.png "Crochet projects with flames")
We have now breached a year of 1.5 c of warning for a year, a decade before people thought it would happen. Almost no one is talking about it. Our 80+ year-old president has COVID for the third time. Election season gets more wild by the day. And some stressful things happened at work.
I like machine sewing because I can make useful things. But it doesn't help me channel distress and anxiety. It doesn't prevent me from spending too much time online doom scrolling either. But, I have found one thing that helps me do that. Over the past several months I have taken up a new fiber art, crochet.
Every so often for the past 30 years, I would try to teach myself to crochet and would never progress much further than making a foundation chain. But this time, I just kept working and reworking until I could crochet competently. My biggest challenges have been random increases and decreases. To counter this, I realized I need to regularly count my stitches. I also still have problems following complex directions in patterns, but again I just committed to doing and redoing
I like how rhythmic crochet is - it's rhythmic enough to be soothing. I also find one needle handier to transport and work with in various settings than the two needles of knitting. I have used crochet to make it easier to wait in long lines, deal with delayed flights, get through contentious meetings, pay attention in long training and channel my worry. Now when my kid says, "I bet you were wasting time on Twitter," I can replay, "no I was crocheting."
Doom crochet makes everything a little less painful while the world burns.
Here is a set of tutorials I like:
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Here are the links to the patterns I used to make the items pictured above: