The needle moves. The hook pulls through. The shuttle passes. Needle, hook, shuttle. Again.

Most fiber artists have had the experience of arriving at the work in one state and leaving it in another. The body that sat down taut has released. The mind that arrived tangled has quieted. The hour that felt impossible before the first stitch felt entirely different by the last one.

What is happening is physiological, and it is more layered than most accounts of craft and wellness name. Let’s name it.

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Billie Zangewa did not plan to become a textile artist. Her degree was in printmaking. When she returned to Botswana after art school, she had no access to printmaking facilities. A friend had given her some silk from her grandmother’s trunk. That is how it started.

She says she was enticed by the silk, that she wanted to discover its secrets. What she found, working with it over the years that followed, was a medium that turned out to fit exactly what she needed to say.

I related to this as soon as I discovered it, at a Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) exhibit I reviewed for Sartle several years back.

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What would it mean to make your own daily life the subject of your fiber practice? The actual texture of your days, the room you are in right now, the light from that window, what is on the table this morning, what your hands feel like today?

Most fiber artists have spent years learning to follow other people’s patterns, execute other people’s visions, work toward finished objects whose design came from somewhere outside themselves. There is real skill in that and real satisfaction. And at some point, for many makers, something shifts. The question stops being what should I make and starts being what do I actually want to say?

Stitching as witness is one answer to that question. It turns the attention fiber arts already demands, the slow, present, stitch-by-stitch quality of focus that makes hand work different from almost everything else in modern life, toward your own life as subject matter. The ordinary moments. The domestic interior. The scenes that would vanish without record because no one has taught us to treat them as worth keeping.

This post is about how to do that, and why it matters more than it might first appear.

Below the paywall: the full framework for stitching as witness, the wellbeing research behind it, how to begin, and what the practice looks like across different fiber disciplines.

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When people hear the term slow stitching, they often picture delicate hand-sewn stitches, needle and thread moving methodically through fabric, and a quiet, meditative creative process. But does that mean machine sewing can’t be a form of slow stitching?

Absolutely not. Slow stitching is a mindset, not a method. While it may look slightly different when using a sewing machine, you can absolutely practice slow stitching with your machine … cultivating mindfulness, creativity, and presence with every seam.

This guide will explore what slow stitching means, how it translates to machine sewing, and how you can incorporate this intentional practice into your own creative work.

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I originally wrote this piece as an exhibit review for Sartle in early 2020 when I attended the Rosie Lee Tompkins retrospective at BAMPFA, just before the pandemic closed the museum. I am republishing it now to further share Tompkins work.

And also because it ties in to the article I recently shared on fiber arts as spiritual practice. Everything the other article explores in the abstract (the meditative function of repetitive making, the practice of sitting with a specific person in mind, the way intention changes what a session holds) Tompkins lived concretely, in her Richmond home, across five hundred quilts made over three decades.

That felt like the right reason to bring this review back to a new audience. I hope you enjoy.

Walking through the Rosie Lee Tompkins exhibit that just opened up at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, one phrase kept reverberating through my mind: “an ordinary mystic.” There is a spiritual element to this artist’s quilt work that goes beyond her frequent incorporation of bible verse references stitched onto fabric and weaves its way through every subtle connection made in each joined-together piece of colorful texture. You can sense it in just one of the quilts, but when you view the 65+ quilts hung together on the wall in one sitting, it permeates your awareness in a deeply profound way. The artist combines her own diverse cultural background with the influence of the upcycled/repurposed culture of Bay Area arts scene to create a set of brightly-colored, vivid, and vibrant quilts that emanate their own energy.

Tompkins applies her Christian background in the irregularly embroidered numbers and letters cascading across the surface of many of her quilts. Rosie Lee Tompkins would sit down to a quilt, with both a theme and a specific human in mind, and she would meditatively and mindfully stitch together the varied pieces of fabric into something more than the sum of their parts; it was a spiritual practice. She would take the fabrics that others in the Bay Area were giving away or throwing out, find a theme within them, and bring new life to them through her creations. Her work was spiritual, meditative, and intentional. Tompkins’ work evokes a sense of everyday spirituality; it is also materially beautiful and certainly doesn’t require a religious interpretation if you yourself aren’t comfortable with or interested in one.

Tompkins’ quilts caught the eye of Bay Area psychologist and art collector Eli Leon who had an ardent passion for African American quilts. When he passed away in 2018, he willed his entire collection, consisting of more than 3,000 quilts, to BAMPFA. It was a surprise to the museum but one that opened up a grand opportunity to delve deep into this niche of art. Of those 3,000 quilts, approximately 500 were created by Rosie Lee Tompkins. The museum curators knew that sharing the work with the public might best begin by introducing us all to her body of work. Although there are references to Leon in the collection, the curators intentionally made Rosie and her creations the star of this exhibit.

Exhibit co-curator Elaine Yau has been delving deep into a socio-cultural, historical perspective on the artist’s work. Until relatively recently, the art world looked at Tompkins solely from a formal perspective. This was due in large part to the fact that Tompkins wanted to keep her life private. In fact, Rosie Lee Tompkins is actually a chosen pseudonym for the artist born Effie Mae Howard. Notably, although she was called Rosie throughout her artistic life, she has embroidered her original name, Effie, on to the borders and faces of many of the quilts that you’ll see in the exhibit. Nevertheless, she refrained from engaging extensively with the art world. This is not to suggest that her work hasn’t been seen before. Co-curator Larry Rinder remembers first coming across her work in 1996 at a Richmond Art Center exhibit by Eli Leon, an experience which moved him so much that Rinder went on to help launch her first solo exhibit at BAMPFA. However, it is only since Tompkins’ death in 2006 that the art world has been looking, as Yau has, at the way the artist fits into the narrative landscape within which her work was created.

Yau emphasizes that we have to consider Tompkins’ work in light of The Great Migration as well as her experiences in the Bay Area as an adult. Effie Mae Howard was born in Arkansas in 1936, a child of The Great Depression and World War II. She learned quilting as a child, taught by her mother, passed down from a lineage of African-American women living in the South. She left the region in hopes of better opportunities, ending up in the San Francisco Bay Area by way of Chicago then Milwaukee. Once she arrived here, she was influenced by the late 1970s urban arts scene. In particular, there was a culture of re-use (or what we would now term upcycling). She would head to Thrift Town and Value Village and the many flea markets throughout the Bay Area, collecting fabrics and notions as she went along. She stitched together her own identity as an artist, joining her mother’s visual and tactile quilting lessons with her new Bay Area experiences and inspirations, and the result is a body of work that shows both consistency and growth over time.

There are a couple of quilts in the exhibit that date to the 1970s but most of them were created in the two decades starting in the early 1980s and leading nearly up to her death. The first two quilts that you’ll see as you enter the exhibit are early pieces that instantly tell you a lot about what you’re going to find as you venture along. Both pieces are large quilts that at first glance look chaotic. They each incorporate a range of different fabrics as well as utilization of a variety of techniques drawn not only from quilting but also including embroidery and other handcrafts. Tompkins’ pushed the boundaries of what a “quilt” could be. Once you realize that there is a theme, you can see that Tompkins set parameters for herself, but then allowed herself to go wild within those parameters, and it is this exact combination of restraint and fluid creation that makes her work so uniquely hers.

The first room offers just a taste of what is to come. We see Tompkins’ creativity flourish as we enter the second room, which is themed around assemblage and applique work. In this room, we see Tompkins’ take on a classic “crazy quilt.” Seeing several pieces hung together, it becomes obvious that the artist has a broad vocabulary for quilting, and she continues to put her own spin on traditional techniques. Some pieces are dense and almost cluttered, but she never loses track of her sense for composition and shows exquisite skill in her variation of it from piece to piece.

Make sure that you take the time when you are in the applique room to turn your attention away from the quilts for a moment and towards the case in the center of the room where half a dozen “jewelry Christmas trees” are showcased. These were found in a closet of her home, perhaps originally intended for her eyes only, but they are jewels that glitter so bright that it would have been a shame to keep them stuck in a closet. Tompkins had a love for glitter, sparkle, ribbon, sequins, and all things a little bit extra. She combines them densely on these sculptural forms, creating a three-dimensional version of her quilt style.

The next room of the exhibit can’t be missed - you couldn’t fail to notice it - because of the three bright yellow/orange/purple pieces that stand out in the corner. The curators have called this room “Personal Symbolism,” and it is the best representation in the exhibit of how Tompkins combined her traditional Christian beliefs with her personal lived experience as well as other elements of transcendental, mystical spirituality. These pieces are called The Three Sixes. They loosely represent three people in her family who all had birthdays with the number six in them. The first is her own birthday: 9/6/36 which seems to have taken on a magical quality for her. She stitches it frequently into the surface of her quilts, sometimes written out directly and sometimes written backwards. The second color and number in the Three Sixes represents her grandfather, a family member she grew up with. The third represents a number of different people - a great uncle, a cousin, a brother. In any case, there is a magical quality to the numbers that Tompkins draws from. However, co-curator Yau points out that sometimes the artist took liberties with her math. For example, there’s a piece that’s a “Thirty-six Nine-patch quilt.” The nine-patch is a traditional quilting technique. Tompkins’ often puts her own twist on classic techniques and this is no exception. In this case, she’s worked the numbers of her birth date in to create a set of 36 9-patches, except that as Yau points out, there are strictly only 33, and you have to count certain yarn ties to get to the “correct” or intended 36. Nevertheless, the gist is there, the cohesion between all of the pieces in the series is undeniable, and there is something a bit mystical about the number play at work here.

When we head to the next room, we see a visible shift in the artist’s work. The pieces collected here represent her cultural concerns. Mostly created in the late 1990s, Tompkins has composed quilts with specific themes in mind, although it’s not always easy to guess exactly what she was trying to say. For example, there is a piece with a big image of OJ Simpson right at the top. The piece includes other prominent Pan-African leaders and celebrities. There is clear thematic cohesion and yet it raises questions as to what precisely she was trying to say. Although this is a political piece, it is also highly personal. Her name, Effie, is stitched not only on the border but also on a cross that says “Michael + Effie + Love” (likely referring to the nearby image of Michael Jordan). And this is where all of her life’s work seems to coalesce, as she combines a deep mindful meditation with both personal and socio-political issues.

Another quilt in this section prominently features an image of the Kennedy brothers with Martin Luther King Jr.. It is surrounded by several different versions of the American flag, positioned both vertically and horizontally. Within this, though, the thematic stripes of the flag are repeated in other fabrics including an Indian-inspired batik and a Mexican stripe drawn pulled from serape fabric. There are pastoral scenes here that seem almost colonial with a Latin American reference in a piece of fabric showing flamenco dancers. The statements here are bold and striking.

In her latest years, Tompkins’ work became more overtly religious. The final room consists of many pieces incorporating crosses and other religious symbolism. Then there are two striking pieces at the very end that bring a sense of closure to the entire show. The penultimate piece is a non-quilted single-piece embroidered green-on-green that combines her personal details (including her name and address) with Christian scripture verses as well as a quote that “love is like an ice cream cone; it gets better with every lick.” The last is a black-on-black embroidered quilt that is slightly reminiscent of a funeral gown. Compared to the bright colors, textures, and pictorial narratives of the other rooms, this is understated and yet astoundingly powerful. We see the artist come full circle as we circle through the rooms of this exhibit.

Enjoy a virtual tour:

Other reviews of this exhibit:

“Tompkins sought out materials with a careful attention to their qualities and meanings, correlating colors and numbers with personal and religious experiences, and yet there is an urgency to her pieced designs that cuts against the premeditated rhythms and visual efficiencies of many traditional American quilt patterns.” - Kate Burnett Budzyn, The Decorative Arts Trust

“The previous day, the Grand Princess cruise ship had pulled into the Port of Oakland carrying thousands of passengers exposed to the novel coronavirus; I walked through the museum in suspense, my thinking fragmented by constant notifications about the future. Yet Tompkins’s quilts pulled me into the present: I was mesmerized by the nearly seventy works on display, which revealed her fascination with color, the consistency of her inconsistency, and her use of fabrics that carried with them generational shorthands depending on pattern, texture, and material.” - Amelia Lang, e-flux

“This extraordinary exhibition features not only many of Tompkins’ remarkable and imaginative oversized quilts, but also pieced tops, embroideries, assemblages and decorated objects. Tompkins often used other quilters to sew her patterned top quilts to their backings, and those artists are given credit in the show, as “Quilted by …”" - Emily S. Mendel, Berkeleyside

“In her early works, Tompkins used a broad range of colors and fabrics. Some are restricted to a limited palette; others revel in their variety of texture and pattern. They are often arranged in a seemingly random way, but create a dynamic, vibrant effect. The individual pieces she used in her quilts are hand-cut and not uniform, but the work as a whole has a dynamism and visual completeness that incorporates its disparate parts.” - Hilda Scheib, Bay City News

Related on Substack:

Object

Reflecting on quilts, identity, and ancestral work

Quilt by my great-grandmother, possibly made with the help of my grandmother and friends. c. 1986…

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3 years ago · 9 likes · Ferren Gipson

LOST ART

Rosie Lee Tompkins, God, anonymity & alchemy

Since January 2021, I have written forty-three essays for LOST ART. That’s four years, two zines, one audio episode, 110,069 words…

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2 years ago · Sarah McColl

You have probably already noticed it. The way a crochet session that begins in a knotted, agitated place tends to end somewhere quieter. The way you can sit down to embroider while a conversation loops in your head and find, forty-five minutes later, that the loop has loosened. The way knitting pulls you somewhere that is difficult to name: present but unhurried, your hands knowing what to do while the rest of you settles.

