I've finally decided to start blogging after considering it for weeks because I'm in this weird limbo where I don't feel like making anything because I've made too much over the past two days. This strange limbo feeling would make a stellar blog topic, so here we are!
I've been planning a craft-bag for a while now and this is the project I picked up on this Heritage weekend in South Africa. There are many commercial craft-bags out there but they all have one common issue: whoever designed them didn't keep a real creator in mind in my opinion. Sometimes there will be slots for crochet hooks or knitting needles, but then they're on a spot that is too short for them, and it's not like they can exactly bend. Sometimes they have holes for feeding yarn through, but these holes are usually in the form of a grommet, which essentially means your project will be physically attached to the bag until you either run out of all the colours yarn in it simultaneously, or you decide to cut the yarn wherever you are. There is usually lots of space inside, but no space to safely store scissors without them poking through the bag over time. And so the list goes on and on.
But! The best way to solve all of these issues is to design one for myself, with flexibility in mind and with different options that can be mixed and matched for different creatives' needs! I was terribly excited to prototype such a bag this weekend and managed to pull it off, but now I feel so tired of thinking.
This is something that few creatives talk about in the craft world - in writing you have writers block and in art you have art block but I rarely hear of people having yarn block (or whatever your weapon of choice is). I think in part it's because in the craft world, if you feel too tired or blocked to create something brand new, in other words come up with your own pattern, you can always carry on creating stuff with the thinking already done for you by using other creatives' patterns. We all have these projects and we all have multiple projects going at the same time too - so it's easy to just switch until your brain has taken the break it needs before carrying on with your current project causing you creative fatigue. Very rarely are we in a situation where I am now, where all my projects are either from scratch projects, or very complex patterns by other people.
But I do think switching gears for even a bit - like typing up a blog post - refreshes one quite a bit.
For accountability's sake - I will not be working further on the craft bag this weekend, but I will apply the tweaks I want to it next weekend before creating the final pattern and letting that fly into the world.
