When you don't know what you don't know.

After my many years of making things, I still forget about this part of the process. That part of the ongoing learning of craft (and of life) where you realise yet again that you don't know what you don't know.

You thought you knew but you didn't. And you didn't even realise that there was a question you should be asking.

It can happen to you anytime, whether you are at the start of your crafting journey, or way down the track. And just this week it's happened to me.

So I've had a couple of dark-ish weeks. A combination of winter and busy meant that I got a little off-kilter, and when that happens I look for freedom in craft and so go off piste and start making random things without much planning. Sometimes this can lead to amazingness and sometimes it just leads to more of the off-kilter feeling.

This time around, I started a sweater that I was totally sure was going to be the business. I sketched out the colourwork, was super happy with my colours and my improvised pattern, and was hooning through the knitting....until.... it wasn't.

By this time I'd shifted the off-kilter feeling by doing all the things I needed to do. I stopped blogging, I got off social media, I did a bit of exercise, and a small amount of drinking (mainly with friends ;-) ) .... and at the end I was kind of left with a crafting hangover. My colourwork sweater didn't exactly turn out how I thought. I was thinking it would be amazing, but instead it kinda looked a little bleurgh.

I am not a one-craft specialist. I am a everything-ist, and as such I only learn about something like colourwork when I am actually making something that includes colourwork. When I do learn about it I don't get totally obsessive* and study every book ever written on a subject. I learn what I need to through the lens of the specific projects I want to tackle.

I thought this colourwork project was no big stretch for me. I've done quite a bit of colourwork - many things over many years. I've made some things I totally love from scratch. My thinking was "I've got this". I believed I knew what I needed to know to make it spectacular.

Turns out not so much. This yoke did not work. And the reason why it didn't work was not even on my radar.

In the planning of the sweater I had studied yoked sweaters to see what I liked. My post why all crafters need a visual diary talks about this. I did what I suggested in that post and studied the ones I had saved in my favourites on Ravelry to look for similarities. I knew that I didn't like it when white was a main background colour. It tends to make the yoke too stripey for me. I want a more integrated looking non-stripey yoke. I also knew that I liked a fairly limited palette with only 4/5 colours.

So I sketched out a plan. I used one of my favourite motifs and combined it with another simple stitch pattern. I like simple. My plan was simple. All good so far. I had colours I liked, a stitch pattern I liked and I was off.

A spot of freestyle knitting.

However, what I didn't know was that my past adventures in colourwork didn't prepare me for this type of yoke. Changing the background colour of a sweater is a tricky proposition. And my past adventures into colourwork have either

1. involved tweedy yarns which blur your colour changes so blocky stripes are less of an issue OR
2. they have involved sparse colourwork on a plain background which means you are only essentially working with one colour not two.

This yoke involved plain yarns (no tweed) and a changing background. The skills you need to make it work are different.

For example you need to really understand value and how visible your colour changes will be. You need to think about whether the pattern is sparse or blocky. You need to think about how to integrate your colour changes so that it doesn't look stripey - if stripey is not what you want. To get it to sing you need to get how this stuff all works. Not something I have done before.

What I sketched didn't work. It looked fine when I mocked it up in Excel but not in real life. The grey had the same effect the white background would have had and made it stripey because there wasn't another colour change for the foreground going on at the same time as the background. I realise this is a long complicated tangled explaination but the important bit is that I can see where I went wrong. I learnt something big.

My second major error was the inclusion of two strikingly different patterns. One was sparse - the VVV - and the other pattern was more solid blocks of colour. They simply looked odd together. And the sparser pattern didn't work really at all with a change in background. When I've used it in the past - and loved it - it has been a simple sweater with that single pattern and no background changes at all. Again I learnt something big.

So I ripped our the yoke without pain or grief or even a glass of wine. It was wrong and then it didn't exist.

There was a small bit of twitchiness around the fact that I had got it so wrong, while feeling that I had it so right. Because that is where the rub is, isn't it. When we are learning something new - especially when we don't realise we have something new to learn -  it's humbling. Even believing that mistakes are how you learn I think I have this feeling that one day if I keep practising that I will know it ALL. That this won't happen anymore. OR maybe I hold onto the idea that if I could just find the right book or website that I would hold all the knowledge there is.

But we can't. Because learning doesn't work like that. And that is where the true joy of an ongoing practice of making comes in. There will always be more to learn, more to understand. There will always be things we haven't thought of and new mistakes to make. That is part of the magic. We can never know exactly how a particular material will respond to a being shaped into a particular pattern. We guess, we plan, but really sometimes it's only in the making itself where we can see if our idea works.