You may have chalked this up to distraction. To keeping your hands busy. To having something to look at that isn’t a screen.

But it’s possibly deeper than that. What you are doing when you stitch, hook, or quilt with any kind of regularity is a form of meditation. For many makers, across centuries, across cultures, across wildly different relationships to faith and practice, it has always been a form of spiritual practice too.

This piece is for the makers who have sensed this and have lacked the language for it. And for those who have never thought of their crochet or their embroidery in those terms at all, but who are curious.

What Spiritual Practice Means Here

Before going further, let’s sit with the phrase “spiritual practice” because it may carry a lot of weight. For some readers, it calls up formal religious observance. For others, it suggests incense and intention-setting, which may or may not resonate. And for others still, it might feel like language that belongs to someone else’s life.

I want to use it in the broadest possible sense in this discussion today: any practice that connects you to something larger than the immediate demands of your day. Any practice that creates a quality of presence and meaning that ordinary activity rarely offers. Any practice that leaves you feeling more yourself rather than less. This includes religious practice but requires none of it. It includes formal meditation but extends well beyond it.

By this definition, your fiber arts practice may already qualify, and if it does, it probably has for longer than you have been giving it credit for.

What Happens in the Body When You Stitch

The physiologist Herbert Benson spent decades studying what he called the relaxation response: a measurable shift in the body’s physiology that is the direct opposite of the stress response. Where the stress response raises cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure, the relaxation response lowers all three. Where stress activates the body for threat, the relaxation response tells the nervous system that the threat has passed.

Benson found that the relaxation response can be triggered by any repetitive activity that occupies the mind without demanding problem-solving. The key is two things working together: a focus point (a stitch, a count, a repeated pattern) and a relaxed, receptive attitude toward whatever thoughts arise. Repetitive activities that meet these conditions, including knitting, crochet, hand embroidery, and quilting, reliably activate the parasympathetic nervous system, bringing the body into a state of calm alertness rather than anxious vigilance.

The bilateral component of many fiber arts adds another layer. Crochet and knitting involve both hands working in coordinated rhythm, which engages both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously in a way that differs from most everyday tasks. This bilateral engagement has been linked to states of internal coherence: the sense that the body and mind are working in the same direction, rather than in opposition. It is a neurological description of something many experienced makers know from the inside: the feeling that you are, for once, all the way here.

Research on absorbed attention in skilled activity adds another dimension. When a maker is deep in a project, a pattern that requires full concentration, a sequence that cannot be set aside, she enters a state that researchers describe as absent self-consciousness. The normal background noise of self-monitoring quiets, the sense of time passing loosens, and the attention rests cleanly on the work. This state is an active one, a form of intense, pleasurable presence that has real effects on mood, anxiety, and the immune system.

This is the physiology of what quilters, embroiderers, and weavers have known in their hands for a very long time. The body catches up with the tradition.

Reciprocity and the Materials

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. In that book, she articulates a way of understanding our relationship to natural materials that I have found deeply applicable to fiber arts.

Kimmerer’s central argument is about reciprocity: the idea that when humans engage with the living world with care and attention, something is exchanged. She writes about sweetgrass braiding specifically, the way the plant flourishes when it is harvested thoughtfully and with gratitude, the way the practice of braiding is itself a form of relationship. In the Potawatomi tradition, and in many Indigenous traditions, working with natural materials is a conversation. The plant or fiber offers what it has. The maker offers back attention, skill, and care. A gift calls for a gift in return.

Many fiber arts traditions use natural materials: wool from sheep, cotton from the bolls of the cotton plant, linen from flax, silk from silkworms, alpaca, angora, hemp. Even makers who primarily work with acrylic or polyester often reach for natural fibers for projects that carry particular weight. There is something many makers already know about the feel of natural fiber in the hands: something warmer, more responsive, more alive than synthetic alternatives.

Kimmerer might say this is because the material carries something from the living being it came from. When you handle wool with attention, you are in relationship with something that grew. When you stitch with cotton thread, you are using a plant that was planted, grew toward the sun, was harvested. These materials have a history. They have traveled to your hands from somewhere.

To receive that travel with attention, to handle the material carefully, to understand its qualities, to make something that honors what the fiber offers, is to participate in reciprocity. It is to enter a kind of conversation with the material world that sits at the root of many spiritual traditions.

This requires no particular belief. It requires only slowing down enough to notice what is in your hands.

The Long Tradition: Fiber Arts as Prayer and Practice

Across cultures and across time, fiber arts and handcrafts have been understood as spiritual practice long before anyone called them that.

Tibetan Buddhist monks create elaborate sand mandalas over days or weeks of concentrated effort, then destroy them upon completion: the destruction as essential as the making, an embodiment of impermanence. Prayer beads across Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions use the repetition of touch to anchor the mind in devotional practice. Medieval tapestry weavers in European convents understood their work as a form of prayer that simply happened to take textile form. The weaving traditions of many Indigenous cultures are inseparable from ceremony, from the honoring of ancestors, from the maintenance of the relationship between the human world and the natural world.

In African American history specifically, fiber arts have carried this spiritual weight in particularly documented ways. Quilting has functioned as prayer, as memorial, as witness, as the medium through which love and grief and hope were passed from hand to hand and generation to generation. Toni Morrison, in Beloved and throughout her literary projects, honored the way Black women’s domestic creative labor has always been something more than craft. The women in her novels, and in the history she drew on, made things as acts of love, as acts of resistance, as acts of spiritual maintenance. The quilt, the stitching, the textile made in the hours between other work: these were never merely useful. They carried meaning that formal art world categories were never quite wide enough to hold.

Rosie Lee Tompkins made her quilts explicitly as prayers. She sat down to each one with a particular person in mind, with a spiritual intention, stitching Bible verse and found imagery and her own name through pieces of velvet and faux fur collected from Bay Area flea markets. This is exactly the tradition, ancient, wide, and continuing, that your own fiber practice sits within, whether you know it or not.

What Changes When You Treat Your Practice as Spiritual

The research on the relaxation response and absorbed attention describes what happens physiologically during an ordinary fiber arts session. What happens when you bring intention to that session is something additional.

Intention, in this context, requires no complex ritual. It means pausing before you begin. It means taking a moment to name, even silently, what you are bringing to the work. It means making a choice about the quality of attention you want to offer this session, rather than falling into it by accident.

Makers who work with this kind of intention often report that the experience of the session changes, even when the physical activity is identical. The work feels more purposeful. The calm that arrives feels less like a side effect and more like something they have participated in creating. The object that results carries something of the attention that made it.

This is what Kimmerer means by reciprocity. The gift calls for a gift in return. When you arrive at your making with care and presence, the making gives back something proportional to what you brought.

Making for Someone

One dimension of Rosie Lee Tompkins’ practice deserves particular attention because any maker can adopt it. She sat down to quilt for someone. Many of her quilts were made with a particular family member or friend in mind: they can be understood, as one exhibition account puts it, as prayers on their behalf.

This practice of making with a person in mind is one of the oldest in fiber arts traditions. The prayer shawl movement in contemporary churches operates on exactly this principle: a garment made for someone who is grieving, or ill, or facing something hard, with that person in mind throughout the making. The maker’s attention travels with the object.

A formal context is optional. Before you begin, decide who this session is for. It might be someone who needs comfort. It might be someone you are grateful for. It might be someone you have been worried about and cannot reach. The making becomes a form of attention directed outward, a way of caring for someone when other forms of care feel insufficient.

Many makers who try this report that the session feels different from the start. The work matters more immediately. The calm that arrives is accompanied by a sense of connection, of doing something that extends beyond the object.

On Silence

Most contemporary making happens with something playing in the background: a podcast, a show, an audiobook, music. These are fine choices. They make the hours pass pleasantly and often accompany some of the finest work makers produce.

And there is also something distinct about making in silence, or in what Quakers call expectant waiting, and what meditators call open awareness: a receptive, alert quiet that differs from the absence of thought. It is a different relationship to thought.

When you make in silence, the sounds of the work come forward. The soft pull of yarn through your hands. The rhythm of the hook or the needles. The sound of thread being drawn through fabric. These sounds, inaudible over audio, are the sounds of your practice. They are the sounds of the repetition that is doing its quiet neurological work on your nervous system.

Making in silence for a single session, even briefly, gives you a chance to experience the practice on its own terms rather than as a backdrop to something else. Some makers find it uncomfortable at first. Most find that the discomfort passes and what remains is a quality of presence they had not known was available.

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How Craft Fits Into the Slow Living Movement

The first version of this article on slow crafting originally appeared on the PsychCentral blog Crafting to Heal which I wrote in 2019. I’ve been very intrigued lately by looking back at my work over the years and finding threads and common themes, often things I’d forgotten about. For example, my…

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2 years ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Kathryn Vercillo

From Other Writers:

Raechel Henderson

Plarn: Its Crafting and Magical Uses

In my book, Sew Witchy, I’ve written on magical correspondences of various fabrics. My focus there was on natural fibers (cotton, linen, wool and silk). Not all crafters and sewists limit themselves to natural materials, though. In fact I’d hazard a guess that very few do. One could, I suppose, use only silk or cotton thread, eschew plastic buttons for …

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The School of Wonder with Andrea Scher

Let's keep making beautiful things.

I’ve been leaning into art-making more than ever these days—heading to my studio nearly every day to push paint around and create wall hangings from yarn. But it’s not just the making itself that’s nourishing. Having a place to land during the day, away from my computer, and getting to commune with my studio mates has been deeply restorative, too…

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2 years ago · 295 likes · 69 comments · Anne Helen Petersen

A few days ago I had the honor of speaking at The Power of Positive Crochet Summit, and it was such a terrific experience. The crochet community is so supportive and creative and wise. Not that I didn’t already know this but having the chance to be immersed in it again in such a terrific space was really inspiring.

This wasn’t just about stitches; it was a 4-day journey into using crochet as a tool for grounding, resilience, and emotional well-being.

And it doesn’t have to end yet!

For about another week, you still have the opportunity to get the VIP Power Pack. It includes my 27 page booklet of 10 exercises for Using Crochet During Difficult Times.

And it includes so much more! Get it now before it goes away!

Get The VIP Power Pack

It includes …

… that’s my talk at the bottom here, 2 pm PDT 4/17 … and there will be more talks throughout the weekend. Lots of good resources here!

Sign up free

Something interesting happens when, as a crocheter, you frog with intention rather than frustration.

Most crocheters know the frustration frog well. The stitches went wrong, the count is off, the row doesn’t look right, and you rip it back with something between irritation and defeat. It tends to come with a particular quality of internal commentary, the kind that says something about you rather than just about the work.

Frogging on purpose is a different experience entirely. You rip out stitches not because something went wrong but because you choose to. Because you need somewhere to put what’s in your body right now. Because you need to feel something move.

The two feel completely different from the inside, and understanding why that’s true is the thing I want to talk about.

What the body is doing when you rip out crochet stitches

When you frog in frustration, you’re acting from an activated state that already has a story attached to it. Your nervous system is registering failure, and the ripping confirms it. Even the brief satisfaction of undoing a mistake is satisfaction in the key of defeat.

When you frog with intention, you’re directing activation rather than reacting to it. Fear and anxiety generate physical energy that needs somewhere to go. They’re states that evolved to mobilize the body, and when the thing you’re afraid of can’t be outrun or confronted directly, that mobilization has nowhere to discharge. It sits. It circles. It finds the future and camps there.

Physical action on something real and external moves that energy through the body differently. Research in somatic therapy describes the importance of completing stress cycles, the idea that incomplete physical responses to threat can stay in the nervous system as unresolved tension. Intentional movement, with a clear beginning and a clear end, can help the body complete what the threat response started. You’re giving the fear somewhere to go, a channel for the energy it has generated.

