and value in exploring not only the thing itself, but the empty (?) spaces around it. In a similar way, during mindfulness, we may be asked to notice the breaks/ the gaps in between breathing in and breathing out.
The pompoms, the popcorn stitch, the pacifiers, all the small protective items that make up my own dominion… The making of all the above are moments I trust my own drumbeat enough to let it lead.
A different kind of moment than the one I wrote about in the last post, ECCLESIASTICAL ECHO, this one wasn’t about stepping allowing the indirect processing to bring solutions. This one is about hearing my own drumbeat beneath it, noticing, and giving it space to develop. Noticing the space… Allowing the space…. Allowing time to reflect and develop…
Thank You for Reading!
