Mistakes Were Made*

Before I went to art school, I made art all the time, but art school ruined it for me. After years of extremely high standards (we had projects measured to the thousandth of an inch with calipers FFS!) exacerbated my underlying perfectionism, I stopped making anything for fun. After I graduated I started sewing to reclaim making for myself as a source of accomplishment, as a release from anxiety, and as an outlet for my restless energy. But, I found I couldn't just quit being a perfectionist over night.

I stumbled across the phrase "handmade vs. homemade" on a craft blog recently. Handmade, it posited, is elegant and beautiful. Homemade, on the other hand, is the tacky and unsophisticated work of an amateur crafter. If you are going to make your own clothes, strive for handmade. Follow these instructions closely they warn, or else you will end up with a garment that looks homemade.

Despite their warnings, I do not follow the instructions closely enough, and rarely do the garments I make truly transcend homemade. My work always has mistakes, not just because just about everything I make I am making for the first time, but I propose, because I am a human being. As a recovering perfectionist, I realized if I try too hard to aspire to the perfect handmade standard I was going to ruin crafting for myself. If crafting was going to work for me, I would need to set my own standards for good enough or risk living in a state of neverending failure to achieve my own too high standards.

The internet offers us 2 templates for the craft blog:

• The aspirational: There are so many blogs dedicated to how to achieve the perfect product. This article on the Grainline Blog about strategic backtack placement serves as a perfect examplar of the aspirational form of craft blogs.
• The send up: Nothing is more fun than making fun of others' failures. The internet delivers on this with a robust assortment of offerings deriding and mocking those crafters with hubris to fly too close to the sun.

In this blog, I am seeking out a middle path. Just because the things I make will never be perfect doesn't mean I'll resign myself to making crappy projects. Nor does it mean I want to be forever ruled by feelings of failure and inadequacy when my finished product doesn't measure up to the Grainline Blog.

These pages will be a tribute to the experience of making things from scratch, and what it has to teach me about my relationshiop to perfectionism, what it takes to make projects that are good enough, and what making things that are good enough can teach me about feeling good enough.