Frogging is particularly useful for this because it’s physical and deliberate, and because it asks something specific of your hands without asking much of your thinking mind. Your hands know how to frog. Your brain doesn’t need to manage the process. That leaves your attention free to simply be present with what’s moving through.

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There is a moment, if you’ve been crocheting for a while, when the rhythm takes over. Your fingers know what to do. Your breath slows, your shoulders drop, and for just a moment, your nervous system seems to exhale. This is more than just the pleasure of making something. It’s something deeper than that. It is a felt experience of restoration…

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a year ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · Kathryn Vercillo

The Rip It Practice

The exercise I’ve used in my own work, which I first shared over ten years ago in my book Hook to Heal, and which I am most recently sharing in a free PDF that I’m offering to people who attend my free Power of Positive Crochet presentation on 4/17/26, is “Rip It”.

It’s simple. Start with a piece of crochet that has some rows or rounds already on it. It can be something you’ve been working on, or something you make quickly and set aside specifically for this purpose or even something you made a long time ago that you don’t want anymore. Give yourself permission, in advance, to rip it all out.

Before you begin, take a moment to notice what you’re carrying. The specific fear, the heaviness, whatever is sitting in your chest or your shoulders right now. You don’t need to understand it or name it precisely. Just notice that it’s there.

Then begin ripping. Slowly if that feels right, quickly if you need that. Let the yarn pile up in your lap. Let the work come apart. Notice the sensation: the slight resistance and then the release, the sound of the yarn pulling through, the way it coils back into itself as the rows disappear.

When the last stitch is gone and you have only yarn again, stay there for a moment. The work undone. The possibility still present.

Then, if you want to, begin again.

What you’re actually practicing

The deeper skill here is in the practice itself; the frogging is just the vehicle.

What you’re building is the experience of something coming apart and the world continuing. Fear tends to tell us that undoing is catastrophic, that if a thing unravels we won’t be able to recover it. The Rip It Practice is a small and very immediate argument against that story. The stitches come out. The yarn is still there. Your hands still know what to do.

There’s also something important about the choosing. Choosing to release the work is different in quality from losing the work, and that difference matters more than it might seem to. Fear often comes with a sense of things happening to us, of control being elsewhere. Choosing to undo something, even something as small as a few rows of crochet, exercises the capacity to act deliberately inside a state of activation. That’s the capacity you’re building.

The paradox at the center of this practice is that crochet is almost always about accumulation: stitches building into rows, rows building into fabric, fabric building into something finished and whole. The Rip It Practice inverts that entirely. The work is to take apart. And taking apart, done with intention rather than frustration, turns out to be one of the more generous things your hands can do for you.

A note on when this is useful

This exercise works best with ambient fear rather than acute crisis: the slow hum of things that are uncertain and heavy, the political anxiety, the financial worry, the climate grief, the ordinary accumulation of hard things that many of us carry a lot of the time right now. If you’re in active crisis, please reach toward support rather than your hook.

For the ambient kind, this practice has been one of the more consistently useful ones I’ve encountered across twenty years of thinking about crochet as a health practice. It meets the body where the body actually is, gives the nervous system something real to do, and ends with you holding the possibility of beginning again.

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Recently I worked through a set of questions from someone researching the cognitive benefits of crochet, particularly for older adults. Going back through both Crochet Saved My Life (2012) and Hook to Heal (2015) to answer carefully reminded me how much ground those books cover. I thought some of you might find the answers useful, so here they are…

Crochet and Mental Health

How can crochet help with depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions?

When I wrote Crochet Saved My Life, I was documenting not just my own experience but the experiences of nearly two dozen women I had interviewed who had used crochet to navigate depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, schizophrenia, chronic illness, and grief. What emerged from those conversations was a picture of crochet as a practice that works on several levels simultaneously:

It helps regulate mood through the release of serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins that creative activity supports. Researcher Kelly Lambert, whose work I referenced in the book, identified what she called an “effort-driven reward circuit” in the brain: a network of regions encompassing reward, emotion, movement, and higher reasoning that activates specifically when we work with our hands to produce something. In modern life, this circuit rarely gets called on. Crochet calls on it.

It also combats the rumination that feeds depression and anxiety by giving the mind a focused task to engage with instead. And it builds self-esteem through the completion of projects, which matters more than it sounds: finishing something, even something small, creates a concrete sense of accomplishment that people struggling with their mental health often have very little access to.

Does it actually help with serious conditions, or just mild stress?

The people I interviewed for Crochet Saved My Life were not managing mild stress. They were living with schizophrenia, PTSD, serious depression, OCD, and chronic illness. One woman used crochet as a touchstone to help ground her in reality while experiencing hallucinations. Another crocheted for charity as a way to move through the grief of losing a child. Hook to Heal has been used by therapists, social workers, and peer counselors in substance rehabilitation programs and prisons.

That said, I am careful to say that crochet is one tool among many, not a replacement for professional care. The research is real and the experiences are real. Crochet is not a cure. What it can be is something reliable to reach for, something that does something useful in the body and mind, even when other things feel out of reach.

Crochet and Cognitive Health

What does crochet do for memory and concentration?

More than most people expect. In Crochet Saved My Life I drew on the work of Stitchlinks, a group that conducted extensive research into needlearts and health, and on Betsan Corkhill’s 2008 research on mindfulness and craft. The counting and sequencing involved in crochet directly engage working memory. As you work a pattern, you hold a stitch repeat in your head, track where you are in a row, and adjust based on what you see developing in front of you. Over time, this becomes automatic, but getting there stretches and maintains the working memory in ways that matter.

I also documented how the craft builds three distinct forms of attention:

• selective attention (filtering out distractions)

• sustained attention (staying with a task over time)

• and divided attention (tracking pattern and progress simultaneously).

These are not small things. They are the foundations of how we learn and function.

What about cognitive skill development more broadly?

Crochet Saved My Life has a full section on cognitive skill development, which was one of the areas that surprised me most in my research. The skills that crochet supports include working memory, problem-solving, attention, planning and strategizing, and visual processing. These are the foundations of how we learn anything.

The research I referenced also describes crochet as a “cognitive filter”: a way of maintaining positive mood by redirecting attention away from negative thought loops, or presenting them in a less threatening way. There is also a theory I found fascinating, put forward by Corkhill, that the back-and-forth motion of needlework may have something in common mechanically with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), a therapy that uses bilateral stimulation. It is a theory, not a proven mechanism. But it points toward why the repetitive motion of crochet seems to do something particular to the nervous system that goes beyond simple distraction.

Can crochet help prevent or slow cognitive decline?

This is one of the areas where the research is most striking. The argument, supported by the research I examined, runs roughly like this: the factors that contribute most to cognitive decline in older adults include loneliness, lack of purposeful activity, feelings of uselessness, chronic stress, and high cortisol levels around the brain. A regular crochet practice, particularly a social one, addresses several of these simultaneously.

I wrote specifically about the relationship between crochet and Alzheimer’s prevention. Someone who joins a crochet circle and makes items for charity is combating loneliness, purposelessness, and inactivity at the same time. Crochet as a meditative stress-reduction tool also matters here: chronically elevated cortisol has been associated with memory problems, and if crochet can reliably bring stress levels down, that has implications beyond mood.

There is also a practical physical advantage specific to crochet that I found interesting: because crochet uses one hook rather than two needles, it requires less hand-to-hand coordination than knitting, which may make it more accessible to people with reduced motor control. That lower barrier means more people can access the cognitive engagement it provides, for longer.

Crochet, Emotional Regulation and Mindfulness

How does crochet support emotional regulation specifically?

The mechanism is both physiological and cognitive. The rhythmic physical motion engages the body in a way that can interrupt the anxiety cycle at a physical level. The focused attention required simultaneously crowds out the rumination that sustains distress at a cognitive level. Both things are happening at once.

In Hook to Heal, I included mindfulness as one of the core foundations of the entire program. Mindfulness, as Corkhill defines it, is the state of being aware of yourself, your surroundings, and your relationship to those surroundings in the present moment, aware of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, not worrying about the past or fretting about the future. The rhythmic, repetitive nature of crochet is one of the most accessible routes into that state that I know of. You do not have to try to be mindful. The stitch creates the conditions for it.

The documented benefits of sustained mindfulness practice include enhanced working memory, cognitive flexibility, stress relief, reduced anxiety, and generally improved quality of life. Crochet is not the only path to those benefits, but it is a particularly low-barrier one.

What about focus and problem-solving? How does that work in practice?

• For focus, the key is that crochet provides an immersive task: complex enough to hold attention, achievable enough not to overwhelm it. That balance is harder to find than it sounds and is part of why crochet works when other activities do not.

• For problem-solving, every pattern requires a crocheter to figure out where they went wrong, how to adjust tension, how to interpret instructions, how to troubleshoot a seam that is not lying flat. These are low-stakes problems with findable solutions. Practicing that loop of noticing, diagnosing, and adjusting has value that extends well beyond the project.

Crochet and Physical Health

Are there physical benefits to crochet, not just mental ones?

Yes. Crochet has been used as an occupational therapy tool for developing fine motor skills. Specifically, it supports finger flexion and extension, range of motion in the hands and lower arms, grip strength, hand-eye coordination, and even oculomotor control, the muscles around the eyes. Many older crafters report that keeping those hand movements active helps maintain hand mobility and staves off the stiffness associated with arthritis.

What should people watch out for physically?

This is underacknowledged, and I think it is important to name. Poor posture is common among crafters who hunch over their work, and the neck and shoulder tension that results can undermine the very relaxation the practice is meant to provide. I continue to have this problem despite years of trying to do better.

Extended sessions without breaks can cause strain in the hands and wrists.

I want to add something here that comes from years of working at the intersection of art and health more broadly: crochet, like any creative practice, does not always help and can sometimes cause harm. I have met people with compulsive tendencies who will continue crocheting long past the point where their body is telling them to stop, resulting in real pain and in some cases long-term damage. Paying attention to what your body is actually communicating during the practice is part of using it well.

The short practical version: take breaks, choose a comfortable ergonomic hook, work in good light, and treat physical discomfort as information rather than something to push through.

Crochet and Older Adults

Why does crochet seem particularly well-suited to older adults needs?

In Crochet Saved My Life, some of the most consistent themes I found around older adult crafters were about purpose and contribution. Many elderly women I spoke with or read about described crochet as the way they continued to contribute to family and community at a stage of life when society had largely stopped asking anything of them. Making something for a grandchild, a charity, or a cause restores a sense of usefulness that matters deeply for self-esteem and overall wellbeing.

There is also the social dimension. Crochet groups and crafting communities provide cognitive stimulation, emotional connection, and a structured reason to engage with others, all of which are among the strongest predictors of healthy aging. Loneliness, boredom, and apathy are themselves health risks, and a regular crochet practice, especially a social one, addresses all three.

How should older adults approach the practice to get the most benefit?

The cognitive benefits come from choosing projects that require genuine engagement: patterns with a stitch repeat to memorize, projects that introduce a new technique, anything that keeps the brain working without tipping into frustration. Too simple and the benefit diminishes. Too complex and it stops being enjoyable.

The physical benefits come from regular, moderate sessions rather than infrequent long ones, with attention to posture and hand comfort. And if crochet with others is available, prioritize it. The conversation that happens alongside crochet is part of what makes it valuable. The hands are occupied, which frees something else in us to be present.

Start with something simple and let the complexity build naturally. Notice how you feel before and after a session, not just what you made. And treat the practice as a gift you are giving yourself, not a task you are completing.

Why crochet specifically?

Wouldn’t any repetitive activity give the same benefits?

This is a question worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, and the honest answer is: yes, kind of, but not exactly. Many repetitive activities have overlapping benefits. Walking, gardening, and other rhythmic physical tasks engage some of the same mechanisms. But crochet has a particular combination of features that I have not found bundled together in many other activities.

In Crochet Saved My Life I wrote about what makes crochet distinct from other crafts, including knitting. Crochet mistakes are easy to undo. You frog the work back and start again, which makes the practice unusually forgiving and unusually well-suited to mindfulness: when frustration arises, it is easy to correct course rather than abandon the project entirely. Other crafts that are harder to undo can tip into anxiety for someone who is already struggling.

Crochet is also genuinely portable in a way that many other therapeutic activities are not. A hook and a ball of yarn fit in a coat pocket. You can crochet on public transit, in a waiting room, during a difficult conversation. That portability means it is available precisely in the moments when you most need something to do with your hands.

And then there is the output. At the end of a session there is a tangible object that did not exist before. That specific feedback loop between effort and result, what researcher Kelly Lambert called the “effort-driven reward circuit,” is something that scrolling a phone or taking a walk does not replicate. The object is evidence that something was made. For many people I interviewed, that evidence mattered in ways that are hard to overstate.

