tenleys

[tenleys]

Start Here

In my childhood bedroom, tucked away on the top shelf of the closet, sit two tubs of knit and crochet swatches. Somewhere, a skinny blue-green strip is smooshed next to a vibrant variegated hat created by folding a rectangle together, tiny crochet doll coats, and fuzzy squares of fabric created with novelty yarn. This strip, all of 4 inches, was the start of my knitting career. 

 The contents of that jam packed box are all a part of my knitting and crochet beginnings. They mark the phase where I explored texture by using fluffy, muppet-like yarn, the phase where I explored creating doll clothes, and then moved on to creating my own toys, fuzzy rectangular monsters with felt teeth and embroidered eyes. In the beginning, I created rectangles. I moved on to shape, gradually learning to increase and decrease, expanding the scope to curved pieces and hats that went beyond the rectangle folded in half. The boxes hold evidence of my early forays into cables, honeycomb stitch, and eyelet lace.

The early projects are crammed in a box because they no longer have immediate use. I don’t need a bright turquoise doll coat with faux-fur trim in my dorm room, but it stays in my possession as a reminder. I went through a phase where I treated these boxes as the skeleton in my closet, embarrassing attempts at something that I was far better at now. I scorned the fluffy yarns, the synthetic fiber, and the hats so large, no one could wear them. Now that I knew better, I reasoned, the rectangle-based curriculum of the early years was something to avoid.

And so I knitted on, growing in skill until I forgot what it was like to begin, laughing at that beginner self. But eventually, I came around. I’d pull out the boxes every so often and remember my intentions for the swatches, the blanket I’d wanted to start, the joy I found in that ridiculous variegated blue-green-yellow rectangle hat. Instead of seeing the mistakes, I recalled the excitement of doing a new thing. Even though I moved on to learn two color stranded knitting, rather than how to hold one strand of yarn with two needles, I began to appreciate the younger me that made mistakes and ugly things with oblivion, excited, rather than ashamed, of the puffy scarves and endless, endless rectangles. I used to blithely knit with whatever crunchy acrylic yarn that I could find, rather than worry about using something more prestigious, like 100% wool.

Now, even further removed from my periods of beginning, rejecting old work, and then appreciating it more, I see that creating anything requires a start, and sometimes a willfully bad one. Or at least, a bit of embracing the act of putting on blinders to perfection. I am older and more self conscious now, and rather than laugh at little, eager me, I admire that trial and error. I had no fear, I didn’t see any difference in what I was knitting with my burgundy acrylic with what the authors of knitting books were creating with silk and mohair. I have realized that recently, my creative output has been stifled, and a lot of that has to do with fear of beginning. I want to share my artwork with others, and I want to try new artistic mediums. A couple of takeaways from my early start with knitting stand out:

1.Get unstuck from the need for perfection. If I wait until my work is perfect to share it, I will wait forever.

2.Firsts will look (or sound) like firsts. There will be mistakes, there will be established conventions that I break because I either don’t know about them, or don’t think they apply.

3. Be excited. I don’t need to downplay how thrilled I am with a project. Just because my first quilt doesn’t look like someone’s 43rd quilt doesn’t mean my work is less valuable.

4. Be nice to yourself. This means no going back and laughing at first blog posts, first paintings, or first projects. It can mean admiring how much I’ve grown, though.

5. Try weird stuff. The whole “Do things like nobody's watching” phrase is so overused, and I have conflicting feelings. It is fun to have people watch sometimes, it’s motivating and gives me a sense of accountability. But when the audience becomes more important than the actual making, the making suffers from repetitiveness. So throw the weird beginnings out into the world alongside the polished work.

6. Don’t apologize for trying. The things I make and the thoughts I share are valid. There is a difference between being critical of my work so that I can improve it, and being critical of my work so that I can beat others to the punch. Rejection of my favorite painting might feel easier if I throw the first jab (“I messed up the left leaning stripes and hate these colors”), but if I am making critical remarks to my audience, they will be more prone to pick out things they don’t like, leading to a critique session that I really don’t need.

7. You are not aspiring. The term “aspiring artist” bothers me. If I make art, I’m an artist. If I used to make things, but don’t anymore, maybe I’m a “hibernating artist”. Aspiring connotes that I must reach some pinnacle to be a real artist. I don’t. If I make art, I am a real live artist.

8. Do what you want right now. As I learned to knit, nothing was too scary or too hard. If I wanted to learn to cable, I tried it. If I really wanted a pair of mittens, I learned how. The same “go for it!” attitude applies now. I want to start a blog, so here it is! Waiting until I’ve learned everything that goes into a perfect blog will just scare me away from ever starting. If I had delayed learning to knit because I didn’t have the ideal supplies or chair or anything, I would never have the huge output that grew from trying.

9. The goal is progress, but you don’t need to know what the progress is for. Did I know that someday I would knit a pair of mittens that would be the most coveted item at a White Elephant gift swap? No, of course not! I just got better at the process, and my work went from fingerless gloves that only a mother could love, to mittens that everyone and their mother wished they owned.

10. Opportunities pop up that coincide with (and sometimes challenge) your skill level. I don’t need to prepare myself for creating huge wholesale orders, because my making isn’t at that level right now. I can afford to let things happen organically, and this is a time where I get to set all the rules. If I move to work on creating profit with my art, having a base of work that I loved creating is a whole lot stronger than having a wishy-washy base of “well, I was trying to please you” type work. (Though having a specific target in mind can be helpful at some points, that is not my goal with my personal website and artwork).

[tenleys]

Flood Falls

Woodblock Print

Spring 2016

Edition of 2