We can only learn things slowly. We can't hurry the process. We can't gulp knowledge down and this is especially true as we practice the art of craft.

Bit by bit we inhale the learning like oxygen, one breath at a time. We need to breathe out before we can take the next bit in. The breathing out is the important part as it creates the space within our lungs to take the next breath. And it gives our body time to make use of the the oxygen it received; for that last breath to become part of our cells, changing us in some unseen way one tiny molecule at a time.

We are constantly learning as we make. That learning is changing us and how we look at the world. Slowly, and without us knowing it, it becomes part of us. And that is a wondrous thing.

To move forward I chose to go with a pattern I know would work from someone who already understands such things - Riddari. The result is clearly much much better. As for me - I'll try to chart out something for another sweater with my newfound knowledge on another day.

Happy crafting.

Felicia x

*don't laugh Tine, Jenn and Claire!

Stash Less Challenge #5 - Make it work.

In 2016 we invite you to join us in your own personal Stash Less project. Stash Less is a project whereby we work towards having a mindful stash. Each month we will be posting a challenge for you to use in your own journey of discovery and change. Please feel free to join in at any time. We can't wait to hear what you find out! Last year's Stash Less posts can be found here but to follow this year's Challenge then please use the links below.

Stash Less January - Challenge #1 Taking Stock
Stash Less Feburary - Challenge #2 Make a Plan
Stash Less March - Challenge #3 Make a Making List
Stash Less March - Challenge #4 Stop Shopping

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OK so this month's Stash Less Challenge has to do with gratitude and becoming more aware of what you have. As my head has shifted over my time of Stashing Less, I find that the one thing that keeps me on the wagon (even with my various fails) is making sure I keep my eye on the prize. And that means keeping desire at bay by keeping gratitude in my heart.

I'm away this week and so a few days ago had to go through the packing process. Because our family have to do a fair bit of travel - given that the fella in my life is British with strong ties to his motherland - then I've got great at packing light. Packing light makes for a happy trip, doesn't it?!

Packing, this week, meant perusing my currently unworn summer wardrobe for my favourite frocks. Which meant seeing my wardrobe with fresh eyes. Always good, always healthy. For six days away I took three frocks, one pair of pants, two tops, a cardi, and a hoodie. Because that really is enough clothes for six days. But it was the process of choosing what frocks to bring, that was the interesting part. It clearly showed me what an abundance of options available to me. Even if not all of them are perfect. Even if I don't love all of them. I have enough.

And yet..... often it doesn't feel like that. Often I look into my wardrobe and get a bit critical. This doesn't fit quite right and that one is the wrong length. This one needs ..... I could go on but I won't bore you.

One of my holiday reads has highlighted this phenomenon for me - the title itself hints at my problem - Wardrobe Crisis: How we went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion.

When I was growing up in the 80s we had a different relationship to how much we owned. We owned less and we had less options available. We didn't feel deprived. We had our best clothes and then we had our everday clothes. We wore the same things over and over again. When we went out somewhere special we wore our Sunday clothes.

My* addiction to having choice, to perfection (as in I need the perfect outfit for every occasion) and to newness, has lead to me often feel wanting rather than gratitude.

When I go to my wardrobe to pick something out I have many items in my wardrobe that aren't quite right. This is true of handmade and of store bought clothes. Things I would wear if only they were a bit more X or a bit less Y or if they had shorter Z.  

Stash Less Challenge #5 - Make It Work

And that is my challenge to you: Have a look at your wardrobe, pick three things and fix them to make them what you would wear. Make them into something you would be grateful to own. Make them work for you and bring you joy.

Mend them. Reshape them. Unravel and reknit them. Refashion them. Whatever you need to do.

For me I'm going to start with the frock in the picture at the top of the post. What the instagram photo doesn't show is the fact that this dress feels and looks like a sack. Even though people like it and I like it, it doesn't really work how it should and I feel that every time I wear it. I feel a bit frumpy. I made a mistake as I was making it, and made the skirt wider on the front than the back, and at the time I was too lazy to go back and fix the fact that it is fuller in the front. And then it is also a bit too loose around the bodice. And the bodice is a smidge too long so it sits in a funny place.

So I'm going to fix it. This month. About five years after I made it but better late than never hey.

Do what you have to do to make your clothes work for you. And let's get more grateful for what we have by making it feel more like "us".

Post on instagram with the tag #stash_less (or #stashless :-)) and I will post some good fixes at the end of the month on the blog.

Happy sewing.

Felicia x

* and maybe your?

It's all about Community and Connection!

My two favourite words! And so today I bring you a favourite "local" project that is all about community and connection.... and craft.

