02 — The seasons of making
As a kid, I remember being quite ‘hands-on’ or, better, crafty. I would work on interiors by building rooms for my Barbies using shoe boxes and leftover materials from my mom’s sewing projects. I’d wallpaper living rooms and sew curtains and cushions for bedrooms. I would style and renovate as more fabric became available. I still remember the excitement of being able to use the glue gun under strict supervision in my parent’s kitchen but also the guilt that I felt for enjoying crafting these simple rooms over the two-story store-bought Barbie house the family had gotten me as a present for my birthday. I could spend hours by myself, in my room, sitting on the floor cutting fabric, thinking of how I wanted the windows to be and what could the decorations look like. Back then I had already understood the extent of my privilege not just because of the Barbie house but also because my parents allowed for my creativity to be expressed through my hands without restrictions.
I could just make stuff.
Then as all these stories go, the path from childhood to adulthood slowly starts to get filled with shoulds and, more often than not, making things and perhaps creativity altogether takes a back seat. I did that, I grew up and lost touch with my hands. I kept them exercised with all sorts of typing tho, on my computer, blackberries, and then iPhones.
I’d go for long periods of time, starved of that side of myself only to return to it, on my knees.
All those stock phrases like ‘having time is a luxury’ haven’t rang true as much as when I lived in New York - there I did not have that luxury. When I studied, every living moment was spent in class, then working on assignments, and when I worked, I needed to multiply myself to keep up with the high expenses and live a life; you get the gist, I was a living and breathing hustler.
Arts & Crafts
Time was something I partially had over the gap between Christmas and New Year's along with the pressure of squeezing as much as I could in that small window of time. I cherished those trips to the Upper West Side Michaels (an arts and crafts supply store now permanently closed) to get all the supplies I needed for handmade Christmas decorations regardless of how late I was in the process.
Cooking
The crafts always went hand in hand with visits to Pier1 and Williams-Sonoma (both home/kitchen decor and cooking supplies stores) to purchase some missing items to cook some complex recipes I’d also spend hours on. I subconsciously tried to make as much as I could in the short window of time I had.
Knitting
Fast forward several years. I had since moved from New York to Scotland and was facing some uphills. For the first time in years, I had time tho. Time to slow down when the body was still buzzing from all the years spent running hustling non-stop. I had time for walks, time for cooking, time for gardening, and time for knitting. I am not an expert, actually, I only know one technique patiently taught by my mom, and the rest has been a handful of YouTube tutorials. Knitting (and crocheting) got me through illnesses and losses, it got me through some of the hardest times in my life.
I’d sit on my uncle’s green velvet sofa, the same one I remember from when I was a child, have Andy (my dog) by my side, and knit away. At the time, I’d only known how to knit straight so everyone got scarves - uneven ones at first.
I didn’t connect all these dots at the time until I recently did.
Last month I was in London for the London Design Festival and over the weekend I carved time for myself and did what I love to do the most in town: go to all my favorite bookstores, flip through books followed by sitting at a coffee shop with a good view to people watch whilst sipping coffee to then resume my reading as soon as that need got satiated, you see, I live in Gothenburg now and there’s not much people watching happening - so much to say on this.
I did one silly thing that I’d heard on a podcast that talked about reconnecting to your intuition: In one of these bookstores, I closed my eyes, turned around a couple of times, and with my eyes closed I picked a book and opened to a random page.
“But if happiness is a skill, then sadness is too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore it, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience, and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”
This is where I landed on, page 139 of Katherine May’s book: Wintering.
I bought the book, I devoured the book. I brought it with me into the bathtub, to bed, read passages from it to anyone who would listen, got tea spilled over it and after folding as many dog ears as I felt I needed, even if we’re only in October, those words felt like a warm embrace for the soul.
As I started reading this I thought of another book I had read many years ago by Kelly Williams Brown called ‘Easy crafts for the insane: A mostly funny memoir of mental illness and making things’. As she described, the author went through 700 bad days, a broken marriage, physical challenges, family illnesses and a depression - the only thing that got her moving forward and through the pain was: crafting.
“To craft is to set things right in the littlest of ways; no matter how disconnected you feel, you can still fold a tiny paper star, and that’s not nothing”.
Without knowing, I’d been doing exactly the same: resorting to making, crafting, knitting every time I went through a phase of pain and discomfort in my life.
Getting your hands dirty
My years living in Berlin were an oasis for my discomfort, hence, making; I’m going to start calling all those explorations the ‘arts of discomfort’. Directly correlated to the ups and downs of life at that point, I got into learning two sets of skills with very different kinds of budget-friendliness but one thing in common: getting my hands dirty.
I experimented with mathematical calculations and chemical baths with goldsmithing.
Then with clay on pottery wheels making bowls and a series of vessels so artisanal that my mother decided to have them on display in her living room vitrine as if they were pieces from another era.
Tufting
Then there were the ambitious pieces, creative but heavy on the body with loud sounds, yarn, and guns - tufting guns. By then I was in Gothenburg and embarked on making a 2,5 mt x 2,5 mt wall hanging. Was the size of the making directly proportionate to the size of my discomfort? If only I had made the connection then.
What I didn’t realize through all this making is that the more creativity I craved, the more life was messy and complicated and unsettling. You can call these activities coping mechanisms or expressions of the soul but whatever you decide to call them, follow your seasons of making unapologetically. None of these skills need to turn into a side hustle or a business; you can just make for the sake of making and reflect on what you're going through as you create for yourself. Naturally, now, as I have been making necklaces and bracelets with pearls and gradually becoming more interested in mohair yarn, I am starting to wonder how much soul work is ahead of me.
I’m sure I’ll find out by making.