I’m starting a thing
Starting a thing is hard and sometimes scary. At least for me, it is. I have always been a bit of a perfectionist, and I avoid showing people things until I deem them perfect. I keep my endeavours private in case I suck at them, then I can quietly put them away and no one will know my failure. When I learn a new skill, I have little patience for the learning process, often giving up if I’m not immediately a prodigy. Maybe that’s why I’ve had this website for years without actually doing anything with it. Maybe that’s why I always find some reason (sometimes valid, sometimes not) to not put the thing out there in the world. I’m trying something new now: being brave and putting unrefined things out into the public.
I’m sure you all remember a few years ago when we found ourselves with an unusual amount of time on our hands and the inability to leave home. As a person who gets bored very easily without some sort of mental stimulation, I decided to return to my crafty side, after having let it slumber for many years while I dove into adventure travel (you’ll notice that deep diving and hyperfixations, followed by a pivot into a new hyperfixation and forgetting the last one is a pattern with me). At the time, I was living in a studio apartment in Montreal, was extra broke (said World Event had shut down live events, which is where I’ve always made my primary income), and needed something to stimulate my brain. My foray into Duolingo and an attempt to learn Irish was helping but wasn’t feeding that creative side of me. With my paints and canvases in storage many hours away in Toronto, I had to find something new, so I turned to something I had been thinking about along my travels: making clothes that fit me, not trying to make me fit clothes.
And so my deep dive began. I had no sewing machine, no knowledge, and no money, but what I did have was YouTube, a needle and thread, and an old bedsheet. The rabbit hole began with many many many hours of learning about historical sewing methods (which are often done by hand, and therefore negated my lack of a sewing machine) and side-quested into the science of fibers. I found comfort in knowing that alone in my apartment I could try to make something using an old bedsheet and if I sucked at it no one needed to know, and it wouldn’t really have cost me much other than time, something of which I had plenty.
The outcome of that first project isn’t really the point of this (it ended up being a wonky circle skirt that I excitedly twirled around in, in case your completionist mind needed to know). The point is that I did a thing, and that thing led me to another thing, which led me to another thing, and all of a sudden I have a stack of cardboard I hoard for DIY bookbinding, bins of fabric scraps I’ve gotten from other sewists for patchwork projects I keep adding to my ever-growing list, and a beautiful Singer treadle sewing machine from 1906 that is one of my prized possessions. The point is that I did a thing, I sucked at it, I kept going, and now I suck a little less. The point is that I’m trying to relearn that perfection isn’t the goal; curiosity, learning, enjoying, and growing are the goals.
So with that in mind, I’m doing the scary thing and making my journey public, with all its failures and lessons, with my hyper fixations and my inability to pay attention long enough to follow a pattern, with a slew of craft supplies strewn around as I lose interest in one and pick up another. I’m sharing my work, I’m bringing you along as I learn, I’m trying to take down these arbitrary hurdles (as well as find ways around very real financial and time hurdles) so we can all enjoy trying something new. Maybe I’ll find a way to sustainably make a living creating (without losing all the joy), maybe I’ll crash and burn. Who knows. Either way, I’m being brave, and I hope you’ll leap into this imperfect journey with me.
