Craft

Making and mindfulness

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I recently did a mindfulness course to help manage the anxiety I’ve been experiencing around work and other aspects of my life (mostly work at the moment). We did lots of meditations and breathing exercises and lying on the floor, and it was helpful. But taking the practice out of that classroom and into my everyday life has been a bit of a challenge. The one place I have found that mindfulness fits quite naturally with what I do is where I’m in the middle of making something.

I find I can sit and cut the little beauties above for quite some time and keep my sense of presence with the motion of the scissors and the curve of the petal. I use these flowers or stars or whatever you want to see in them in several ongoing projects at the moment, accumulating bagfuls of different coloured flowers as some painters may accumulate paint.

I know many people are finding colouring books helpful, and I have some really beautiful ones, but I have to say that they are not for me. I don’t seem to be able to focus in the same way when I’m working to someone else’s design. The other creative space I have found for a mindful practice is crochet. I’m only just learning this one, but there is something calming about the process of producing loop after loop, and working those looks into a growing creative whole.

There has been much said about the mental health benefits of creative work. I suspect that the mindful element to it is only part of what is happening and the way in which art can provide a useful channel for expressing, sharing and understanding emotions is potentially far more powerful in helping people. But I’ve found in my own creative space, a little work on mindfulness has been very helpful for me.

Working on my craft

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A few weeks ago I watched a documentary about origami on Netflix called Between the Folds. The documentary covered a whole genre of origami called wet folding, that I had never heard of before. The premis is that you work with wet paper to produce fluid, soft form paper sculptures. The results were really beautiful, and the doc is well worth a watch.

Both my parents are artists and when I was young my dad taught me how to stretch paper when you want to paint to avoid it warping when it makes contact with water. I think this was probably the first time I’d encountered a way of working with the paper’s memory rather than trying to work against it.

I think about how I work now, which involves paper cutting and sculpture among other thing with paper as trying to work with a paper’s memory. Whatever you do to paper will change it, even after you erase a drawing there will still be a ghost mark of the drawing you first made. In my own work I make the paper or card silouette and then use objects to mould it around before applying more layers of paper and glue. What you get at the end of that is more like a hard shell than a fragile changeable bit of paper so it’s important to work out what the card will remember in terms of shape right at the beginning. Get this wrong and what you get is warping and movement in the wrong direction. 

At the moment I’m still in the process of experimenting. What works best? Which is the best way to curl a bird wing? How think is the paper and how long can I fuss with it before it will fall apart? It’s learning in a very physical, tactile and mindful way that’s quite different to other aspects of my life. I’m enjoying the journey so far.

Getting started

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Caberet yarn from Stylecraft

I’m down on the south coast with my boyfriend and his family. At the moment he’s sitting outside with his hoodie pulled up over his head, scanning the Internet on his phone and looking like something out of Mr Robot. Yesterday we went scavenging in the craft shops and I bought some wool and some crochet hooks to try a few new things out. I bought a ball of the cabaret wool from Stylecraft as I really like the texture of it and the blending of colours. Crochet is something I’ve come to quite recently and really like for the simple meditative actions of the work involved.

Over the last few months I’ve been thinking about starting my own small business around some of the craft things I like to make. I like to work with paper and glue. I make small decorative pieces from a mix of recycled and arts quality paper. I like the silouettes of cutting paper into different shapes and the textures that can be produced by creating delicate overlapping layers of those shapes. I also like using wool and copper wire, Perspex eyes for soft animals, or other bits with radically different textures to catch the eye. I’ve not really struggled to come up with ideas for ‘products’ but finding the time to finish off the prototypes has some times been an issue.
What I am struggling with is how to turn my messing about with bits of paper and glue into an actual business. I keep thinking of things I should  be doing, like keep a drawn record of all my designs (mostly they come out of my head through my hands and into a physical piece). The further I go down the road of trying to create something the more questions I have;

Do I try to find a shop that will take some pieces or just go online?

If I go online which platform is best for my stuff?

If I go online how will I package and post these things so that they arrive in one piece?

What does this all mean for my tax (I also have a day job)?

I’m going to blog about how this all works out in the next few months, more to keep a record for myself so I can look back and see how far I’ve got a year from now. I’ve just downloaded some books on tax and book keeping, and there is more research to be done, but it feels good to be creating something right now.