artful articulation

I don’t undo

There is no unraveling and recreating stitches until perfection is bestowed upon my work. The point of my crochet is not for the project to look perfect, but for me to remember what i have learnt whilst making it… There is only keeping going and trying as i go along, i have no time to go back and redo…

When planning this blog post, this was something that became focal to me, as it was always going to be a review of my work with an aim to start the new year with an increased ability to articulate my intentions within my crochet, and to define my practice a little further, in a bit more detail…

My brain must have been working in the background, as it does often, making connections that are often impossible to make whilst consciously focusing on any given issue. Not unlike a computer, the human brain is always working in the background, sorting and cataloguing thoughts, memories, realisations, information and skills and anything else we may have encountered in our days/ lives…. When sleeping, other processes still go on unnoticed by our waking mind. That is when dreams happen. We may remember them, we may not, we may understand them, we may not. With my crochet blanket making process, there is a certain amount of natural progression and reliance upon a correct output of ideas to solve previously imputed crochet problems.

My Nan told me recently that when she is not sure about how to go on with one of her crochet projects, she ponders the issue before falling alseep, and often the answer comes to her in a dream…. This made me think of my own crochet processes a bit deeper… My Nan taught me how to crochet. There has always been a connection between my crochet work and my Nan’s crochet work.

a feedback loop of sorts…

More than once I have been inspired to make crochet blankets influenced by my Nan’s work:

There are parts of the SAMPLE BLANKET based on her work, which I have seen at my cousin’s; the shape of the CHEVRON CIRCLE STAR is vaguely reminiscent of my Nan’s crochet maple leaves (in fact, from memory, i actually do attribute the idea for that crochet blanket to those crochet leaves my Nan so beautifully crafted in the post THERE…); the flowers that i have used in the DAISY CHAIN BLANKET in this post are all based on a flower that my Nan has been making for us for ages, which i have deconstructed and wrote a pattern for AVAILABLE HERE.

I have made loads of them at one time, with the aim of selling them as coasters. They did not sell and there they sat waiting. For my grainy brain to be able to figure out how to use them, how to transform them into something other. I have attempted this once in the past, with the previous lot of flowers i have made as part of my final degree show – see the full story in the FAMILY TREE to FAMILY TREASURE PROJECT. I actually got to photograph it again on a recent visit, which i have included in the photos below.

…but I digress.

There I was trying to work out how to fit those handmade crochet flowers all together for years in the windmills of my mind… Working on other things in between, I have finally, some 9 months ago, found a way to effectively encase the flowers into shapes to enable them to be connected easily.

This time, i kept going. This time I did not throw the remaining untamed crochet flowers into the corner, without enthusiasm for my then latest solution attempt. This time i stuck with it and my Daisy Chain Crochet blanket grew. This time, i have finished it! 🙂

You can see different stages of the working out of the blanket below, in the photos taken at random intervals of this blanket’s origin story.

Daisy chain crochet blanket is all about flowers.

Flowers are important to me because flowers are an inspiration to me in a variety of ways: they grow everywhere, they defy barriers, they can grow against all odds, in even the least hospitable environments. Their shapes and colours have been adapted in a creative way to solve problems of their environments and they brighten my life very often. They enable change to happen. Flowers are in my name, and the celebration of them IS my name, which I really like.

Flowers die but crochet flowers prevail. There is a Frida Kahlo quote I have come across recently: “I paint flowers so that they do not die”; well, I would like to change a little word in that quote, can you guess which???

Start of a year seems to be a good time to be reviewing, and that was what I originally intended with this post. A crystalisation of what the process of making is for me, of what my crochet is and how my crochet work is made.

Maybe I have done this a little today, maybe not, but as I started writing, there was another thought on my mind. I don’t undo, very much how in life you cannot undo your past. I learn on each project as I go. My projects are not perfect, far from it, there are always mistakes along the way, there are parts which did not work so well, but which i value because I have learnt from them and these mistakes helped me to move on. As such, i would like to wish us all for the new year to see those parts of ourselves we may regard mistakes as necessary, vital and helpful to our overall development.