It's a Hoolia Wheel! Crochet and Creativity

I've had a bit of monkey mind lately (just what it sounds like, but here's a link), probably induced by cabin fever. Whenever monkey mind strikes, I feel the need to experiment a little, with no particular goal in mind. Sometimes I am able to do this with knitting (and that 's a great thing), but my knitting is pretty structured, so in the last year or so I've turned to crafts that are newer to me to blow off a little creative steam. These are things I'm not nearly as systematic about - spinning, cross stitch, crochet - and so I feel a lot freer to just do without any planning ahead, and see what happens.

The Hoolia Wheel.I am very inexperienced in crochet. Whenever I have Miss Marnie around for a few days I can make what would seem to be great progress, but as soon as I am without a guide, I tend to get lost. I have a hard time remembering how many times to wrap what and how to get from one spot in a motif to another elegantly. I have an easy enough time understanding the charts in Japanese craft books, but I'm not sure exactly where to start and there are techniques and conventions that I just don't "get" yet. I cannot read "written out" crochet patterns to save my life!

Yesterday, inspired by this beautiful washcloth, I decided that I would attempt yet another crochet motif. The only motif that I have ever completed without getting lost halfway through is the granny square. An accomplishment? Yes! Cute? Yes! But I kinda need to move on from there. So I looked through my crochet stitch dictionary and found several "intermediate" motifs that I liked. (Apparently there is no such thing as a "beginner" motif - even the granny square is "intermediate". Seems unfair.) The problem was that all the directions were written out, and I could not for the life of me figure out what to do once I got to the second round of anything. So, back to square one. I decided that since there were illustrations of the single crochet, half-double crochet, double crochet and triple crochet, I would work through those systematically, and learn to use them in rows and rounds. I did that, and I think I understand the stitches better, though to be honest, I have to go back and re-read how many times to wrap the yarn around the needle, etc. again before making a particular stitch to remind myself that I do know how to do it.

I got bored with these exercises, and I really, really wanted to make a motif. Reading the written out directions I just could not get it, though. So I decided that I would just make one up instead. I know the stitches (or can look them up! Einstein said that you should never bother to memorize anything you can look up...), I can work in rounds, and I understand the basic principles of increasing from knitting. I can do this, right?

I did! Voila! The Hoolia Wheel! Can I just say that I love it? Now, I know that I have surely just re-invented the wheel (pun intended) because what I did was so simple that I am sure someone (and perhaps many someones?) have crocheted it before. But. It's new to me, I did not learn it from a book, and so somehow it is more mine than many other complicated things I've done. It's just freaking glorious.

Okay, so here's the creativity part of the title. I had a boyfriend right after college who was wonderful at drawing. He did a self-portrait that I will never forget, both because it was so well-rendered and so introspective - he was really able to capture an aspect of himself that would be identifiable to anyone who knew him. But he would never call himself an artist. Only a draftsman. He explained that a draftsman was someone who was trained in the technical execution of drawing, but that an artist was someone who created organically without having to know the rules, working from within himself rather than from within the context of "art." I question whether he was right about himself, but I think there was a lot in the definition that he gave me.

Again. 'Cause I like it.Almost every knitting friend whose designs I admire has told me that she started designing because she found it to be too much trouble to work from a pattern. I realize that in my early knitting days this was the case for me, too, because although I did have access to Vogue Knitting, for the most part there weren't a wide array of commercial designs that appealed to my 20-something sensibilities. I heavily modified a lot of things - a Filatura di Crosa tank became a mini-dress! - and designed some of the more complicated pieces I've done. Not because I was trying to design (I certainly was not resizing!), but because it was really the only way to make things I liked. They had to come from my head. I wasn't limited in the techniques I used, because I didn't have a knitting community to help me gauge what was difficult. I just had June Hemmons Hiatt as a guide, and well, she did everything.

After a few years, I discovered Rowan Magazine, and I fell in love with patterns. I found more and more designers I really loved in Vogue soon after that (can we say Norah Gaughan?), and by the time Melanie Fallick's Knitting in America was released I was a goner. I was such a pattern junkie (still am!), and I gained a lot from that transition, but I lost something, too. Somehow having so much available to me caused me to stop creating things myself. There were good aspects to this - I could learn a lot by following someone else's footsteps and enjoy a way of thinking other than my own. But the more I learned, the more "rules" my structured little mind created. I became more proficient over time (and to toot my own horn I think I became a very good knitting teacher), but I also really boxed myself in. "Designing" and "knitting" became separate things.

My design "technique" now mostly comprises piecing together known elements in new ways. There is nothing wrong with this, and I think it can be helpful to think of design in this way, because for many of us, this is exactly what it is. You see a neckline that you like and think, "Now how could I incorporate that into something lacy and delicate?" and you play around and find a way to mesh things that you'd like to see together. There is creativity there, but for me it's much more at the "draftsman" (craftswoman?) level of creativity - nicely done technical execution with the "flair" originating in the combination of elements.

When I think of artistry, I think of designers like Mary Walker Phillips, Norah Gaughan, Teva Durham, Annie Modesitt, and Debbie New. You may not love, or even like, everything that these women create, but their designs often reach heights that other beautifully rendered but contextualized, structured pieces will never attain. There is something undeniably special about them. These are not the workhorses of your closet that will get everyday use - they are the statement pieces that uniquely define us.

I think that the artistry of these designers comes from transcending the rules of knitting and looking beyond the techniques that are known and on into those places in their own minds which still just contain possibility. For my own little mind, the easiest way to do this is to not know the rules. Structure is so much a part of how I learn that if I have it in place, it is nearly impossible to leave behind. I have to push myself to mess around and do "creativity exercises" if I want to come anywhere close to pushing an envelope. I work to be artistic, and often that takes so much work (almost always, actually) that I revert to being a sound craftswoman - it's my natural mode. Now again, I am not poo-pooing myself or saying that I don't enjoy that kind of creativity, because quite honestly I do, and if I never engaged in it there would be fewer of those great staples in my closet that I rely on. But. There is a real thrill when you do something that is totally out of the blue - really just out of your head - and look at it and think "That is good."

Making the Hoolia Wheel was that way for me. A small thing, really - just a motif - but at the same time a personal revelation. Because of this, I've decided to do two things: First, push myself to do a few more of those "creativity exercises" in knitting, and second, go about crochet an entirely different way. I am not going to seek out the rules, read patterns ravenously, or study it up in the way that I do with everything else. I'm just going to do it and see what happens. It will probably kill me - wish me luck!