Crafting Beginnings
Be Willing to Start Again
June 7, 2026
Stand in my apartment. If you listen closely, you can hear my thoughts. Littered with the mess of my creative mind, filled with half-finished and half-started projects
Yarn takes up the bulk of my cubby space – living next to a Michaels for some time did a lot of damage. But there are also stacks of cardstock in every color, a couple of sketchbooks, two drawing tablets. On the bedroom floor is a box of paints and small canvases, others hiding in the closet and between dressers. Under the bed I have boxes of vinyl, a cutting machine, book board, book cloth. There is a storage bin filled with wire, stones, lobster clasps, crimp beads. At least 5000 pieces of origami paper alongside half a dozen books of decorative paper are squirreled away amongst all this. In the living room, under the plant stand, fabric paints and sandpaper, bottles of glue and adhesive remover. There are countless barely touched notebooks and journals on my bookshelf. There are currently nine other writing documents open on my computer, and two coding projects.
Each of these supplies was acquired with excitement and overflowing creative energy. Plans were made. I had infinite imagination. Most were given attention for some time. Hours of YouTube tutorials on crocheting, knitting, drawing, writing, bookbinding, wire-wrapping. Books on origami and writing and coding. Some of these creative passions never made it past the starting line. Fewer have made it to completion. Most sit in the limbo of “I’ll come back to this later.” I always will come back to them later.
Somewhere along the line, my infinite energy shifts focus. Folding paper becomes boring, but trying to make a softcover book into a hardcover becomes the most fascinating thing I have ever encountered. Then books end and the desire to crochet a cardigan enchants me. I leave behind me a trail of what I used to think was failure. I have 58 of the 144 pieces of paper folded for my geometric origami creation tucked into a box. I leave the litter of cut book board and dirty paintbrushes and a craft knife. I work through the back panel of the cardigan and when I pick up my hook to start a front panel, my attention shifts again. The cardigan joins several other half-finished crochet projects.
It was easy to see all these partial attempts as failures. I could not complete it, therefor I am a failure. Simple logic, when you’re in the midst of it. Faulty, of course. But even in knowing that, I could not help but log into Instagram and see all these things being celebrated that were completed. Sometimes a progress pic, but from someone you know will complete it. My Instagram craft highlights have one or two completed crafts; the rest are just me trying the share that creative intoxication of a new project and leaving something half-finished on display. No one likely expects to see the final result of anything I post. Doesn’t that make me a failure? Does that mean I am lacking in some moral virtue?
Of course not. The months of time I have invested over all these projects means something. They occupied my hands. They helped manage the restless thoughts, the mean thoughts. They brought me joy. An afternoon otherwise paralyzed by my own mind instead becomes one of creation. Creation does not need a final product. There is value in the act of creation itself. In imagination and trying to translate that, however messily, to others. The human condition is to try to share that internal world and be understood, and this is just but one way we speak to one another.
Crafts are a form of communication. Crafting, like communication, is never perfect. There is always something misinterpreted, “lost in translation.” We try our best, but it is just a consequence of being unique beings. Some communicate better than others in terms of ‘normalcy.’ A completed craft is like a completed sentence. A thought is followed all the way from point A to point B with no detours along the way. Deviation results in judgement.
I am Broken and I am Mad. I do not communicate ‘normally.’ I stim. I speak in broken fragments; I follow new trains of thought that lead me so far I forget the starting point; I sometimes completely blank on what I was saying at all, like a computer restarting and all my programs being forced closed without saving. I fuck up my grammar and forget what things are called constantly. Even when I read, I rearrange the sentences, insert words, switch letters around. That sure made graduate school difficult, when every reading was who-said-what gibberish. Basically, it became tangled messes in my mind. Not the arguments themselves. The ideas were solid, but who formed which part of the idea? -shrug- Fuck if I know.
My thoughts do not move in straight lines. My head is never empty, never quiet. Crafting is a way for me to communicate. It’s messy. It’s incomplete. It’s my way of building a world for myself. It’s an act of resistance, an act of authenticity. The world tells me that not completing a project is failure. Every half-finished sweater or origami piece is a reflection of a personal fault that could be corrected if I just tried hard enough.
Like my thoughts, my projects branch into projects. My curiosity sniffs out something new and its power overtakes my original intention. In this branching, I learn. Origami morphs from folding paper into geometry. Crochet moves from stitch pattern to stitch pattern. Making jewelry becomes a fascination with the component pieces. I seek out new things. I want to challenge myself. I want to learn the fundamentals while attempting the advanced. But I bounce around, unable to focus that creative energy in one project for too long. Like each new stitch pattern, I have a new thought – this one requires a single crochet, chain three, two double crochet. I follow the yarn; one thread woven and slipped around itself to build something. It is not linear. Why, when even the crafting materials themselves are not linear, do I expect my projects to be?
Crafting is communication, and that communication is a song of resistance. I have been taught my entire life that completion is the only measure of value. How much can you produce? How quickly? Capitalism assumes that if you cannot dance the dance, you are a drain. You lack worth. You take more than you give. You cannot complete.
I challenge that. Every project is not a measure of completion. It is not a measure of productivity. Instead, each project demonstrates something much more beautiful: curiosity, imagination, experimentation. Hope.
Every project I intended, even those I only gathered the supplies for, are proof that I have chosen to move from a consumer and a producer to a maker. I come across an empty space and saw not lack, but infinite possibility. Each project is not a failure because it does not see an end. Each project is a success because it sees a beginning. Every project is proof that I can begin again.
The cubbies filled with yarn, the paper, the paints, all the unfinished sweaters – none of this is failure. It is evidence of life. Not a tidy life. Not one considered productive. But one of creation and curiosity. Every time I try and make a wire tree of fluorite stones, or miscount the width of a crochet project, or pick up a pen to look at a blank page, I am defying what is expected of me. I am communicating my resistance to this world. I am building another, one I hope is better.
My thoughts, my speech, my writing, my crafts – they are often messy and unfinished. I lose my place. I change direction. I do not weave in all my ends. They are all fragments of conversations. But I am communicating something real. I am here. I am curious. I experiment. I challenge. And I always begin again.