Stressed out? Craft!!

Hi All,

Many different people have many different ways to try to de-stress, or decompress from things going on in their lives. Perhaps their kids are driving them up a wall not listening, or at work something isn’t going how you wanted, you didn’t get a promotion, finances are tight, etc.

I’ve been in all of those situations… sometimes every single one of them in a single day.

My point is that you need to find a way to make sure to take care of yourself in a way that will be healthy for all those involved. (Don’t make a bad situation worse.)

In my life, and for me, the best way I have to de-stress, is to craft in one form or another. There have been times when that craft is simply creating beautiful doodles on the back of an envelope from mailers that would normally go straight to recycle. (Because I couldn’t afford to buy anything else to craft with… and I think I had a bank pen in the example I am thinking of… sooooooo… free pen.)

Starting this school year for me has been extremely stressful, as I’m sure it has been for many of you with children or grandchildren, friends with children, if you’re in the education field in any capacity, well… you get the idea. The other night I found that I couldn’t sleep at all from being stressed the night before school started so needed a quite craft to keep my hands busy and focus my mind elsewhere… hopefully to fall asleep again, but that rarely happens for me… just something I live with. Sunday night I choose to get out crochet thread (10 embroidery thread or sometimes I think it’s called Shashiko thread?) and a teeny tiny hook and make a doily.

When I’m overly stressed this is my go to besides ribbon embroidery… but ribbon embroidery you have to get out more supplies, and I wanted to be quite.

Anyway, from 2 to 6 am this is what I worked on. Monday night I then spent another hour decompressing from the day with the same project and finished it off. Above is the finished product. Doilies make me focus on that sometimes extremely frustrating teeny tiny hook. In this case it was 2.5 mm… aka… SUPER SMALL! When you are working with this size, you have to not have other things in your mind or it’s easy to miss picking up your working thread, or miss your stitch change… things like that. It forces you… or at least me… to focus and to ground myself.

I could have finished this project much faster, but because I was having trouble putting issues out of my mind, it took longer. I will say however it did help me focus and remember what was important looking at that finished product.

I know this is a lot longer than some of my other posts, but with the crazy happening in 2020, others might be feeling this way to, so thought I’d share my coping technique.

I hope this inspires you to create a safe healthy space and time for yourself to let out frustrations in the way of your choosing. Hopefully not at 2 am like me, but if that’s what’s needed… I’m behind you either way!!!