Nobody’s Perfect

When it comes to the things I make by hand, I always want my finished items to be as neat and tidy as I can make them. I love picking up little tips, tricks, and finishing techniques that help my items look just a bit more polished. I tend to focus on little details and I do think the extra time it takes to really hone in on each step of the process does help to achieve beautiful results. To me, part of the satisfaction of creating things by hand is having full control of the entire process while considering the end result all along the way.

I take a lot of pride in the things I make because it is the result of a lot of time, patience, research, practice, trial and error… but I often forget to show the “messy” side of creating when I share my projects. The mistakes, the re-dos, the failed attempts, the practice pieces. I often hear comments about how everything I make is always perfect, everything comes easy to me, “what can’t Peter do?” I don’t say any of that to sound pompous, and I do appreciate these comments because I know it comes from a place of appreciation, but when someone looks at something I have made, all they see is the finished result. What they don’t see are the hours spent reading books about techniques, watching videos, trying out different methods of doing something, planning a project, starting a project over, fixing the same mistake for the third time in a row… I hide all that messiness, so it is easy to look at something I make and assume the whole process was effortless. I wonder if some of that comes from my background in classical music – leave the mistakes in the practice room. Make it sound easy. The audience shouldn’t notice the technique behind the music.

While I love to share beautiful photos of my finished projects, I also love the process of creating – the messiness, the frustration, the lessons learned, the new techniques, the challenges – so I want to make sure I share those pieces here as well. Because as my husband knows, a lot of blood, sweat and tears goes into my projects. It’s not always pretty, and it’s never perfect. But I do have a low tolerance for mistakes and am detail-oriented, so while the end result is great, sometimes my knitting looks like this:

That’s the beginning of a lace shawl that I ripped out because I messed up where the center stitch should have been on one of the pattern repeats. It was easier to rip it all out and start over than try to unknit several rows to fix the mistake.

Sometimes my sewing looks like this:

Had this tiny little pin tuck not been right at the top of the sleeve cap, I might have left it. But it was in such a prominent location that I ripped out the seam and sewed it again. Three times. Because I could NOT get the fabric to ease in the way I wanted.

Sometimes my weaving looks like this:

A pile of threads on the floor from one of the several times I have had to unweave my fabric because I used to wrong color, or made a mistake in the patterning. The second photo shows how far I had woven before I noticed an error and pulled the weaving out to that point. The third photo is a gap in my threading that needed to be fixed, and the fourth is two red threads that were threaded together instead of separately.

Mistakes happen, nobody’s perfect. What I love about crafting is that mistakes can almost always be fixed (measure twice, cut once y’all!) and you get to choose your threshold for what you’re willing to let go. But we’re all just learning along the way, messing up in abundance, and fixing what we choose to. It’s all part of the journey.

Until next time, stay creative.