Impatience is not the greatest trait to have in general. When it comes to the creative processes involved in crafting or art, impatience can make things especially disheartening. The struggle with this is a real and ongoing one for me. Having a vision is one thing, the execution of such is quite another. Depending on the project, frustrations with the process, dealing with the imperfections and the gradual (or sudden) lack of joy in the process can sometimes become overwhelming. When it comes to anything that requires precision, things can get rather stressful. At some point everything comes to a halt and the project gets dropped. Apparently this is not an uncommon phenomenon.

Every once in a while immersion into a project occurs deeply, where the attention is so concentrated, that you can actually get outside (or way inside) your head, as if on another planet. When that level of hyper-focus happens, it is a satisfying surprise, its own type of drug. It has been an ongoing search (a yearning) to find the outlet that can reliably put me in that zone. People I know get into such a headspace while working on a car engine, making music, planting garden beds, creating jewelry, working with fiber, assembling a collage, building a porch. For me, it has been a long, long, journey through different waters. Sometimes it happens with gardening. A few times during some free-form sewing. With drawing. But to achieve that state with any regularity, so far the closest I have been able to come to it has been while putting words down on a page.

Earworm of the day:

A-tisket a-tasket
A green and yellow basket
I wrote a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it,
I dropped it,
I dropped it

Patience. Focus. How many times I’ve experienced the intense discomfort felt when trying to paint a room. I am actually unable to paint the walls of a room or the outside of a house without weeping. I can happily paint pictures on a wall, but ask me to roll out color or cut in around a window with a brush and I want to jump out of my skin and run away screaming. And if I have to do it, if I started it and it needs to be finished, it becomes a torturous experience, with sloppy, sub-par results. I have actually broken down and sobbed while painting a kitchen and the trim on a house. I both admire and envy those who find the rhythm of rolling on paint relaxing.

There are the people who color within the lines and those that color outside of them, and there are some of us who do both. It’s not as if I’m incapable of coloring inside the lines, it’s just that sometimes what gets colored within them cries out to be embellished, or becomes strange-looking, or not so tidily executed within those lines. Shading and pattern often needs to happen. Sometimes going outside of the lines leads off into a whole other tangent, creating something on the edges of the page. It’s not always pretty, but that’s where it leads. There is a bit of a life metaphor in that.

This proclivity was happening back in kindergarten and it still happens now. The mandala coloring books for adults that my children tend to gift me every few years, meant to be meditative and relaxing, are mostly that way only under certain circumstances. These books seem to be great while talking on the phone, or coloring in the physical company of someone else while having a conversation, like a great big doodle book. But just to sit there and do it without the dual distraction doesn’t work; the marriage of the visual and auditory enhances the focus.

Thinking back to childhood, there were a few times when my Nona tried to teach me to knit – over and over again. The dropped stitches. The bulges. The creation of what looked like multiple sock heels in what was supposed to be a smooth scarf. The ripping out. The knots. The tears. This was not fun. I stopped doing it, and felt like a failure for not catching on.

Many years later, my grandmother-in-law, Nana, attempted to pick up teaching where Nona left off. I would do a few rows and mess it up. She would say “Rrrip it out and do it again.” So I would start all over and mess it up again. “Rrrip it out.” Do it again. “Rrrip it out.” And again. “Rrrip it out,” while I would be stuffing down the scream wanting to burst from my lungs. Finally, we both gave up.

Since that time, a co-worker taught me to do the most basic crochet stitches while we were away at a conference one year. That was a bit more relaxing, because when you have to “rrrip it out” (I can still hear Nana) at least it is easy to backtrack and recover what you lost. With those basic stitches I have learned to make headbands. Lots and lots of headbands and only headbands. When attempting to make an actual hat though, they all come out square on top, looking like the mortar board hats for high school grads. So it has just been headbands (or maybe you can call them “neck warmers”), until I tired of that. It is really enjoyable to go into yarn stores and wool festivals to look at all the beautiful colors and patterns, the gorgeous home-spun, and fantasize about the potential for what could be. I have eventually learned that “fantasy” is they key word, as opposed to “reality,” which might indicate a level of maturity, or acceptance.

Was it needlepoint or cross-stitch? The cool-looking Alphonse Muchas pillow cover was started with great enthusiasm. That one was about one-third completed before I had a meltdown and was finally able to admit how much I hated doing it. How can people find this relaxing? I have a friend who makes beautiful stitched pictures and samplers that I gaze upon with much appreciation. I doubt I could get much past the letter B doing one of those. The Muchas pillow top sat in a shoe-box for years, with the intention of having some renewed energy about it. Every time I took it out I would just shut the box and put it away again, until finally the unfinished piece and all the yarn for it was given away to someone who would hopefully do something with it.

