Scrumbling

I wouldn't have expected to 'take' to freeform crochet. One of the biggest paralysers for me, when it comes to creating things, is the fear that it won't turn out like I see it in my head and I suppose I was hooked (unintended pun!) on the thought that following a pattern meant that it would look like it was supposed to, and also that it would not be my fault if it didn't. Makes perfect sense, except that following patterns bores me. It took me a while to realise this, because I would see patterns and get excited about the finished item, and I can follow a pattern from start to finish. But I noticed that there were periods when I wasn't crocheting anything - I had beautiful yarn stashed away, books of patterns that I liked and, crucially, the desire to be making something using some of my beautiful yarn. It seems however that after a while of following a pattern, maybe one finished item and halfway through the next, I just lose interest. Not in the making, in the idea of patterns and I put my hooks away for weeks if not months.

This confused me for ages - I wanted to be crocheting but I didn't want to finish the thing I had started. I know this happens to everyone from time to time, so I tried starting something else but the same thing. I had to be fallow with the crochet for however long it took my enthusiasm to re-emerge and then go round the same loop again. I did think about making my own patterns - I'd still like too, I guess. But it seems to be a process with so much conscious trial-and-error, and with the risk that at the end of it you still won't have what it was you saw in your head...that I just ended up as paralysed as I am if I plan a picture too clearly and carefully. In short it was too terrifying. I wonder if there is anyone out there teaching people how to design their own patterns? That might help me break through the terror barrier....

Anyway, a friend of mine, perhaps seeing something that I had failed to see, bought me a book on freeform crochet for my birthday a couple of years back - this book if you're interested:

The pictures blew me away - the peices shown are amazing works of art, as well as usable items and yes, the picture on the front is all made from crochet! - but it still didn't quite click for me. I suppose I looked at the incredible work that could be done and thought to myself that there was no way I would be able to produce anything like that, especially without a pattern of any kind to follow, so what was the point in trying. I should add that the book doesn't say anything like that - it says anyone can do it, go on, have a go, you'll surprise yourself - and I would recommend it to people who are genuinely interested in freeform crochet, but it is possibly not for the low-self-confidenced among us, who tend to be intimidated rather than inspired. 

I think I had probably had the book for about a year before it hit me - the thing that I guess my friend had realised. My artwork is abstract, that is how I am able to do it. From a young age I was taught (and I use that word deliberately) that I could not draw, ergo I could not be an artist. But I had the urge to draw, as many kids do, and so I developed a style which was a totally abstract exploration of lines and tesselations.  I did these for years, still do actually, although I have developed other styles .

Jolly Green Jungle - Pen and Ink on Paper 

Random Blue, Pen and Ink on Paper 

Atlantis, Pen and Ink on Paper

This technique is about putting the pen on the paper, and letting it move. Creating random shapes around which I can fit other shapes. There is no plan. Nowadays I would say that this work explores colours, shape and tessellation rather than image. But the point is that I have always been able to do this, with a pen on paper - however insecure, however afraid that my artistic talent was zero. It look me years to be able to call this art, even, but I could always do it. I could paper my house in these probably, I have so many of them (some going into my Etsy shop soon btw) because whatever other urges to creativity I felt and stifled this outlet was always there - you do not need to believe yourself an artist in order to pick up a pen and move it around.

I have developed my ability to paint by discovering ways to translate this process into that more intimdating medium - embracing the nature of abstraction and consciously avoiding too strong an idea of the finished peice until in the last few stages i refine and simplfy. Even though recognisable imagery features more strongly in my work now it still gets there through of packing in everything that falls out of the brush, and then painting most of it out again rather than by thinking 'I want X in this picture'. My discovery was that freeform crochet (also true of knitting if that's what you prefer to do) offers a way of doing exactly this with yarn and a hook. You simply take up the hook and you go where it wants to take you - don't think about it too hard, and don't spend too much time looking at the results until you are ready to start peicinng things together - and I would start with small peices (scrumbles) rather than going for a big single peice which is much scarier. You don't even need to know many different stitches, although its a great opportunity to learn new ones with no pressure, and you can incorporate all the lovely buttons and beads and bits of ribbon you have squirrelled away as finishing touches, and use up all the tiny short peices of yarn left over from other things that you couldn't bear to throw away...I collect haberdashery as treasure, and I very rarely have a use in mind for it when I buy it. Means a lot of it has been sitting in jars and boxes for years and now I canb pull it out and play with it!

So, I thought that freeform would be the scariest thing of all but it turned out to be the most liberating. If you scrumble you don't even have to think 'it's going to be a hat' or whatever before you start, if you don't want too. Wait until you have a selection of peices and then fit them together in various ways and see what it suggests to you. Or crochet (or sew) a 'blank' from a pattern, a waistcoat for example, and then cover it with your scrumbles. So here is something I scrumbled earlier: 

I just decided 'black, white and grey' and went for it. 

Incidentally, I also find scrumbling a gloriously satisfying word - 'What are you making?' 'Scrumbles'. Its delicious. Or maybe thats just me. 

Getting on with things

I believe that sharing something you have put time and effort and emotion into creating always carries an emotional risk, however well-rounded and confident a person you might be - will they like it? Will they laugh at me? Will they think/say/tweet that they could have done better with their eyes closed and the paintbrush up their nose? Am I being unpleasantly arrogant thinking its good enough to share? or, if selling, is this a ridiculous price to ask regardless of the time/effort/love that went into it? Who will ever take me seriously enough to pay money for this stuff?...All that kind of thing.

I do hope its not just me anyway!