That said, this varies a lot from person to person. I know people who hate crochet and love knitting and seem to get the same benefits. When I wrote these books, I was very focused on crochet-as-therapy and now I’ve expanded my work considerably to look at the broad interaction between art/craft and health/circumstance. The answer is not a simple one.

I, however, still personally love crochet the most.

Create Me Free

Essay Collection: Crochet/Craft As Therapy

I’ve been writing about the complex relationship between art and mental health for many years now…

Read more

2 years ago · 12 likes · Kathryn Vercillo

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That is the very first page of Nicole Nehrig’s With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories. Nehrig describes picking up knitting in her late twenties during a tumultuous period of her life. She taught herself from books and online videos, made a lot of mistakes, ripped out rows of stitches to get back on course. She describes it as a fitting metaphor for what was happening in her life at the time. And then, when she finally made the decision to go to graduate school for psychology, she found herself knitting more than ever, mostly because it provided an antidote to her work as a therapist. It was tangible. She could see her progress. She could trust what she saw.

Now, take a look at what I wrote in my own 2012 book, Crochet Saved My Life, about that same period of life:

“That crochet hook became my lifeline. It was my go-to weapon whenever I felt like I needed to pick up another knife or a bottle of vodka or even a pen to write my goodbye letters. I picked up the crochet hook instead. I got books that teach kids how to crochet and I used YouTube videos to learn a few basic stitches.”

I was also in my late twenties. I also taught myself from books and videos. I also found that working with my hands did something for me that nothing else quite could. And years later, when I went on to study psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, I sat in those classes crocheting square after square, my hands moving through the repetition while my mind worked through the material. It was the same instinct Nehrig describes: the craft as an antidote, as a counterweight, as the thing that kept you grounded while you were learning to think about the mind.

Two women. Two fiber crafts. Two late-twenties discoveries. Two paths that led toward understanding why making things matters so much to so many of us. That this is also the book Nehrig eventually wrote does not surprise me at all.

I also can’t help but notice her reference to that first skein of blue yarn and remember from my own book/experience, finding crochet in the midst of debilitating depression:

"I went to the craft store with my mom to buy yarn. I immediately drifted over to a soft type of yarn that was wonderful to the touch. I chose blue and grey (a color theme I still love although I suppose it reflected my mental state more than anything at the time). Later I would learn that there are many different types of yarn and thicknesses of yarn and that these things should be taken into consideration when figuring out what yarn you want for a project but I didn't know that at the time so I just bought what I liked. And the fact that I could fairly easily decide what I liked was a really big deal for me at that time. I'll probably never know why choosing blue yarn felt easy when choosing between Ramen noodles and macaroni felt hard but it did."

Thread as Protest, Thread as Preservation

With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories is a national bestseller that spans continents and centuries to examine how women have made meaning through textile work, not just personally, but historically, politically, and collectively.

Nehrig’s premise is both simple and quietly radical: textile work, so often dismissed as “women’s work” and attached to ideas of domesticity and obedience, has in fact been one of the primary ways women have exercised power throughout history. When other avenues were closed, women picked up a needle and thread. They used what they had.

The book unfolds across seven chapters, each exploring a different dimension of what textile work has meant for women: intellectual expression, economic independence, community, trauma processing, political protest. Nehrig draws on her training as a psychologist and researcher, and weaves in her own personal relationship with making. The result moves fluidly between the scholarly and the intimate, between historical analysis and lived experience.

For those of us already working at the intersection of craftivism and fiber arts, much of the history Nehrig traces will feel like familiar territory. And some of it will not.

The Liberty Crochet Mural, the nationwide craftivist project created in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is composed of crocheted panels made by volunteers across the country and joined into a single image of liberty and bodily autonomy. Since 2023 I have been the Northern California steward of the mural, coordinating its display in San Francisco and speaking alongside doctors, nurses, and artists about what it means to bring this particular form to this particular moment.

The lineage Nehrig traces of women using textile to say the things they were not otherwise permitted to say runs through all of that work. I knew the tradition. What the book offers is depth and breadth I hadn’t encountered in one place before: the sampler and the protest banner, the story cloth and the mural, these are the same impulse moving through different hands across different centuries. Nehrig documents it with the rigor of a researcher and the feeling of someone who makes things herself.

She writes that textiles have been a way for women to convey powerful messages of self-expression and political protest. Reading that, I thought about the women who crocheted their squares for the Liberty Mural, many of them at kitchen tables, some of them in the middle of grief or rage, all of them turning that energy into something they could put their hands on and send forward. That is how thread becomes language. That is what Nehrig is mapping.

The stories are powerful:

• An eighteenth-century Quaker boarding school used embroidered samplers to teach girls mathematics and geography, encoding education into textile because it was one of the few vehicles women were permitted to use.

• The Miao women of southern China, in the absence of a written language, passed their histories down through elaborate story cloths. Their thread did what letters and ink could not.

• Quechua weavers are working today to preserve and revive Incan traditions through their practice, reclaiming cultural knowledge that colonial systems tried to erase.

• A midcentury British women’s postal art exchange built community among women who would never meet in person, their sewn works traveling across distances to connect them.

Each story expands the frame of what we think textile making is and what it has always been capable of.

The Psychological Dimension

For those of us who make, who have always made, who have sometimes struggled to explain to people who don’t do this why it matters, Nehrig has built an archive of proof. The impulse we feel when we pick up our hooks or our needles or our shuttles, the one that says this is necessary, that it connects us to something larger, that it is not a small or trivial thing, turns out to be one of the most human impulses there is.

What distinguishes this book from other histories of textile work is Nehrig’s clinical lens. She is not just cataloguing stories. She is asking what these practices did and do to the inner life of the people who practice them. If you know me and the way that my work has developed over the years, you know my passion for this lens.

Her framework will be familiar to anyone who has read the research on craft and mental health. But Nehrig does something more than cite studies. She shows the evidence embedded in the historical record itself, in the choices women made about what they made, when, and with whom.

The woman in Nigeria she interviewed who came to textile work after surviving abuse, rebuilding herself through making. The collective workshops where women who had been displaced or outcast learned to weave and sew together, recovering something of their dignity and capability in the process. These are not anecdotes about a “hobby”; they are evidence of a profound human need that textile work has reliably met across cultures and centuries.

I find myself thinking of the women I interviewed for Crochet Saved My Life, and the many women across crafting that I’ve interviewed since, who described their craft in similar terms: as a way back to themselves, a way of processing what could not yet be spoken, a way of staying present when presence felt unbearable. Nehrig is showing us that those women are part of an unbroken line, one that goes back much further than any of us knew.

Nehrig’s central argument is that it is with thread that women wrote. All of those hands, all of those centuries, all of that language made tangible and passed forward.

We, all of us, are still writing.

Others’ Thoughts On This Book

My experience and opinion and reading of this book is just one take among many. And many of those are actually here on Substack. Do peruse these pieces from , , , and

Sighs & Whispers

With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories

“Women’s lives, their identities, their internal experiences have historically been hidden from public view. But the textiles they created offer a glimpse into their world. It is with thread that women wrote…

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10 months ago · 4 likes · Laura McLaws Helms

Knit and Gather

A book review: With Her Own Hands

As soon as I saw the prepublication press, I knew that this book would be for me. As an English major who now owns a fiber business, I looked forward to the research centered tapestry and collection of women’s stories surrounding textiles. Author Nicole Nehrig…

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9 months ago · 2 likes · Laila Simon

Culture Lens

With Her Own Hands. Turkey Fried Rice. Gratitude.

In case you’ve forgotten, this is my occasional newsletter in which I share something about books, food, and growing (all loosely defined). — L…

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8 months ago · Lakshmi Sarah

The Nature of Reading

Autumn Nears

Dear readers…

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a year ago · 8 likes · Hailey Brock

handwoven

The luxury of slow, creative work

I’m a mum of three children under five, the youngest a babe of almost three months. Outwardly, it doesn’t look like we’re moving very fast. We’re often not moving at all. However, anyone with babies and children will know it’s the mental load that gets you. Your body feels like it’s growing stiff from being nap trapped but your brain becomes more and mo…

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8 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Rebecca

and notice this terrific comment from on a piece by :

Other Related Writing From Me:

Create Me Free

Craftivism: Slow and Small and Quiet = Powerful

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2 years ago · 34 likes · 21 comments · Kathryn Vercillo

Create Me Free

Literature as a Lens for Understanding the Limitations and Potential of Craftivism

I have developed these ideas after decades of lived experience, interview-based insights, and deep research into the complex relationship between art and health. They are based on my unique 6-part framework. If you are interested in assistance in applying these ideas to your own life: Order a…

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2 years ago · 2 likes · Kathryn Vercillo

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Essay Collection: Crochet/Craft As Therapy

I’ve been writing about the complex relationship between art and mental health for many years now…

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The piece profiles fiber artists across the country using their craft to protest, from Portland knitters holding “knit-ins” outside ICE facilities to embroidery artist Shannon Downey’s work at the intersection of craft and activism. It traces the long history of what Betsy Greer named “craftivism,” connecting today’s work to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and beyond.

And yes, it mentions the Liberty Crochet Mural project.

For those who don’t know my history with this: I’ve been involved with the Northern California Liberty Crochet Mural since it began. I crocheted my own square, helped stitch the forty panels together, and in 2023 took over as the organizer responsible for public displays in San Francisco. I coordinated panels and events, including speaking on a panel about reproductive justice and fiber art at Drawing Room Annex during Women’s Month 2024.

I’m happy to share that the mural now has a permanent home. It’s installed indefinitely at The Women’s Building in San Francisco, where it’s included in the building’s self-guided audio tour. I’ll share a video below showing the installation.

The mural invites viewers to see collective labor as witness, grief processing, and solidarity. Hundreds of crocheters across the country contributed to these murals. Twenty-five identical 17’ x 11’ pieces exist nationwide, each stitch a small act adding up to something larger than any of us could make alone.

A Note of Thanks and Some Honest Updates

Thank you to everyone who subscribes to THREADSTACK. I mean that.

I’ve been quiet here in the second half of this year, and I want to be honest about why.

When I started THREADSTACK, I imagined it as a thriving directory and community: a place where all of us who love yarn and thread, fabric and fiber could find each other and weave together. I still love that vision. But the community engagement I hoped for never quite materialized, and maintaining the newsletter without that reciprocal energy takes more than I have to give right now.

So I’ve been focusing my energy on my primary Substack, Create Me Free, where I write about the complex relationship between art and psychology. I recently launched Creative Health Cartography, my methodology for mapping how your holistic health shapes your creativity across six interconnected domains. If you’re curious, I’m offering Creative Health Maps at 40% off through January.

Happy New Year

Updates will come as I figure out where THREADSTACK fits in my ecosystem. I haven’t given up on it; I’m just being realistic about capacity while I navigate what’s sustainable.

In the meantime, if you want craft-as-therapy essays from me, Create Me Free is where to find them. That’s where my heart and energy are living right now.

Subscribe to Create Me Free

Wishing you all a new year filled with good yarn, meaningful making, and whatever form of quiet resistance sustains you.

With gratitude, Kathryn

I have been mesmerized by the embroidery art of from The Slowest Thread for since first seeing this work here on Substack and was surprised to learn that embroidery is a fairly new medium for Lia. The work she does is stunning, and it isn’t just that it looks pretty, but rather that it raises awareness and explores the lived reality of chronic illness through textile imagery. It’s powerful. It stops me in my scroll every time.

So I’m thrilled to bring you this interview with Lia and hope that it will inspire you to go see more of what she does. In it, Lia shares the experience of changing mediums due to health, beginning to identify as having a disability, reading Van Gogh Blues, and so much more.

Who is Lia Pas?

I have been a multidisciplinary artist all my life. I was a composer/performer who worked with dancers before I became disabled by ME/CFS and had to change my creative practice to honour my limitations. Embroidery is a newish medium for me, but my previous work in performance and writing has greatly informed my fibre art.

When and how did you first learn to embroider? Do you have a specific memory of some of your early embroidery?

The first needlework I did was Ukrainian cross stitch in my teens. My younger sisters were in Ukrainian dancing and my mother had to make their costumes. I was already sewing many of my own clothes by this point and my mom asked me to help. We went to a workshop organized by the Ukrainian dance school and the cross stitch and patterns came very easily to me. I think I probably did most of the sewing and cross-stitch on their costumes.

My embroidery practice came when I got sick in my mid-40s. I am completely self-taught. I wasn't especially interested in the embroidery patterns I saw online—I am not a flowery person—so I started stitching some digital SciArt text/image pieces I made before becoming ill. When I started, I looked up various stitches online and used my pieces to practice them and designed a mitosis sampler for myself to learn some of the trickier stitches. (I'm currently writing a pattern of that one.) With my first piece I was hooked, and embroidering anatomy and my symptoms followed soon after. 