This happened on and off, over and over again with quilting. An idea would form in my head. All those beautiful fabrics to collect, the amazing, inspiring quilt-artists. And then, the impatience. The crooked cutting. The points that don’t match. The tremendous urge to color outside the lines. I had a quilting fail/success story that spanned over thirty years; a repeatedly stalled project that was finally finished “with a little help from my friends” at the midway point in its evolution. Can you imagine taking thirty years to make a quilt for your children? They were grown and had children of their own before that one was finally completed. After that experience, I doubt I will ever attempt a quilt again.

I dropped it, I dropped it
Yes, on the way I dropped it

Then there is the bun basket, which brings me to how this post got started, and the earworm part of this tale. I am not sure if it is called a “bun basket” because it is meant for carrying buns or maybe the shape of it is rather bun-like. An old friend – who I had never considered particularly crafty – got into making these, which she called bun baskets. On doing a little research, I think the style is considered an Amish egg-gathering basket. She made a really nice one for me (which I still have decades later) and back then invited me to try making one myself. So I bought all the materials and started in earnest on my very own bun/egg basket. It was going along beautifully. It was taking shape pretty much exactly like hers. I had a bathtub full of the wicker reeds soaking. Yet suddenly I became so tired of doing it, so bored with doing it, that I put it away “to finish later”. Which turned into years. A half finished bun-basket and all those coils of reeds, clamps and supplies in a big box, every once in a while re-discovered, only to be stashed again, until the project was given away.

Last week I was at an event where the opportunity to take a workshop making a basket out of cattails was offered. This sounded appealing – so enticing that I somehow almost forgot about the former bun-basket fail. When recalling that basket-making had not been my forte in the past, I reasoned that perhaps things had changed over time.

There are ten of us sitting at a few scattered tables with a vibrant, clear-eyed, rosy-cheeked, enthusiastic young instructor. She went from person to person, starting us off creating our basket bottoms with long strands of wet cattail leaves divvied out to everyone. Off to a great start, mine was looking pretty hopeful. This was going to be fun.

The process remained somewhat exciting, until the bottom was finished and the rows needed to rise up in order to create the sides. That is where I somehow started making spaces and holes and dropping sections, exactly they same way I dropped stitches in knitting. The other nine people in the room were going along pretty nicely, their baskets developing at a steady pace into recognizable shapes, each unique but also well executed. Mine was already shaping up to be a disaster. Either it was turning into a flat placemat, or when I tried to bring up the sides, it would become too tight and begin to close in on itself like a ball. The young, clear-eyed and very sweet instructor took time to stop by my chair numerous times to help me correct the problems. Despite that, enthusiasm began to wane. At one point my basket got so messed up that I called out, “Something bad is happening!” and more than once she had to undo what I had done (“rrrip it out”) and get me started again in the right direction. Then she would move on to attend to someone else. At some point the uncomfortable realization dawned on me that I had become “That Student”. You know how sometimes there is one person in the class (any class) that just doesn’t seem to grasp the concepts? To my horror, that person was me.

And on the way I dropped it.

The class lasted between three and four hours, where we were expected to complete our own basket in its entirety. At a little bit past the halfway point the meltdown began. I was welling up with tears, which I kept wiping away so nobody would see. Here I was, an adult, a senior for Pete’s sake, crying with frustration because I could not create a decent basket like everyone else in the class. And suddenly it hit me; the kid sitting at her desk in school, incessantly tapping her feet against the chair to songs in her head. Distractedly filling spiral notebook pages with comics. Doodling in the margins of the test handout instructions. Not doing the homework. Not following the pattern. Not sticking to the recipe. My Attention Deficit.

At the end there were just two of us left in the room. Everyone else had finished. A fairly new friend who had been sitting next to me and had created her own rather appealing, good sized basket was trying to bolster up my feelings. The instructor came over and quickly, deftly, without even looking down at her own hands, took my basket and completed my last row so that I could take over and wrap up the finishing edge of the top. Even with that easy task, I made a few errors and needed to back-track.

When it was finally completed, it actually didn’t look all that horrible. It is small – it fits in the palm of my outstretched hand. Compared to the others, it was rather pathetic. But standing on its own, if one of my children or grandkids had brought something like this home I would praise them and put it on the fireplace mantle in a place of honor. Supposedly as the grasses dry, the basket will tighten up a bit, making the holes and spaces appear not as haphazard. The very kind instructor assured me that over time I will come to cherish my wonky little basket for what it is.

I placed it on the fireplace mantel, in support of my inner child.

A-tisket a-tasket
my green and yellow basket

~*~

“A-Tisket, A-Tasket” – a children’s rhyming game 1879 in U.S. The jazz version with enhanced words co-written by Ella Fitzgerald and Van Alexander was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald with the Chick Webb Orchestra in 1938.