The Devotion of Slow Crafting

Slow Crafting Project Index - An index of current and past projects

This note is part of a Slow Living note cluster.

This is a #NoteInProgress and should be seen as a very rough braindump draft, not a polished piece. It will be revisited again and again as my attention wanders in and out.

I did cross stitch as a child and teenager. At 17, in 1995, I taught myself how to crochet using craft books because Google didn't even exist let alone YouTube. I learned the basic stitches with yarn, but I've always been a bit of a masochist, and I wanted to learn to make doilies and other intricate thread crochet pieces. In my 20s, I taught myself how to knit - we had Google, but no YouTube, yet, and I learned from a Stitch n Bitch knitting book. In 2023, I learned how to do bobbin lace (I made a few bookmarks, but I ended up with such a backache from it I quit) and also how to shuttle tat.

Depending on the project, it can take days to weeks to complete something - I recently made a tatted doily using size 20 thread that took almost three weeks to complete, but a crocheted doily with a similar number of rounds only takes me five days because I'm WAY faster at crochet than I am at tatting.

Regardless of my speed in a particular craft, they're still all about slowing down.

Delayed gratification.

I don't get the thing unless I keep working to finish the thing.

A practice in patience.

And a rhythmic practice that is great for inducing altered mindstates and pursuing deep contemplation - there's good reason why things such as spinning and weaving are connected to myth and mysticism.

As I work to hold the tension of the thread as I pick it up with the hook to work through loop after loop of a 3D Doily Project, I also ponder the tension between the way traditional fiber crafts were shifted from mythical and practical skills that contributed to our survival because capitalism needed a way to control the workers once those workers won the 40-hour work week and had some free time on their hands and the way those same commodified hobbies can be used for radical and subversive expression against the systems that work to keep us bound.