Too much craft is finally enough

When I was eleven, my Aunty Lola taught me to crochet granny squares. I took to it like a profiterole to chocolate sauce, and within a few months I had finished a single-bed-sized granny-square rug in the glorious shades of the 70s – mainly gold, orange and chocolate brown, with some purple and aqua thrown in.

I used and loved it throughout my teenage years and it is significant for two reasons: it was the start of my enduring love of craft, and it’s a project that I actually finished.*

In hindsight my teenage years might have been more normally spent chasing boys or actually going outdoors occasionally, but instead I practised enthusiastically for old ladyhood – crocheting doilies and traymats, cushions, slippers, ties for my father, potholders, and lampshade trims; making patchwork cushions (they’re still on my mother’s sofa, worn to shreds); teaching myself to tat; spending endless hours on Spanish blackwork and bargello embroidery; and fashioning macramé potplant holders (some of which are still, to my astonishment, on display in my older cousins’ houses). At university I once spent three days embroidering a cushion rather than going to lectures. But for every item that I finished, two or three projects were abandoned along the way – because I didn’t like the technique or the stitch or the colour or the fabric, or they didn’t fit me or suit me, or I gave up instantly as soon as I hit a tiny snag, or because something newer, shinier, more challenging, less challenging or just different came along.

‘Why don’t you finish one thing before you start something else?’ my non-craft-obsessed mother used to ask. Meanwhile my father was busy in his workshop creating, tinkering with, swearing at, buying materials for and abandoning projects, just as I was. Poor Mum.

Thirty-five years after that crocheted rug, the pattern continues: I start many more projects than I finish. I have hundreds if not thousands of dollars’ worth of fabric and yarn in my stash, and my cupboards and drawers are increasingly crammed with UFOs (unfinished objects). In fact I considered calling this blog The UFO Project until I realised it would attract more conspiracy theorists, Roswell obsessives, X-Files fans and general nutbags than I was willing to tolerate (to wit, any**), and that they would end up pretty annoyed, too, after typing their way into an alternative universe not of greys and government obfuscation but of craft.

And now I’m finally really sick of it. All this moribund craft is a waste of money, time, energy and space. I’m tired of scrabbling through drifts of it whenever I want to find a needle, buying more and more furniture to store it, and generally having it on my conscience. It ends here! This blog*** is about finishing stuff off, getting it out of the cupboards and giving it a life. Setting goals is alien to me, so there’s no time focus here; I’m just going to do it till it’s done. Blogging about it is a way of keeping it on track; if it’s out there and I think (even deludedly) that people are reading about it, hopefully sheer shame will make me do it. So pile on the shame, crafters of the world, and let me know what you think. (But do feel free to leaven the shame with praise and flattery if you feel inclined.)



*Some people might argue with this, as all these years later the yarn ends are still not darned in; however, I’ve accepted now that they never will be, and as the rug has been used and loved for many years without any of the squares coming adrift, I reckon it counts as finished.


** with apologies to X-Files fans; you have my allegiance, and I admit to a lingering fondness for David Duchovny, but this blog is about other things.

*** Thanks to Kitty for navigating the sea of my incompetence and helping me to set this blog up. Without her it would still be a Word document and a bunch of photos I didn't know how to extract from my camera.