At first I was stitching for most of the day because I needed to rest so much. My pieces got bigger and more complex very quickly because setting up a piece takes so much more energy than stitching it. As I regained some of my energy and cognitive function I started writing and making music again, but embroidery is my main restorative activity. This past year I've had a series of liver infections which has meant I've done a lot more embroidery than usual. I bring it to the hospital when I'm admitted for something to pass the time while there.

It is such powerful work. I have spoken with many people whose medium and scale changes with illness. Often, people speak of having to go to a smaller scale, so it is interesting to learn that working bigger works better but your explanation of why makes a lot of sense!

For those who know about embroidery, what might you share about the stitches/techniques/materials that you use?

The first step I take is to scan in and then size the base image so it will be large enough for the stitches I have in mind and for any text I have planned around the image. I print the image on paper and trace it onto the cloth—almost always linen, but occasionally cotton—with a DMC water soluble marker on lighter coloured fabric or a Bohin chalk pencil on darker colours. If I'm using a more complex image or I'm working on very dark-coloured cloth I'll print it on Sulky dissolvable material and stick then baste it to the cloth to stitch over. The Sulky also works great for large blocks of text.

I'll usually choose thread colours and thicknesses as part of the set up for a piece and use my DMC thread sample book if I need shades I don't have in my stash. I generally use a fairly muted palette, choosing colours either based on gross anatomy photos or on the sensations I feel. 

I almost always start stitching the general outline of the base image and then the details. I usually decide on some of the stitches ahead of time but allow myself the option of changing those or the colours if they don't seem right once I get started. 

After the base image and details are stitched I start working on the symptomatology lines. These are usually done completely freehand since I stitch whatever I am sensing in my body in the moment. Adding the text, if any, is the last step so it lines up nicely with the image.

My favourite stitches are chain stitch using a tambour hook with size 8 or 12 perlé thread for larger pieces since that is a much faster technique than other hand stitching. I also use a lot of whipped back stitch since it gives very clear-edged lines. I often use single strands of floss for fine details either as back stitch or whipped back stitch which works especially well for text.

I occasionally add beads to pieces if the imagery demands it. Usually beads represent heavier symptom sensations or actual growths on the organ. I've used organza appliqué in one piece—my liver embroidery—since I wanted to show the top and bottom layers of the organ and how the biliary ducts sit within it.

You have touched on the content of some of your work. Can you tell us a little bit more about your three embroidery series: microscopy, anatomy, and symptomatology?

I've always been fascinated by science—my mom is a scientist and my dad did a geology degree—and have worked with scientific imagery in some of my performance and written work for many years. The microscopy series came out of some of my image/text work where I saw cell diagrams as maps and landscapes. The anatomy series shows my fascination with the beauty of human anatomy and how many of the shapes inside us are shapes found in nature. The symptomatology series combines my anatomy work and my meditation practice. When I'm symptomatic it helps to visualize what I am feeling and "dissect" those sensations to make them less overwhelming. Freehand stitching those sensations feels like a meditation practice as well. Sometimes these three series intermingle in ways that I don't anticipate during the creative process.

If you could show only one of the pieces to someone to help them understand you and your work, which one would you show and why?

Probably body map, since it gets across the symptomatology aspect of my work really well. It's one of my earlier pieces, but is very evocative of the overwhelming nature of ME/CFS. My work has gotten more anatomical since, but the symptomatology aspect is still a very important part of what I do.

Here it is:

I love this article you share on Meaning Making and would like to make sure people check it out. How would you describe/define the ways in which making and sharing this embroidery work makes meaning for you?

Since reading Eric Maisel's The Van Gogh Blues many years ago I've deeply understood just how imperative it is for me to make art of any sort. Making art is how I make sense of the world and of how I experience it. Without my creative practices I become irritable and de­pressed.

My embroidery work started as a way to do something creative that didn't overexert my body or cognition when I became ill with ME/CFS. The path of my science text/image into my symptomatology series shows how my meaning making has a throughline. I first saw the sympto­matology series as intimate self-portraits, a way to understand the overwhelming symptoms I was having, to accept them as they occurred, and to find a sort of beauty in them. That process was natural meaning making for me. When I started sharing the work online I was surprised and moved by how much people related to the pieces. Many people have said the paresthesia pieces are accurate des­criptions of what they feel as well. Others have said the more visceral anatomical pieces have helped them see their bodies as beautiful again, rather than as something to fight against. Seeing how what is intensely personal to me is also universal creates so much meaning, even beyond the sometimes scientifically educational aspect of my work.

That description of “intimate self-portraits” really stands out to me.

Can we discuss ME/CFS a little bit? What did you know about it before your diagnosis? 

I had heard the term chronic fatigue syndrome before but had no idea what that really meant aside from being too tired to do things that most people did. ME/CFS is on a spectrum from severe (needing to be tube fed and completely bedbound) to mild (being able to work part time with proper pacing and supports). When I first got sick I was near the severe end of that spectrum, but thankfully I was able to eat daily and wash myself occasionally. I was very lucky that my GP has a friend with ME/CFS so she recognized the signs within a couple months and told me not to exert myself in any way. Radical rest near the beginning of my illness is likely part of why I'm now in the moderate to mild part of the spectrum.

What was your process of beginning to iden­tify as having a disability?

There were two major instances that made it obvious to me that I was indeed disabled. The first was lending my electric piano to a friend because I wasn't using it at all. The fact that I couldn't sit up unsupported for more than a few minutes at a time paired with such severe hyperacusis I couldn't even listen to music on speakers was hard to accept at first because music had been my main creative practice since childhood. Seeing my piano leave the house made that loss very palpable. A few months later my friend found a used piano for her daughter and returned my electric one, and by then I was able to sit unsupported for longer and play for a few minutes at a time. I can play more now but I'm still very limited.

The second instance was buying a combined rollator/transport chair. Walking more than the length of my house without sitting down to rest results in post-exertional malaise (PEM), a type of neuro-immune exhaustion. This also made my disability very visible since a rollator is a fairly large mobility aid. After using it for a while I realized just how much it helped and how much more freedom I have with wheels. I've since upgraded to a lightweight foldable transport chair that I can lift on my own. My husband wheels me in when we're outside the house. Mobility aids = freedom so I encourage anyone who is on the fence about needing one to at least try one out because it's improved my life so much.

What are some of the most common misconceptions you've faced and how does your art work as a narrative to challenge them?

ME/CFS is very much an invisible illness on a couple different levels. We don't look sick, and most of us are housebound so hardly anyone sees us out in the community. Social gatherings are usually too much of an energy drain for us so we often can't attend them. I've had doctors in the ER tell me I don't look sick even when my symptoms and bloodwork show I have a serious liver infection from my Primary Schlerosing Cholan­gitis (PSC). We lose friends because they don't understand our limitations. My symptomatology series makes our many invisible symptoms visible. Illustrating my paresthesias/tingling seems to especially get the message across of just how overwhelming these symptoms can be.

I am always so disappointed to hear stories about medical professionals treating us that way.

Have you noticed any difference in the way people respond to ME/CFS since the COVID-19 pandemic and development of Long Covid?

There's been a little bit of a shift in awareness, but not as much as I would have hoped. More medical professionals seem to be aware of why I use a transport chair for fatigue so I don't have to explain that as often. I and many others with ME/CFS had hoped the world—and especially the healthcare profession—would take post-viral illnesses more seriously because of how prevalent they've become. But we're still dealing with misconceptions about masking in healthcare settings even during flu season and with the resurgence of measles. It's very frustrating to have to risk getting sick while seeking the care that we need.

What has it meant to you to have your work shown at medical humanities conferences, included on TED talks, and recognized outside of the fibre arts community?

Even before I started embroidering, some of my work was being shown in a medical humanities context, especially my videopoem susurrations and a few of my text/image pieces. There's a throughline from that work into my fibre arts pieces since I've long been obsessed with anatomy, especially historical anatomy art.

Even though the fibre art takes longer to create in some ways, the immediate visual impact of it seems stronger somehow, and I think that's what attracts people outside the fibre arts community too. I also feel like I'm doing good work when someone in the medical community interacts with my work. I try to be as scientifically accurate as possible while also taking a few artistic liberties to get sensations and symptoms across. That combination seems to give the work a more universal voice.

Here’s a TED Talk that shows Lia’s work:

You mentioned the experience of lending out your piano. What was the process like for you of letting go of musical performing and embracing embroidery?

When I first got sick, music was utterly impossible on so many levels so there wasn't even an element of choice there. I could listen to music on headphones but not on speakers because sound and vibration actually caused physical pain throughout my body. Speaking for too long exhausted me so singing was out of the question, as was sitting up at the piano. I had to let my voice students go, stop working on the dance opera I was in production with, and limit all aural inputs. 

To be honest, I didn't even have the energy to mourn the loss of music at first. ME/CFS is not only physical and cognitive fatigue—strong emotions can also cause PEM. I spent a lot of time meditating and watching slow and ambient sci-fi, horror, and period dramas as well as playing a simple video game called Zen Koi. Reading nonfiction was almost impossible except in small doses, but I was able to read some fiction and to write for a few minutes at a time. 

I knew from experience and reading The Van Gogh Blues that if I wasn't making meaning through some sort of creative practice I would get horribly depressed. I had dealt with depression in my 20s and 30s, and though the ME/CFS was utterly debilitating I knew I wasn't depressed because I wanted to do things. I was just too exhausted to do much of anything. In one of the period dramas I watched, a woman was told to "take to her bed and work on her embroidery" so I thought, why not? It would be something creative to do while lying on the couch for hours. My mom brought over the supplies from back when we did Ukrainian cross stitch and I drew out one of my scientific text/image pieces on cloth and went for it. It was slow yet engaging enough that I got hooked on it very quickly! I embroidered for many hours a day at first, but as my symp­toms improved I added back some writing and music too.

I've always been a multidisciplinary artist, and I think my ability to switch between and integrate different creative practices paired with years of meditation coalesced into embroidery being a medium I could make meaning with.

You have described so well how you knew it wasn’t depression. As someone who lives with recurring depression myself, I know that it can be difficult to parse out the difference between it and various other physical and mental health conditions, so I think it’s helpful when people are able to do so.

What would you say was lost and what was gained in changing mediums?

I lost much of my physical community in the performing and writing world but I gained a new community online. I'm quite active on both the online SciArt and ME/CFS/chronic illness communities. I've been able to dip my toe back into music again via leaning into piano improvisation—traditional composing on paper has become very cognitively challenging but spontaneous composition still allows me to get into a flow state. I haven't found much music community because my piano-playing days are sporadic, though I have done some work with Opera Mariposa which is run by two sisters with ME/CFS. 

One thing about having to pace myself so carefully is that I am utterly grateful for the times I am able to play music. I even get excited about scales and technique exercises in a way that I haven't before. I also have the gift of time to work on my various projects, though I usually have so many ongoing that prioritization is tricky. I used to have to go to a residency to get long stretches of time to focus on projects whereas now my studio days are very much like being at a resi­dency. I alternate between deep work, general creative work, and practice/project days. I have very few meetings which saves my energy for the act of creativity itself. 

I’m curious: what is similar and what is different about the mediums you’ve used? 

There is a rhythm to embroidery that echoes the rhythms of music, especially when I'm working on a larger piece that has long lines of the same stitch. I've always been able to get into flow states quite easily, but because pacing myself is key I use timers for my more physically or cognitively active work. Within a couple minutes I can be in flow! I think my longtime meditation practice has definitely contributed to my ease of shifting states, but so has embroidery, especially when I am freehand stitching which is a type of improvisatory practice much like spontaneous composition.

I also find I am much more enamoured of process as opposed to focusing on finishing and presenting a piece. This explains why I have yet to frame any of my embroideries! I clean pieces up enough to get good photos of them but the work of framing them is a bit of a roadblock. Partially because it seems like it might be physically taxing—I may just hire someone eventually—but also because I would much rather spend my time making work.

One practice that has carried through since before I got sick is my writing, especially poetry. Letting go of the need to be cognitively lucid while writing poems has helped. I get aphasia—trouble finding the words for things—with my migraines but that can work in my favour in poetry since it can create interesting images and word pairings.

It sounds like you have found ways to be gentle with yourself, which has been one of the key things I’ve had to learn (and re-learn) as I’ve aged.

In what ways has your embroidery work changed from the time you started this fibre out to now? 

I started with anything sciencey—working from some poetic text/image collage work I had done before getting sick—and then was obsessed with my symptomatology series for a long while. I then returned to anatomy with pieces like she breathed and nave of vibration, and more recently have been combining both anatomy and symptomatology with some of my other illnesses like in tethered by fluid & ligaments and Bleeding Vessel.