Every October time we attend a local school fair. My kids love it and harass me about it for many months. Their questions are always the same. Can we go? And how much spending money do we get?

The answers are yes! and $20. More than we would normally give them for such an event, but in this case we know that about half that money will be ethically spent....

Now why they love this particular fair is multi-faceted. They love that we get to meet up with so many family friends and probably that they get to hoon around all day with very little in the way of parental supervision. They love the activities, the singing, the pop-up op-shop, the food, the craft ..... but the thing that they do every year without fail is they buy monkeys. One monkey per child per year.

Happily Made Monkeys are now a tradition of the fair for us, and over the years, they have become part of our family. They are ethically made and super sweet, with magnets in their hands which make them unlike any other soft toy they own. Magnets mean they are a versatile pet.

I often find one of them attached to a potplant or curled up in a kid's bed. They get stuck to pin boards and attached to the fridge. They are always cuddling and are by far my kid's all time favourite soft toys. These monkeys have been part of our family for many years now and you will find them being flung at our old-school metal screen door in a game of "who can stick the highest monkey". They are often seen having a whale of a time roaming around our house.

And the great thing about them is that they are all about the love.

I mean how cute they are.

The lovely, clever and indomitable Veronica who runs Happily Made Monkeys is a friend of a friend. When I ran into her the other day, she shared that the organisation who makes the monkeys for her in Cambodia, have finally grown to the stage that they can start paying for their worker's kids to go to school. I love the project so much that I thought I would share it here.

Cambodia Knits are a social enterprise who employ home based knitters in Cambodia to make soft toys and finger puppets. Their crowdfunding campaign - selling Sleepy Snoogus' - pays for education for the knitters children. One Snoogus = 1 month of schooling.

For me this project is connection, community and craft rolled into one. So go check them out. They make great gifts - we always keep a few in our present box as they are the perfect unisex multi-age present - and your purchase of them helps make the world a better place.

And the best place to contact Veronica direct about monkeys is via the Happily Made Monkey facebook page.

Felicia x

Out of the darkness and into the craft.

So I've just had a bit of a sabbatical. Those of you reading this here blog for a long time will know that it happens about once a year. I don't even really know it's going to happen. I just can't write; I feel flat, have no motivation and no words. So I skip a post and then another. This one lasted two weeks.

Often this darkness of the spirit has to do with winter, cold days and a busy house, and me feeling a little overwhelmed by the ongoingness of life. I run out of ideas and feel like I have nothing at all to contribute. Nothing to say. And that there is no point to saying it. Things get a little melodramatic, dark and grim. And also tellingly I start feeling a little exposed. I get to feeling like I've shared to much, rambled to much, gone on about stuff too much. I simply feel like hiding.  

Counter-intuitively one of the signs things are heading this way is that I start engaging in a lot of off-piste, off-list craft. I begin lots of random craft based on how I feel in a given moment. Projects that are exciting, but involve lots of headspace as they are creativity-driven projects, not simply comfort craft.

While this sounds good in theory, with hindsight it's clear that I start mass-creating as a distraction to the flatness I'm feeling. However creating like this results in stress, as I start lots of hard things all at once, adding to the feelings of life-overwhelm.

For example a few weeks ago, I decided it was a good idea to create five frocks at once. A kind of upping-the-ante that means that I end up procrastinating due to overwhelm, and feeling stressed. At the same time within the space of a week, I also started an improvised sweater for me, a hat, a scarf, a sweater for my brother and another sweater for me. Sounding a little bit much, eh?

After years of doing this blogging gig though, I now know that the not-being-able-to-write will pass if I don't stress about it and just go with it. I've learnt that part of the solution is to watch the darkness start and then run with it. Don't fight it but actively seek to pull back. Find myself a metaphorical cave to hide in and get a little quiet.

So practically what to do? Well after finally figuring out I was "in" it, I turned off my email notifications, got off the internet and didn't really visit Instagram. I stopped listening to podcasts and started listening to music. I made sure I was exercising and took up a spot of drinking. I ate chocolate, sewed a little and I watched TV. I slowed down and got quiet. And intentionally decreased the number of obligations I had - to myself but also to others. I cut myself some slack.

This also was true of my craft. Once I start a project it begins to feel like an obligation to me - I feel obliged to get it done. So I intentionally I pulled back on my crafting.

I pared my knitting projects back by pulling out a couple of things I'd just started, to decrease the overwhelm of too many things on the go. I concentrated on getting the frocks made (four down, one to go), and I put all the harder projects to one side. I didn't mend. I also put aside the complicated, improvised head-based knitting (like the improvised colourwork sweater) and focused on comfort craft destined for other people.

