The Satisfaction of Creation (Or, how to really destress and relax)

When I was a teenager, I’d stay up late at night for hours, my bedroom door closed, stereo turned up loud, creating.

I remember following cross stitch kit instructions to a T. I also remember looking at various magazines my mom had collected over the years and picking out pieces of this and that, then figuring out ways to combine them with the supplies I had on hand.

I’d stay up hours past bedtime (it was 9 p.m., for the curious). One night in particular, I sat in the middle of my bed, surrounded by cross stitch patterns, plastic mesh and yarn, glittering gold thread, embroidery floss and my scissors, careful as a surgeon to only cut what I needed and not make any mistakes. Out of the pile emerged a neat little box constructed from the mesh, embroidered with white yarn in a diamond pattern and embellished with cross stitch in bright colors of embroidery thread and gold.

It was a gift for my best friend in junior high school.

All these years later, I remember the experience because I was so determined and driven to see the final product in all its glory. One thing you need to know about me, I don’t handle mysteries well – I need to unravel it, stat. Tied to the questions of ‘if I can’ and ‘how I will’ are the sheer mechanics – the actual magic – in pulling something from my mind’s eye and building it in reality.

Sometimes it feels like children, work stress, relationships, keeping a house going and the various other responsibilities adult life threw at me took up all my time from making. However, I spent 18 years as a newspaper journalist, so I was still working on the ‘if I can’ and ‘how I will’ daily, but with words instead of embroidery thread, yarn, scrapbook paper or what have you.

"The only unique contribution that we will ever make in the world will be born of our creativity." - Brene Brown

It’s been awhile since I’ve been lucky enough to truly picture something I want to make, then wave my trusty magic crochet hook to create it.

Imagine my surprise when all the old excitement popped back up like it never left (seriously, my heart was happy that day!). I ended up painstakingly crocheting a bouquet of teensy fairycore flowers and leaves to add to a set of fingerless mittens. I loved every bit of figuring out how to crochet the flowers – deciding if I wanted layers of rose petals or a flat stylized design, how big they should be, color choices galore, and oh wait there should be leaves, then deciding they weren’t right and starting all over again.

It was intricate, delicate work, exciting and frustrating. There were numerous false starts with figuring out if I should use yarn or embroidery thread, then finding the right hook – one was too small, one was too large. Boy did I ever dig to find one suitable – another side effect of collecting craft supplies over my lifetime (shrugs shoulders).

One of my newspaper superstitions is that bad things come in threes (I was the crime beat reporter), and it turns out, my brilliant ideas also come in threes. Idea number two is for an adorable pair of cottagecore mittens decorated with crochet mushrooms.

As you can see, I have a sea of ends to weave in (sigh), but they are exactly as adorable as I thought they’d be! I have to admit, I was sort of intimidated since I decided to freehand, without a pattern. Trailblazing is the best kind of creativity, but it’s tough since you have to figure it out as you go, and it tends to come with more than a few false starts.

But all that work is a doorway out of the troubles and stresses life throws at us. And while it causes stress all it’s own, the rewards are plentiful and something no one can take away from you.

What have you gone off path for lately? How did it turn out?

Just in case you’re teetering on the edge of staying up all night to make something cool, here are some extra Brene quotes to fuel that fire!