I have to confess that I thought today was the first Friday of February, not the last Friday of January. As such I had to scramble to make this post in two days. With nothing made / no crafts in progress that I hadn’t already talked about, this post is looking at personal crafting expectations.
When I say personal crafting expectations I’m referring to expectations I have of myself when it comes to what / how I am crafting. I started knitting due to a personal expectation. It was my junior / senior year of high school and one day I was thinking to myself “I know how to do counted cross stitch but I don’t know how to knit. I should learn.” I think the main thought process was that while I enjoy cross stitch and I love what I make with it, knitting can be more “useful” in terms of what you wear or use. I’m not saying you can’t use counted cross stitch on clothes, but you can’t make clothes out of counted cross stitch. I figured that if I enjoyed one fiber craft I “should” learn another one, and that not being able to knit somehow reflected badly on me.
Thankfully I found out I like knitting, which is why I’m still doing it. Another craft, which I haven’t been able to get comfortable with, is general embroidery. I’ve tried to start doing embroidery multiple times, but often after getting practice on a few stitches I just lose steam. I don’t know what about it just doesn’t jive with me but I never get any projects done. I barely get them started. I think it ties back to my expectations again. While I feel like I should learn embroidery because I know counted cross stitch, I also get frustrated when I’m trying to make an embroidery piece because I feel like I should be better at it than I am. I’ve done counted cross stitch for a decade and a half. I should have the experience to be better at embroidery as well.
But that’s not how it works, is it? I need to learn embroidery because it is different from counted cross stitch – that was the point of wanting to learn it in the first place. If I set up unrealistic expectations for myself then I’m setting myself up for failure and disappointment when I don’t reach them. I think that’s a big difference between crafting expectations and crafting aspirations. Expectations are thing that you think you ought to do, or that you are missing / falling behind if you don’t reach them. They bring with them the burden of feeling like you’ve fallen behind or failed at what you’re doing.
Aspirations are hopes you have of things you want to achieve and are working towards. I think all crafters should have aspirations, be they projects you want to make or skills you want to learn, so that we always have something we can move towards. I also think we should let ourselves off the hook sometimes for our expectations. Sometimes pieces don’t work out, or you mess up the same line in a pattern five times before you figure out where you’re going wrong. That’s okay. Life is a journey and so is crafting, give yourself a break and be kind to yourself.
