It’s been a while since I posted.  I sort of fell out of love with crochet and started to question its worth.  I think I’d forgotten my ‘WHY’.  Besides crochet and other crafts, I also try to exercise as much as I can, eat as mindfully as I can and drink little or no alcohol.  I’ve mentioned before that I belong to a virtual running club ‘Too Fat to Run’ and remembering your WHY is considered an important part of who you are and what you choose to do.  I choose to exercise and not drink alcohol because it makes me happier and healthier.  It means I can be drug free and it buys me a quality of life that I might not otherwise have.

For a while now I’ve been trying to set up an Etsy shop.  I’ve tried hiring stalls at craft fayres around Bristol.  I’ve also tried establishing a Facebook presence.  I’ll admit that a lot of this has been done in a very half-hearted manner.  It’s very easy to set these pages up, but it takes time and effort to keep them running on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, my blog has also fallen victim to lethargy over the past month.  This is primarily because I thought my WHY had to be ‘to make money’.  As a consequence I was completing projects that didn’t necessarily interest me – but those I thought would be good to sell.  But that in itself brought about problems as I’ve never really taken the time to work out who I wanted to sell these products to.

This past week I had a moment (you’ll see that I have these a lot). Much of this was based around my WHY.  Why was I finding crocheting so mundane?  I loved it so very much, have just started Part II of the international diploma in Crochet and so why was I suddenly losing my way, especially as it brought up happy memories of my Nana?  But this week as I was browsing through the Open University website for yet another course to do (you can NEVER be doing too many courses at once) it occurred to me that the problem isn’t as much the crochet as the end result.  I have been spending so much time mithering about the end result – selling my products to people, producing things quickly enough to sell them, writing patterns for people to buy that I had forgotten the reason I had started on this journey in the first place.  Don’t get me wrong, it would be fantastic to have a book of my patterns and techniques published but for the moment that is not my WHY.

For the moment it is about learning.  It’s about working out how different techniques work together.  It’s about simple thinks like structure, colour and shape.  It’s about learning how to design pieces and how to turn those designs into reality.  I’ve been experimenting (or wasting yarn) with making diamond shapes starting from the middle. I’ve made a skirt; completed a bag where I combined both sewing and crochet; and completed some tie-backs for a bedroom in our apartment in Portugal.  I finally worked out my WHY.  Because I enjoy it, because I am learning new things and, even, because now I have the time.