Of course all that should really matter is that you like it, and believe in it. Certainly there are people who do operate like that, (or who seem to anyway). But I am not one of them. I can like it and believe in it for a while, but there is always doubt and concern and even despair (of the 'who-are-you-kidding-you-know-you-are-rubbish-at-this-and-at-everything-else-too' variety). Nothing brings low self-esteem to the fore in me like creativity does, which is a shame since I really want to be more creative and more seriously creative as well. I have got better at handling it though - this blog is evidence, if you need any. It used to be that I could like things myself, and look at them and go back to them and admire them for days, but entirely in private. Then I started showing things to a restricted list of individuals, which grew gradually and organically without me actively seeking to extend it and these days I can keep up the positivity until it is too late to do anything about it (the pictures have been posted, or 'look what I made' said, or a peice is out on the table when guests arrive). This is a very new thing. I think that the trick for me is not to think about it beforehand, just show or not as feels right at the time and save the anxiety for afterwards - and believe me it does still come (nasty comments? complete blank nothing happened kind of response? faint praise only? Compliments are always a delightful surprise). I have a little mantra (more on mantra below) that I use when I find myself agonising - every time, even if it is the five thousandth time in a minute, I tell mself  'you've done it now, let it be'. Not the most exciting or poetic phrase, but it does actually help me stop worrying myself into an early grave. Which I could do very easily if I let my natural inclination take its course.

I think perhaps that I find it difficult to separate opinions about my work from opinions about me-as-a-whole. If my work is useless then I am useless, you know the kind of thing. It seems possible that this is a measure of how much of myself I do put into my work. But if the work is done then it seems a shame not to share it. The time and effort has been spent after all, and I have to believe that I wouldn't want to show people if I really and truly thought it was terrible myself, as opposed to simply being afraid other people will think it is. Anyway, who knows, it could be rapturously received and praised to the skies! This is not my default mental state, but I would like it to be.

I  made a sampler once, when I was about 15, which read

'Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these - it might have been'. 

I believed that then. And I thought it meant that I was probably going to be the saddest person who ever lived, letting all those might-have-beens slide past me because I was too scared to go out and grab them. It may well have taken me the better part of 20 years to internalise those words and recognise them as an encouragement rather than a prophecy, but I do still believe them now. The phrase can function as a mantra, and its one I use when I get wobbly about putting myself out here like this - if I don't do this, and the other things I want to do like my Etsy shop (in the works), joining art groups, seeking exhibition opportunities etc then I will never know if I could have done them. I don't like not to know things.

Mantra are extremely useful things. Or I find them so. It is not an intrinsically religious thing, or even a spiritual one although it can be. It is about packing a whole lot of thinking and decision-making into a short phrase. I write the phrase down usually, in order to make it real and active as opposed to just things in my head which can get lost or forgotten. Then when I say or read the phrase it reminds me of the things that I packed into it when I chose it. My first self-conscious, deliberately chosen mantra was from Rudyard Kipling's poem 'If''. I took the lines:

"If you can forces your heart and nerve and sinew

to serve your turn long after they are gone

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the will which says to them 'hold on' " 

because at the time I was deeply stressed and also depressed - you know the things on the most-stressful-thing-that-can-happen-to-you lists? They had all happened at once, and I had to keep it together because other people were depending on me to do so. To me those words meant that even when  struggling as long as I could hang on to the will to carry on, as opposed to curling up in a corner and waiting for the world to go away, then the rest of me would fall into line - I had the emotional strength to hang onto these lines, if nothing else. So I would repeat them to myself over and over when I need to and it was like telling myself 'hold on, hold on, hold on'. I had them in a locket for a while, then I put them in a little bottle instead so that I could see them as well as hold them.

Having them physically with me was a good thing, as if I was in a situation where I couldn't just stop and recite poetry I could just hold them and think 'holding on'. Writing the words down was important, I know the whole poem by heart so I could have just recited it to myself but by choosing the words and writing them down I was investing them with the meaning I needed them to have.

There are other things I should have done then (Doctors, counsellors, whatever), but I didn't. The mantra didn't make everything better, but it did help me to cope with things and it is a technique I still use, and am finding new uses for. Mantra can influence feelings and help you through doing things you find tough. My current favourite, which is a good one for trying new things that you don't know will work out, is also from a poem - Sheenagh Pugh's 'Sometimes' -

"Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to"

which reminds me that failure is not foreordained or inevitable, even for me. I wrote this one on coloured paper to signal positivity, and I put a feather in with it because birds are the most supremely self-confident creatures. I can hang it in the window when I'm working or have it in my pocket if I am going somewhere intimidating.

 

It is also important to me, as I think I mentioned, to notice when I am feeling negative. This is because you can get so used to feeling that way that you forget other things are possible. I try to recognise it and then move on - pretty much with that phrasing. 'I think I'm stupid. Noted. Now I'm getting on with this'.  If you try to ignore thoughts and feelings they grow - like telling someone not to think about the pink elephant - so, in theory, noting them should keep them small. I can accept that, just at this moment, I think I am stupid without letting that stop me doing what I have decided to do. I've just made another bottle charm today actually, although not a mantra. More of a symbol, reflecting the fact that fear can be a barrier but it can also be spur. I find it very easy to get down on myself about being down on myself, about being shy, about finding the creative act frightening but it is also true that I need the fear, I need to be aware of the risk that I take when I make art in order to be sure that I am producing something real and true. It is a stylised molecule of adrenalin, made out of paper and beads. I have been using this image in a painting, and I find it strangely pleasing. Hence my little charm.