The old trick of turning your darkness around by focusing on someone else, worked really well for me this time. I decided to really concentrate on two knitting projects - both for people I love, both stocking stitch, both other people's patterns. And it really worked. It was comforting and simple. Decreasing the overwhelm one stitch at a time, by thinking about the people I was making for, rather than my darkness. Yay.

And the cloud shifted in two weeks. Quicker than it has before which I feel has to do with the fact I went with it so willingly this time. I didn't try to force myself to post through it.

I found this Tim Ferris blog post - that talks about a deloading phase to get ready for the next big push - that I also found helpful. It feels a little like that is where I'm at.

As I sit here this morning I've actually written three posts in a row. Fingers clacking and out of nowhere. I feel like I have so much to share with you all. I am forgetting post ideas as fast as I'm coming up with them. Happy days.

Thanks for bearing with me and I'll see you tomorrow with a post about a cool social enterprise, and then later this week with some exciting TCS news.

I'd love to hear about how you use craft for your darkness.

Felicia x

PS. Last week I talked about a podcast with Paulo Coehlo but forgot to add the link. So here it is. Also on the Tim Ferris podcast - he gets great guests!

The progress of the wedding dress.

So there has been progress with the wedding dress. Not really visible progress as I'd have to show you photos of my half nude body covered in scraps of fabric pins, and we don't want to go there, do we. Instead I'll talk you through where I've got to.

I was (am) procrasinating. Plain and simple. I'm a little stuck in the old it-looks-beautiful-in-my-head-so-i-don't-want-to-make-it-in-case-it-doesn't-work story. I'm good this game and as I've done it many times before for projects that are important to me, I now recognise that it is just part of the process. It will shift.

My lovely friend Jenn put me on a making diet, restricting me from doing random stuff until I started but I got subconsciously got around her quite easily by talking up how the girls need winter dresses and so I started by cutting out five. Five. Talk about avoidance.

The avoidance is mainly because I haven't really settled on a design. It will depend on the fabrics and how they drape. So I need to do some investigation which I am doing.

So what have I actually done.

Firstly - I've been obsessed with Laure De Sagazan, a French wedding frock designer, and have spent a couple of (worthwhile) hours dissecting the shapes and lace of her frocks. If she had a stockist in Melbourne I would probably abandon the idea of homemade and trot on in with a smile on my face. Her frocks are just stunning and I would happily support her growing business. But she doesn't and I really do want to try to make it. I really do :).

Secondly - I wanted to sew up a few things to try to find a silhouette I liked.

So far I've made;

1. The Elisalex bodice - which is truly lovely but looks too formal
2. The Anna bodice - which is truly lovely but looks too bridesmaidy with the only exception being that I think this version with the low V back could be truly beautiful. Especially if it was made of lace.
3. The Esme from Lotta - which I adore and thought about using if I was to go with a sleeve. The shape of the neckline is beautiful and it is a great base which I could then alter by taking the back out ala-Laure.

Thirdly - I drafted a pattern from my favourite Gorman RTW skirt to use as a base. I adore how this thing drapes. I then sewed it up with some linen to get an idea of whether it works. It does and it's beautiful. The shape is perfect.

Fourth - Using my all-time favourite dress (mine is a different print) I've been trying to work out a pattern given all my mock ups. This frock makes me feel sensational and so I want to copy the waist band and the length of the bodice. It fits perfectly. I purchased from the super No.6 in New York - I've been trying to figure out a way to use the shape of the dress top and the waistband with the Gorman skirt to make my own Frankenpattern.

Favourite Gorman skirt. It's like the perfect a-line/circle mix.

Five - I purchased 5.5m of this beautiful Nani Iro from Miss Matatabi for the flowergirl frocks. The second photo on her website shows it better but doesn't really do it justice - and neither does my picture at the top. It is the palest perfect pink (from a non-pink lover) with silver sheen and white and fragile green flower outlines. Again this purchase is total procrastination that I feel really good about. I'm thinking little backless Geranium Dresses, maybe with a slightly longer bodice and a deep V back. The weather in Melbourne in December is rid-ic-u-lous. It could be 42 degrees or it could be 18. You never know.

Onwards and upwards. The procrastination will shift*.

My next step is to mock up an actual whole dress. I'm going to use some chambray and hope for the best. I'll be pattern making as I go. But first I need to finish those five half made kid frocks ;-).

Felicia x

* In this gorgeous podcast with Paul Coehlo he talks about how he procrastinates about 3/4 hours per day before he gets to the writing. And that it is just part of his process.