Chaos Crafting

So some of you know, my Platonic Murder Wife took up quilting about six months ago.

She started sewing at the start of the pandemic making masks for everyone, including yours truly, and I don’t remember how but moved on to quilting–she even got a new machine for it.

Now, when Dina does something, she goes all out. She researches and watches tutorials. She gets the best quality tools and supplies (she’s a notorious snob, be it tea or yarn or anything in between). She follows patterns to the letter, whether it’s knitting, baking, or, in this case, quilting.

During a group chat a few months ago, she was telling us about this quilter she follows, and how this woman would pull random scraps from a bag and say “I think this’ll work!” and start quilting without measuring and turn it into beautiful things. “Chaos quilting”, Dina calls it.

Chaos is kind of the way I do everything (although whether those things are beautiful remains in doubt).

Knitting? Who needs a pattern! I made handwarmers I still wear to this day by just randomly knitting–I learned how to do a thumb gusset by watching a video and just applied it to my project. I like lacework, so I would knit things just by doing some math and making up a pattern.

Baking? Who needs measuring cups! I just toss everything together until it has the right consistency in most cases.

This is why if you ask me about writing, I sometimes go blank, because I just wrote fifty-something books and somehow learned how to be a storyteller along the way.

If I quilted, I’d be a chaos quilter too.

But I don’t quilt because it’s fucking expensive and takes up a lot of room, and that’s the thing with me and hobbies–I’ll do it for six months to a year and then I abandon it for something else. However…I have wanted something new to do that doesn’t involve looking at a screen.

My eyes and brain get tired and I need a break sometimes, but working with my hands and focusing on a task lets my mind do all kinds of background stuff I need to work out stories. It’s part of the process. So I’ve been pondering what kind of inexpensive hobby I could take on.

I decided on embroidery.

I was excited about this kit, but doing it I got kind of doubtful. See that fabric? It’s thick canvas. It’s hard to get the needle through and my hands were killing me. But I swore I wasn’t going to get any supplies until I’d made at least one thing.

Then I went to the local fabric store today to get some stuff Dina wanted but didn’t have locally, and I asked, “Do you have any embroidery supplies?”

(Note: at this point I learned what I’m doing is “crewel work”. I had no idea when the lady asked me kind of embroidery I was doing, I was like “Uh…back stitch and French knot stitch and stuff like that…?”)

So I got some linen blend fabric to experiment on, some hoops, and some good floss, and I decided to do what I should’ve done to start with: chaos crafting. No pattern. No plan. Just start stitching on fabric to get a feel for it. It’s the only way I really learn.

Tonight I made this.

It is not at all good! It is, in fact, very bad!

But…I learned! It helped make sense of the instructions I read for a couple of different stitches. It gave me a feel for the fabric and how to work with it. I tried a few tricks tutorials suggested. And I think with practice I will be able to make something good eventually (hopefully before I abandon the hobby in six months).

So this is my first official attempt. I will post again when I can do something Actually Good (which may or may not involve me at least drawing something on the fabric–I got a water soluble pencil for that in the future).

It’s all gonna involve swear words it, though.