I wish my life - and ours - would be a little more crochet-y
PS: Not talking about covering toilets with crochet, btw...
No, I don’t mean more crochet-y as in having a house covered in crochet, from cabinets and couches, to toilets and sinks.
What I mean is that crochet, as other handmade crafts, teaches us that it’s ok to try and fail, and try again and maybe fail once again, it teaches us to be graceful with this being human thing and lifeing thing, and it also teaches us that some projects take more time than others, have more setbacks than others, but will eventually come to an end.
Unlike crochet, though, it’s hard or impossible to frog life stuff. Life’s mistakes or mishaps can hardly be undone as easily as with crochet, where all you have to do is pull a thread, sometimes with more difficulty than others, to start over or start anew. All you’ve lost is some time. In life, it’s not that easy. Even giving up on something is not that easy, but is sometimes the best decision. Not everything works out, but the truth is that is not the end of it, of life I mean.
This all came back to me after I’ve read (10 minutes ago)
’s piece titled “Things always work out if you allow them to”. Yes. Even if they don’t work out as we planned, we do have to get out of our own way and allow them to work out.Because if we don’t try; we’ll never know. And if we don’t know we’ll always wonder. And if we wonder, we’ll never arrive to fully flourish and get to chase new dreams to try. I know what I’m choosing… what about you?
The hardest part is getting the people in our life to understand it, live it, embody it, join us in that allowing, when they’re not in on these crochet lessons or don’t have a similar “tangible example” to look at to understand how things - slow, hard things - work and work out. And that makes it hard to live it ourselves. To get them to join us in pushing through, in being patient and hanging on without despair. Even though despair-on-the-brink-of-breakdown does lurk in too often, it seems.
In the end, you’ll either end up with a glorious crocheted piece, or lots of yarn to start over. I wonder…
A few PS’s:
Loved reading Shitty Crafts by
. Funny, uplifting and on point. Laughed and nodded all through it.
Came across it thanks to
’s beautiful project, Threadstack. If you’re reading me, you’ll love finding about it and discovering a creative community in the making (literally and figuratively).And some photos from and notes about my new surroundings:
PS: This may seem like a luxury choice, but in case you’re not aware of the state of housing here, it’s impossible for a common mortal to buy or rent a decent house in the city or nearby. Besides longing for a life in the country for a long time, this was the most sensible (even if counterintuitive and really challenging) choice: get an about 100 yo abandoned barn/wine cellar and turn it into an uncommon house (possible only because I share my life with an out-of-the-box architect).
And that’s all the randomness I got for you (for now).
Keep on keeping on,
Ana <3
Love this! I don’t crochet, and my stitching is by machine and impossible to undo…no neat unravels to create a better end result, I have to either chop it up and reassemble or throw away (never do that). And that seems like a very good metaphor for my life, constantly trying to reassemble the pieces into something new and better 🫠
Couldn’t agree more about crocheting teaching us about life! The same with any crafts really, I can mostly just draw from experience with hand embroidery.
Thanks for the shoutout and I salute you for the move - what an adventure, can’t wait to see what your out of the box Architect come up with 😉 lived in Lisbon briefly in 2018 with my husband but it was already then excessive pricing for what you could get… phew 😮💨