Let’s look at those:

Read more about this piece:

The Slowest Thread

Bleeding Vessel

For World Cancer Day 2025, here is a slightly edited version of my original blog post about my embroidery Bleeding Vessel. I started the piece 27 July 2020 and finished stitching it 15 June 2022—almost two years…

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2 years ago · 42 likes · 20 comments · Lia Pas

I feel like I'm starting a new phase with the wandering ghost, exploring some metaphysical ideas on how the body/anatomy and the divine are intertwined. I'm working on a new piece right now that I'm being a bit secretive about because it may be the start of a new series. It explores the body, beauty, scars, and the Stoic concept of oikeiosis (interconnection with the cosmos). 

Read more about this piece:

The Slowest Thread

the wandering ghost

I completed my largest embroidery to date—the wandering ghost—in June. The stitched area is 53 x 21 cm (21 x 8.5 inches…

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2 years ago · 35 likes · 21 comments · Lia Pas

I've also gotten a lot more ambitious with my fibre art. My pieces are getting larger and I find myself learning new techniques to evoke the sensations I feel and the images in my mind. I learned a floating honeycomb stitch for a recent piece on my iliac vein stent which was a challenge but very worthwhile. 

Be sure to check out all of Lia’s amazing work. In addition to what you can find on Substack, there are tons of links to images, audio, social media, poetry and prose here.

The Slowest Thread

Writing about my creative process as a disabled multidisciplinary artist working in fibre arts, writing, and music, and maybe some deeper dives into other things too.

By Lia Pas

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2 years ago · 15 likes · 9 comments · Kathryn Vercillo

Create Me Free

What Does It Mean to Consider The Ways in Which Health Impacts Art?

My focus is on exploring the complex relationship between art and health. But what exactly does that mean? There are many different mental and physical health conditions (as well as more vaguely-defined life challenges such as “burnout”) that impact our creativity. This isn’t good or bad, per se. But knowing what the impact is on us individually is a powerful first step towards working with ourselves instead of against ourselves…

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a year ago · 9 likes · Kathryn Vercillo

The Bed Perspective

Words, songs and meditations about living with chronic illness (severe ME/CFS), creativity and self-restoration in a broken world.

By Madelleine Müller (she/her)

There are lessons stitched into every row of a handmade scarf, though no one ever formally teaches them. They aren’t written in patterns or listed among the project supplies. Still, if you’ve spent any time with yarn and a hook or needles, you know: crafting teaches you things. Not always about craft. Often about yourself.

This is the invisible curriculum of fiber arts. It is quiet, slow, embodied. It’s not built for tests or grading. But it shapes how we move through the world, especially if we are moving through with chronic illness, neurodivergence, trauma, or simply the weather of everyday mental health.

Patience as a Practice, Not a Trait

Fiber arts are famously time-intensive. Whether you’re crocheting a temperature blanket or knitting a sock, the process can’t be rushed. And if you try, the fiber lets you know. Stitches twist. Threads knot. Hands cramp. Eventually, you learn to respect the pace of the material. You start to sync your breath with the rhythm of your making. Over time, patience stops feeling like something you lack and starts feeling like something you are learning.

Psychologically, this practice is tied to self-regulation, the capacity to manage our impulses and tolerate frustration over time. In dialectical behavior therapy, this is called distress tolerance: the ability to sit with discomfort without needing to immediately escape or fix it. Crafting teaches this implicitly.

When you lose count of stitches or misread a pattern, there’s usually no shortcut. You must unpick, breathe, and begin again. In doing so, you learn not just how to complete the project, but how to stay with yourself through the slow work of making. You learn that a moment of stuckness doesn’t mean failure. It just means you’re in process.

Imperfection as Permission

There is a moment that every maker knows, usually early in a project, when the realization hits: this will not be perfect. Maybe it’s a missed stitch. A mismatched color. A slight warp in the weave. You see it. You wince. And then, if you’ve done the work, you let it stay.

In my book Hook to Heal, I wrote about an exercise called “Make an Intentional Mistake.” The idea is to deliberately leave an error in your work as a practice of letting go. This mistake becomes a quiet act of acceptance, a rebellion against perfectionism, and a gesture of radical self-compassion.

This practice resonates deeply with the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Wabi-sabi invites us to see the worn, the uneven, the asymmetrical as sites of beauty, meaning, and depth. It invites softness toward ourselves.

Nowhere was this more visible to me than in Mandalas for Marinke, a project I started to honor crochet artist Marinke Slump after her death by suicide. Over 300 people contributed mandalas, some of whom told me they were beginners. It was their first mandala or their first time contributing to a group project. They made their pieces anyway. Some even left messy yarn tails on purpose, saying they wanted their contribution to reflect that beauty doesn’t require tidiness. That you can be raw, honest, unfinished, and still make something worthy of being seen.

When the cause is important enough, people sometimes allow themselves the freedom they’ve denied themselves in quieter moments. I believe in learning to soften that inner critic before crisis or community demands it. I believe we can choose to live as if we are already enough. Imperfect, and enough.

Embodiment as Grounding

Craft is not cerebral, even when it’s intellectually complex. It happens in the hands. In the shoulders. In the lap. You feel it. And that feeling, the texture of the yarn, the motion of the hook, the strain and release of the fingers, is often what brings us back to ourselves.

When depression makes the world foggy, when anxiety makes it sharp, fiber arts offer something tactile and tangible. This isn’t just a metaphor. Studies and stories alike show that crafting can modulate our nervous systems. It can anchor us in moments when we feel adrift.

For me, crochet was the first thing I could do when everything else felt impossible. It didn’t ask me to be well. It just asked me to pull one loop through another. And in that simple gesture, I began to return to my body.

A Grounding Exercise: Loop-and-Breathe for Crocheters

Try this when you need to reconnect with your body and the moment:

• Sit down with your yarn and hook.

• Before you begin, close your eyes and place one hand on your chest, the other on your belly.

• Breathe in for four counts. Hold for two. Breathe out for six. Repeat three times.

• Begin your stitches. With each loop, silently or aloud say: “I am here.”

• Let your hands find their natural rhythm. Don’t push. Just follow.

• If your thoughts wander, gently return them to the stitch.

• If your body aches, pause. Stretch. Resume.

• When you finish a row, close your eyes. Breathe in, breathe out, and notice: you are still here.

The Quiet Pedagogy of Craft

None of this comes with a certificate. There is no graduation. And yet, what we learn through fiber arts is deep and lasting. It changes how we relate to ourselves. It teaches us how to be with discomfort, how to celebrate process, how to inhabit our bodies with care.

This is what I mean when I talk about the quiet pedagogy of craft. It’s not the kind of learning that announces itself. It doesn’t ask for gold stars. But in the stillness of stitch after stitch, it teaches you how to breathe through tension. How to be with your own imperfect hands. How to move forward when you don’t know what comes next. It doesn’t fix what hurts, but it gives you something to hold.

Fiber arts offer a pedagogy of presence. A curriculum of care. And if you listen closely, you might just hear it teaching you how to live.

Shhh … do you hear it?

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a year ago · 4 likes · Kathryn Vercillo

I know how to do most things in crochet. I’ve at least attempted almost every technique that you can name, and I’ve taught tutorials for a fair number of them. I’ve made accessories and wearables and amigurumi and wall hangings and soft sculpture. But, 20+ years in to crocheting-as-therapy, mostly what I make is huge granny square blankets.

No, not the kind where you make a bunch of individual three or four or five round squares and eventually join them together. I love crocheting but hate sewing and joining together is much more like sewing. No, I mean starting a granny square in the center, going around and around and around until the blanket is too heavy to continue crafting. Then I begin anew. The number of blankets around my house is absurd, and still I can’t stop making them.

Often I have another project on the go, something that offers much more instant gratification, hyperbolic crochet that’s part of an ongoing art series I’m working on, or a scarf or dishcloths. But always, behind that project, there’s the never ending granny square on a hook, ready for another round or two.

Sometimes I gift the blankets. Sometimes the dogs claim them and curl into their warmth like they know something sacred lives there. Often I use them myself, especially on cold mornings when the light is soft and my coffee is still steeping. Mostly, they sit in folded piles. Adding color, texture, and softness to the room. They do not need to justify their presence. They are enough just as they are.

A Ritual of Reconnection

This is the project I reach for during the in-between times. The days when my mind is cluttered or my body is tired. The weeks when other forms of art feel like too much to begin. The seasons when I am in recovery from something, even if I cannot name what it is.

The giant granny square does not require clarity. It does not demand inspiration. It does not even ask for matching colors. I can pick it up without explanation and continue from wherever I left off. The return itself becomes the ritual. The loop is the point.

While I stitch, I often have something playing in the background. Podcasts are my first choice. True crime stories about missing persons. Reflective conversations from Glennon Doyle or Gretchen Rubin. I like the rhythm of someone else talking while my hands follow their own rhythm. When I do not want to listen, I watch familiar shows. Law and Order. 90 Day Fiancé. Documentaries about people navigating impossible circumstances. I am not watching for information. I am looking for the comfort of repetition, of structure, of stories that move predictably even when mine does not.

A Different Kind of Progress

This project does not finish. That is the part that keeps me coming back. So much of what we are taught about creative work is goal-oriented. There is a beginning, a middle, and a completed product. But this square offers another model. A different kind of forward motion. One that honors where I am, not where I am supposed to arrive.

There is something profoundly healing about this kind of continuation. Repetition allows the nervous system to settle. Stitching in circles is not just comforting. It is regulating. It slows my breath and quiets my thoughts. The square gives me structure without demand. It does not ask for outcome. It only invites me to stay with myself.

Each round becomes a record of a moment. The way my hands moved. The tightness or looseness of my tension. The colors I reached for without planning. Each blanket holds the physical memory of the time I spent with it. When I cannot write or speak or explain myself, I can still stitch. And that tells the truth in its own way.

Craft as Recovery

In Crochet Saved My Life and Hook to Heal, I wrote about how crochet helped me rebuild parts of myself after depression. Not through productivity. Not through accomplishment. But through rhythm. Through the quiet repetition of the hook moving through yarn. Through the act of showing up for something small and real when everything else felt too big or too blurry.

That recovery was not a one-time event. It is something I return to again and again. The never-ending square reminds me that I do not have to finish something in order to have gained something from it. The value is in the returning. The value is in the softness. In the movement. In the way my body remembers how to make even when my mind cannot lead.

Eventually, each square grows too large to hold comfortably. I cannot turn it without effort. It becomes physically difficult to continue. So I pause. I fold it gently. I stack it with the others. I begin again.

There is something powerful in that cycle. I do not see these pieces as unfinished. I see them as part of a longer rhythm. They are projects in waiting. They are evidence that I was here. That I took time to make something, even when the world felt uncertain.

In Hook to Heal, I wrote that “returning to a creative project you had once abandoned is its own kind of healing.” I believe that now more than ever. These granny squares remind me that my relationship to craft is ongoing. It shifts, it rests, it resumes. And that continuity matters more than completion.

When I feel like I have lost momentum or clarity, I return to the square. I find where I left off. I pull up a loop. I begin again.

And that, for today, is enough. That, for today, is everything.

I came here today to write something new for THREADSTACK, but I didn’t know what I was going to write about. Then a couple of things converged, and I knew that I wanted to share this Craft to Heal exercise, which is a light adaptation of the Letting Go #6 exercise from my book Hook to Heal.

Some background: I wrote Hook to Heal ten years ago, creating exercises for using crochet to heal, grow, and connect. I am now rewriting it, chapter by chapter, over the next year, to expand it to other fiber arts and crafts.

Note: I had set this up as a year-long workshop series but unfortunately there wasn’t enough interest to afford it in that form so I’m pivoting. I’m working on the chapters, which will be available for sale individually, and hoping to set up small Zoom groups every month at a lower price point for those interested.

In May, I’m working on editing the Letting Go chapter.

And this morning, over in Chat, I saw that offered a wonderful creative prompt to “make something bad on purpose.” I won’t copy the entire prompt here but if you don’t know her work on Substack, go check it out - she offers great ideas and information for creatives, particularly neurodivergent creatives.

Seeing that, while working on editing this chapter, made me want to share the Intentional Mistake exercise.

Intro to Letting Go in Crafting

You can read the intro to the Letting Go Chapter of Hook to Heal here:

Create Me Free

Thoughts on Letting Go, Releasing, and the Importance That I Stop "Shoulding" On Myself

This is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of my book Hook to Heal!: 100 Crochet Exercises For Health, Growth, Connection, Inspiration and Honoring Your Inner Artist which is a chapter on Letting Go. Each chapter in this book introduces a topic where we might need some healing practice then provides my original crochet exercises for working through those challenges along with Yarn for Thought to dig deeper into the questions asked and what arises as the person crafts. This is the introduction to that second chapter. I wanted to share it here today because I’ve been reminded recently of the important tip to be gentle with myself and that relates specifically to how hard it can sometimes be to creatively pivot, change, release, let go…

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2 years ago · 15 likes · 4 comments · Kathryn Vercillo

“If we want to improve our own quality of life through crafting, we have to learn to let go. We have to stop seeking perfection. We have to stop saying that where we are at is not enough. We can find ways to strive to make our best work without beating ourselves up for its perceived flaws. We do this by letting go of controlling the end product and focusing on the creative process. And there are many, many ways to do this through fiber arts.”

Letting Go: Intentional Mistake Exercise for Crafters

The exercise

In this exercise, you will intentionally put one glaring mistake into an item that you are making and leave it there.

The purpose

Many people feel that their work must be “perfect” and are dissatisfied with any little mistake that they see. The practice of allowing mistakes in the work will help release you from this perpetual feeling that things could always be done better and let you appreciate the beauty of things that you make just the way that they are.

Your work doesn’t need to be perfect and neither do you. Our imperfections are amazing.

Exercise In depth

Consider how you feel about mistakes in your work. If they bother you, examine why they bother you. What beliefs do you hold about what a mistake says about you? How do you feel when you see mistakes in someone else’s work? Do you hold others to the same high standards that you hold yourself to? Think about the voice in your head that belittles your mistakes; who does that voice belong to? What would be the worst thing that might happen if you allowed mistakes into your work?

Exercise steps:

1. Select a project for this exercise. It could be something you’re already working on or a new project but either way it should be something that you’re excited about working on and either keeping for yourself or giving to someone else. Don’t make it a throwaway project since that misses the point of the exercise.

2. Choose an error to make. You will find some examples below this exercise. Make a note in the pattern where you’re going to place the error.

3. Crochet the pattern. When you get to the note you’ve made, intentionally make the mistake. Pay attention to how this makes you feel.

4. Finish the project. Keep it in a place where you can see it. Notice if the mistake seems obvious to you and whether or not it bothers you.

5. Show the work to someone else. See if they say anything about the mistake. Notice what you’re thinking as they look at your work.

IDEAS: TYPES OF ERRORS TO PLAY AROUND WITH

Some examples of the types of mistakes you could put into your work for this exercise include:

• Improperly joining yarn or thread. For example, in crochet or knitting, you could put a knot in the yarn if you don’t usually do this. In embroidery or sewing, you might tie off a thread visibly on the front of the work instead of neatly on the back.

• Improperly finishing ends. In crochet or knitting, leave a tail of yarn poking through the fabric instead of weaving it in securely. In macramé, leave one cord’s tail longer or frayed. In needlefelting, don’t blend an edge fully so the base fiber peeks through.

• A single incorrect stitch or row. In crochet, that might mean a double crochet where a treble should be. In knitting, it could be purling instead of knitting one stitch. In embroidery, you could reverse the direction of a satin stitch. In weaving, misplace the shuttle path for one row.

• Adding or missing a stitch, knot, or section. This might be one extra stitch or one too few in a row or round. In quilting, you might misalign one seam. In macramé, skip a knot in a repeating pattern.

• Starting with the wrong number of stitches or foundation. In crochet or knitting, this might require compensating with increases or decreases later. In weaving, you could skip a warp thread at the beginning and adjust for it later. In sewing, cut a piece slightly off-pattern and work it into the design.

• Planned but misplaced shaping. Increasing or decreasing the wrong amount or in the wrong row or section. In quilting, this might show up as one triangle rotated incorrectly. In embroidery, accidentally mirroring part of a motif.

• Unexpected color changes. Changing colors mid-row instead of at the beginning of a new row. In quilting or weaving, swapping a fabric or thread color in a block or stripe. In embroidery, using the wrong shade for one small section.

• Using an inconsistent material or tool. For example, using a slightly different type or weight of yarn, thread, or fabric in just one section of the project. This could be substituting a different fiber content (like mixing wool and cotton), switching to a different size crochet hook, needle, or punch needle for part of the work, or including a scrap fabric with a clashing print in quilting or sewing.

• Misaligning a pattern element. Intentionally placing one motif, square, or stitch slightly off from its intended position—rotating a quilt block the wrong way, centering an embroidery motif unevenly, misplacing a row of weaving, or sewing an appliqué piece off-center. This disrupts symmetry or visual flow in a small but noticeable way.

• Introducing irregular texture or tension. You might vary the tension in one area of your knitting, allow loose loops to form in punch needle or weaving, leave a macramé knot bulky, or felt one section less thoroughly than the rest. In embroidery, you could deliberately make one stitch longer or shorter than it should be. These subtle variations shift the feel and appearance of the piece.

Variation examples for different crafts:

EXERCISE TIPS TO KEEP IN MIND

• Make a mistake that is large enough to be noticeable in your project but not so big that it will ruin the functionality of the piece. For example, you don’t want to change a row of single crochet to a row of double treble crochet in a garment because it will affect fit, but you could change a row of single crochet to a row of half double crochet with less impact on function.

  • Or, alternatively, make a dramatic mistake, with intentional awareness that function will be compromised but aesthetics might be more interesting.

• Noticing is the key thing here. Notice the mistake. Notice how it makes you feel to make a mistake. Notice how you feel when others see your mistake.

• Prepare an affirmation for accepting your mistake. “My work is valuable and wonderful even when it has errors” is something you could remind yourself as you work on this exercise.

Taking it further:

If mistakes in your work are something that bother you then it might be worthwhile to do some research into different cultural beliefs that view errors in work differently.

For example, there is the Japanese concept of wabi sabi, wherein the imperfection of an item is not only acceptable but is actually what makes the item most valuable.

Likewise, there’s a wives’ tale that Amish women always put one mistake in every quilt they make because they believe that aiming for perfection is a mockery to God. That tale turns out to likely be a myth but it’s a concept worth exploring as an alternative viewpoint if you’re a perfectionist.

Similarly, In Islamic art, artists traditionally avoided depicting human forms and instead created intricate, mathematically complex geometric patterns. However, it's often said, though debated among scholars, that artisans would intentionally introduce a small mistake in their work to reflect the belief that only God is perfect. Whether or not this was a formal practice, the sentiment behind it still resonates: perfection is divine, and we, as humans, are not meant to attain it.

You might also look at traditions like visible mending, which has roots in many cultures, where instead of hiding flaws, the repair is made boldly and beautifully. A patch on a worn spot or a bright line of stitches across a tear becomes part of the story of the item, not a flaw to be corrected but a feature to be honored.

In some African American quilting traditions, improvisation and irregularity are key parts of the design, not deviations from it. These choices can be expressions of creativity, individuality, and cultural identity. They remind us that there is more than one standard for beauty, and that perfection isn't the only or even the most meaningful goal in creative work.

When we allow space for imperfection in our creative work, we also allow space for ourselves: to be human, to grow, to be present in the process rather than fixated on the outcome. A mistake left in a piece can become a quiet act of acceptance, a reminder that beauty is not found in flawlessness but in honesty, in effort, and in the hand of the maker. Let your work reflect not just your skill, but your story.

You Might Also Like to Read:

Create Me Free

Things Artists Might Not Need to Give a Hoot About ...

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Tip: Create a "Brag Book" To Keep You Inspired When You're Losing Your Way

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Create Me Free

Happiness is yellow: why neurodivergence can drive creativity - Guest Post by Allegra Chapman

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3 years ago · 30 likes · 14 comments · Kathryn Vercillo

Crafting is about so much more than the products we make. It is about how we show up in the process of making. When we slow down enough to feel the yarn in our hands, to watch a pattern take shape row by row, or to sit quietly with the sound of scissors cutting fabric, we enter into a space of awareness. That awareness can take many forms. Sometimes it is calming, sometimes energizing, sometimes clarifying. There is no one right way to experience it.

As I’ve worked with crafting as a tool for healing, I’ve come to recognize several distinct but related states that fiber artists often move through during their practice. These include grounding, centering, focus, flow, and relaxation. Each of these offers something different, and each can be supported by craft.

Today, I want to look specifically at grounding as a supportive act of intentional awareness that you can access through crochet, knitting, weaving, sewing, etc.

Grounding Through Craft

Grounding is the practice of connecting to the physical world around you and re-establishing your sense of presence in your body. It is what helps you feel solid when your mind is racing, or when the emotional intensity of a situation becomes overwhelming. In clinical and therapeutic contexts, grounding is often used as a tool for anxiety, trauma, and dissociation, helping individuals come back into the here and now.

Grounding is sensory. It engages what you can feel, hear, smell, see, or touch. It is about bringing your awareness out of the spinning thoughts in your head and into the immediate environment and the physical sensations of your body.

While grounding is widely taught in psychology and trauma-informed care, it also has roots in older traditions, of course. Indigenous and animist cultures have long understood the value of connecting to the earth, to the body, and to the material world as a way of staying rooted. In contemporary somatic therapy, grounding is one of the first steps in regulating the nervous system.

How Grounding Works in the Brain and Body

Grounding activates the parasympathetic nervous system … the “rest and digest” system that helps bring the body out of a fight, flight, or freeze state. When we engage our senses intentionally, we can shift out of survival mode and back into a state of calm.

Activities that involve touch, temperature, weight, rhythm, or breath are especially effective for grounding. Crafting naturally offers many of these elements.

Grounding in Fiber Arts

Fiber arts are incredibly rich in grounding potential. Consider just a few examples:

• The soft weight of a ball of yarn in your palm.

• The repetitive motion of weaving under and over.

• The tug of a pulled thread or the snap of embroidery floss.

• The texture of felted wool or the cool smoothness of metal needles.

• The way your feet feel against the floor as you sit at your machine or your loom.

• The rhythm of your breath matching the rhythm of your stitching.

Grounding does not always have to be intentional. Sometimes it happens just by sitting down and getting started. Other times, it helps to bring extra attention to the sensations of your work. If you notice yourself getting anxious or dissociated, you might pause and name five things you can feel: the fabric in your lap, the air on your skin, the chair beneath you, the tension in your hands, the sound of scissors.

When to Use Grounding

Grounding is especially helpful during or after stress, anxiety, or emotional flooding. It can also be used preventatively, to start your crafting session with a sense of rootedness. If you feel scattered, disconnected, foggy, or overstimulated, grounding is often the best first step before diving deeper into any creative or reflective work.

Simple Grounding Techniques for Crafters

Here are a few ways to bring grounding more intentionally into your crafting practice:

• Sensory Inventory: Before you begin, pause for 30 seconds and name one thing you can feel, hear, see, and smell.

• Weighted Stitching: Use heavy yarn or fabric and pay close attention to how it pulls on your hands and arms.

• Foot Awareness: Plant your feet flat on the floor as you craft. Notice the pressure and position of your body.

• Cold and Warm Tools: Hold a cold pair of scissors or a warm cup of tea while crafting. Let the temperature anchor you.

• Rhythmic Movement: Use the repetitive motion of stitching to find a slow, steady rhythm. Breathe with it.

• Naming Practice: Silently name what you are doing as you work: “Insert hook. Yarn over. Pull through.” Let this quiet narration guide your awareness back to your body.

Grounding as Creative Foundation

While grounding may sound simple, it is deeply powerful. In fact, it is often the foundation that makes other states possible. When you feel safe and settled, it becomes easier to focus, to flow, and to be mindful. Grounding clears the noise so you can hear your own voice. It helps you feel held, not just by your materials, but by your own body and presence. And from that place of rootedness, your creativity can begin to grow.

Five-Sense Stitching, a Fiber Artist’s Grounding Exercise

This exercise helps you reconnect with the physical world through your senses. It is especially helpful when you feel anxious, disconnected from your body, or overwhelmed by mental noise. Grounding brings you back to where you are, right now, using what you can touch, see, hear, smell, and feel.

Begin by choosing a small project or fiber task that feels simple and tactile. This might be a row of single crochet, a stretch of hand quilting, spinning on a drop spindle, or threading a warp onto a frame loom. Choose something that allows for a bit of pause between actions.

As you begin, take a deep breath. Sit comfortably. Feel the weight of your body supported by the chair or floor. Let your feet plant firmly.

Now move through your senses one by one as you begin your craft. Work slowly. With each sense, bring full attention to what is happening.

Touch: Focus first on what your hands are feeling. The texture of the yarn, the temperature of the needle, the pull of the thread through fabric. Describe it to yourself. Is it rough, smooth, warm, slick, resistant?

Sight: Shift attention to what you see. Observe the color variations in the fiber, the shapes forming beneath your hands, the contrast between stitches or weaves. Let your eyes take in the details as though you were seeing them for the first time.

Sound: Listen for the quiet sounds of your craft. The scrape of the needle through cloth, the click of knitting needles, the soft thud of felt compressing under pressure. Let the sound guide your pace.

Smell: Bring your work close and notice any scent. Natural wool often carries the smell of lanolin. Cotton may be neutral or carry the faint scent of fabric softener. Even your hands might smell of soap, lotion, or the material itself.

Physical Sensation: Finally, tune in to the rest of your body. Notice where there is pressure or tension. Are your shoulders tight? Are your legs grounded? Feel the air against your skin. Let your awareness expand to include your whole body.

You can repeat this cycle of five senses more than once. Or you can linger with just one. The purpose is not to rush through but to return your attention to the present moment through your physical experience.

Deeper Understanding of the Exercise

This practice draws from principles in somatic psychology and trauma-informed therapy, particularly the use of sensory tracking as a method for nervous system regulation. Grounding through the five senses is commonly taught in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and somatic experiencing, where it is used to interrupt cycles of dissociation, hyperarousal, or emotional flooding.

Neuroscientifically, this type of sensory engagement stimulates the insula—a region of the brain involved in interoception (the awareness of the internal body state) and sensory integration. Engaging the senses also activates the parasympathetic nervous system, especially through the vagus nerve, which helps shift the body out of fight-or-flight and into a “rest and digest” state. That shift decreases cortisol and adrenaline levels, promoting a calmer, more regulated baseline.

In occupational therapy, sensory-based regulation strategies are frequently used for individuals with sensory processing challenges, including those with autism, PTSD, or anxiety disorders. The hands-on nature of fiber arts already offers many of the benefits these therapies aim to create—this exercise simply makes those elements intentional.

In short, you are not just being present. You are training your body to recognize safety through sensory input. Over time, this can build a more resilient nervous system, increase your window of tolerance, and reduce the physiological impact of chronic stress.

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a year ago · 19 likes · 5 comments · Kathryn Vercillo

I love the members of the THREADSTACK directory and all that they share with us about the world of fiber arts and crafts. So, I went through the directory today and pulled out recent posts to highlight for you. I hope you find wonderful things that you enjoy reading and wonderful people to connect with!

Cherry Heart

Procrastinating or Creating?

I’ve come across a few things lately that talk about procrastination being an emotional problem. Meaning you avoid a task because you anticipate doing it will make you feel a negative emotion: anxious, annoyed, like you’re failing, or doing it wrong. This makes perfect sense to me and I’m as guilty of it as the next person…

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Lately, I’ve found myself pulled back to the old habits that always help me in uncertain times: walking, knitting, a whole day to catch up on minute work details, creamy coffee and lots of spritzy water. I started a clay class at the local ceramic studio. (The instructor said that at some point the hand eye coordination will kick in, like learning to ri…

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a year ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Rachel

Craft to Heal is a year-long series of workshops for exploring how to utilize fiber arts for healing, growth and connection.

The full series costs $300 and includes:

• 22 workshops, each with a different monthly theme

  • You can attend live but you don’t have to attend live to receive the recordings.

• PDFs for each month that are about a full chapter each and include information, exercises and journal prompts

Here’s what the PDF Table of Contents for April, Part 1 looks like:

Enter this giveaway to win a free year:

• Visit this post and cross-post it to your own Substack.

• It must be sent via email as well as published on your page.

• That’s it. That enters you to win.

I should automatically receive notice of each cross-post but feel free to leave a comment here when you’ve posted just to make sure.

Additional Information:

• Here’s how to cross-post if you aren’t sure.

• And here’s more info about Craft to Heal.

Today we get to know more about of:

I'm makin' it

If you were obsessed with Project Runway and now have grandma hobbies, this place is for you.

By Kaitlin Senter

I'm Kaitlin! I write about how mainstream fashion culture influences the handmade space, as well as share project journals and inspiration.

I can’t wait to learn more! What are the crafts that you enjoy?

I'm a tech editor in training, freelancer copyeditor, and homeschooling mom of 3 living in Texas. My two main loves are sewing and knitting but I have begun dabbling in spinning, embroidery, quilting, and crochet. I love the outdoors and also spend a good amount of time growing fruit trees and the occasional flower garden.

A multi-crafter. Love it. When and how did you learn to sew?

I learned to sew in 2022. My kids were of an age where every time you turned around they were wearing a hole in a favorite lovey or article of clothing. They were constantly asking my mom to mend things for them. She didn't mind, but when I also found myself adding things to her mending pile, I decided I wanted to learn to mend our things for myself. I turned to YouTube for instruction and the algorithm took me down the handmade wardrobe rabbit hole. I decided that for Christmas that year I would make myself a holiday outfit and never looked back.

I love that you made something for yourself. Do you do that often?

I usually make things for myself but am often making things for my children and my mom who is one of the most handmade gift worthy people I've ever encountered. I've taught a few sewing classes to the kids in our homeschool group as well, but until recently my makes have been very personal.

In addition to sewing, you’re interested in lots of other crafts. What would you say are some things you really want to try?

Honestly, I'm a bit of a craft and technique collector. It's really difficult to pin down one! While weaving is high on my list, I am really working hard at becoming a better spinner. I am currently using a drop spindle and reading Respect the Spindle and Yarn-i-tec-ture but would love to invest in a spinning wheel soon.

Oh that sounds fun! Is there a craft or technique you’ve tried and don't really enjoy or haven't tried but really don't want to?

I'm not that into knitting socks. I've made quite a few & need so much recovery time afterward. I'm not sure why, they just aren't for me!

And when did you learn knitting?

I learned to knit in 2023 while recovering from surgery. I wrote about that complicated experience here:

I'm makin' it

Tangled yarn, stronger mind

The drugs were working. I felt comfortable, relaxed, even a little sleepy. Today might not yield my best work, but how hard could knitting really be…

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a year ago · Kaitlin Senter

I love the part in there about how creating brings a sense of belonging. I definitely find that to be true as well.

Can you say a little bit more about how it’s connected you to others?

Philosophically, I feel incredibly connected to the world, past and present, at large when I craft. Crafting has been a necessity for humans since we began and continues to be necessary for many around the world. It's a tradition that transcends race, religion, geographic location, and in some instances, social class. I love participating in an ancient activity that binds us all together like this. I know it's a little meta, but these are what I think about when I pick up my project.

It’s beautiful. And resonates for me.

What is one of your favorite projects ever and why?

My absolute favorite project ever are the Joss pants by Seamwork. I accidentally purchased the wrong sized version of the pattern and didn't realize it until I decided to sew them up 6 months later. Instead of repurchasing or contacting the company, I decided to try my hand at grading the pattern down to my size myself.

I thought I could measure the distance between the size lines on the pattern, trace it off, and create lines of my own down to the size I needed, sew it up and that was that. I was deeply, deeply wrong and ended up with a pair of pants that were clownishly large. I drafted and added darts to the front and back. They were still a bit too large so I graded down the pattern again, until I got a perfect fit.

I wear these pants 3 or 4 times a week when the weather is right (they are a cotton/linen blend and you can believe what you want about Texas but they are still not winter appropriate). Not only because they are the literal perfect fit, but because I am so proud of how I was able to fit them myself with the knowledge I've accrued over my time sewing.

Way to stick with it! Sometimes those projects go awry and just never get finished.

Do you have a story of a project that went wildly wrong?

A few years ago, a close family friend was tying the knot. My husband was in the wedding party, I was not, but I still wanted to look like I belonged on the arm of someone in the party. I had strict parameters: it needed to be fancy enough for a wedding, but simple enough to be used more than the one time, I wanted a very specific half black, half champagne color combo, and if I could swing it, I wanted it in silk. I settled on a two piece outfit: a gorgeous half and half tank top, and a midi-length gathered circle skirt (yes, gathered AND circle). I decided on a silk noil, since that would be the easy to dress down when the wedding was over. I couldn't find the exact shades I wanted so I decided to purchase it undyed and dye it myself (I knew, and still know, very little about dyeing). When all my supplies came, I set to work. Knowing as little as I did about dyeing, the deep champagne color I was hoping for, came out as a sunset orange. It wasn't at all what I wanted, so I overdid everything black. No worries. I moved on to making my top. I misread the measurements on the pattern and made the entire top about two size too small in the chest area. Running out of time, I ran for a ready made wrap sweater in a shade semi-close to what I was hoping to dye my silk and moved on the the skirt. After 1,000 hours of calculations, I realized there was just no way I would have enough fabric for my skirt to be gathered AND circle. I settled for circle only and got sewing. This is when the timing belt on my sewing machine started to get out of time. I struggled along, for several days of sewing, until, it was the day of the wedding. I found myself at my sewing machine, stopping every 10 seconds or so to fix the jumbled mess my out-of-time machine was creating. I sewed for hours that day until I realized about 1 hour before I needed to leave, that I was sweaty, disheveled, and hours away from having a finished skirt, if I ever could finish the skirt with a broken machine. I admitted defeat and went to the wedding in clothes I already had. I did eventually finish the skirt and it is in frequent rotation in my wardrobe, but the tank top has remained balled up in the back of my fabric stash, never to be touched again.

You’re not the only one with stories like these, where the determination just isn’t enough to make it work the way you wanted. And yet, we continue to craft. We do that for many reasons, of course, but I deeply believe that a strong reason is that craft heals us.

How has it been healing for you?

Crafting has really healed my belief in myself. I have always been a person who was afraid to fail, especially if there was a chance that someone else would know about it. As a result, I missed out on a lot of life experience when I was younger due to fear. Crafting has helped me not only face failure, but to learn from it in a way that helps me move forward vs wallowing in inadequacy and shame.

I've also gained quite a bit of confidence in my personal style. It takes a bit of self-assurance to wear something (or multiple) things me-made out into the world where you may not only be judged for the choices you made regarding how you dress but also for the work you've done. I have never in my life felt as sure in my choices as I have since I began crafting my own wardrobe.

I have found again and again that craft serves as a place where we can practice things (failure, risk) in a way that is generally tolerable even if uncomfortable and the more we do it, the more we’re able to do it in other areas of life as well.

It also allows us to explore our identity in some ways.

What do you call yourself - crafter? artist? maker? creative? knitter/sewist?

I prefer fiber artist. Mainly because it encompasses the multitude of thread focused crafts I partake in, but also because I think artist is a word that makes people (including myself) take what you do a little more seriously. It's more than “just a little hobby” for most of us. The word artist honors and acknowledges the passion, knowledge, time, and effort put in to creating the things we make.

Absolutely! That’s something I’ve written about over the years:

Create Me Free

Honoring Your Inner Artist: Healing Through Owning Your Creativity

I Am An Artist. So Are You…

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2 years ago · 29 likes · 8 comments · Kathryn Vercillo

What has brought you to the THREADSTACK community?

Crafting can be a wonderful way to connect with yourself, but you run the risk of becoming isolated. I'm so thankful for the growing online communities that allow both connection and introspection.

I also feel that there is a bit of a gap in the garment making world, where we often discuss making clothes, styling them even, but truly exploring aesthetics & fashion in light of the handmade space is lacking. I'd like to find others who are deeply interested in personal style, fashion as a whole, & how that influences how we craft.

Yes, definitely. Let’s start bringing some people together right now. Who are some of your favorite crafters and why?

Ali of Ali Makes Everything on Youtube. I love her energy, if I am inviting some extra “noise” into my day I need it to be uplifting. As someone with finite time & budget, I also really appreciate how candid she is about the amount of time and money spent per project.

of here on Substack. Honestly, Sam’s hobby basket idea had revolutionized my home life. If you are home care taking, homeschooling, or working from home & find yourself with pockets of time you could use to craft but not enough time to hunt down wherever you last left said craft, you should check out her introductory post on hobby baskets.

Basket Case

a cozy mix of crafts, creativity, and a little chaos. perfect for makers who can’t pick just one hobby. all gathered up and delivered straight from my overflowing hobby basket to yours.

By Sam Cole

Charlie Nebe of The Stitchery on YouTube: the way Charlie just dives into a project with nary a pattern or tutorial in sight is inspirational. I love how she just makes what she wants to make, sometimes it’s practical sometimes not, she’s just there for the love of making.

of here on Substack: Trish marries reflective writing with fiber craft in a way that makes me feel more deeply connected to my own projects.

Textile Redemption

Textile Redemption is the intersection of my focus on personal writing, photography, and passion for redeeming the honor and worth of discarded or damaged vintage textiles, as well as a place for you to connect with my designs, makes, and business

By Trish Overstreet

What else would you like to share before we end this interview?

I'm open to collaborations - especially if you're a pattern designer considering hiring your first editor. Since I'm new to pattern editing I'm very open to swaps and trade in exchange for mutually beneficial work. You can get in contact with me here: https://pressandpurl.my.canva.site/

Make sure to say hi to Kaitlin!

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