Dearest Needlework Community,
Here are my ugly shoes! Or at least, one of them! Maybe the second one will be more beautiful, heheh! This week was a painstaking labour of love, from one side of this shoe, to the other... Many hours of slowly locating pricked holes, and then getting the threads aligned.
It seemed before this week, that I might finish them 'soon'... Isn't that often the way with art, crafts, making things by hand? "I'll just do this stitching and then that stitching, and it'll be effortlessly ....done!" Then 7 days later, and I've only got half of one shoe sewn.
It's at this point also, not just because it is taking so long, but also due to the level of incompetence I have, that it becomes hard to keep going. It probably feels like this to some degree, every single day - in various activities inside and outside of the home, BUT keeping going and looking for the solution is a life choice, and this usually leads to success.
My shoes feel like such a good example for me, of being humble; of accepting where I am not masterful or elegant, and recognising where I can work much better. I'm glad I didn't study a pattern for this - even though it might have shown me how to accurately meet up top and sole of the shoes; it is good simply to wade into the murk of the unknown, and find the Way!
'Wading around in the murk' is one of the best places to learn: like creative chaos, waking dreaming, or exploring a wild place - this is where humans are most naturally inventive. We access a primitive and holistic learning mode: embodied wisdom - which is both already in us or in the ether around us, and is something unfolding and appearing before us as we work.
It's a space which is momentarily 'impossible': trying to do something, without the skills to do it. Trying to learn but having no structure for the learning. Nevertheless, the skills come, just by the act of being and doing.
It seems like a hurdle that cannot be climbed over. And then it is gone.
So these are the efforts of my week: the shoe feels beautifully soft and neat on my foot, and I am excited to do the same stitchings around the sole of the right-footed shoe also. I'm impatient too, to add the wooden buttons - and to make more wooden buttons! The making of these shoes is bringing a big upwelling of new ideas and desires to make advance my skills: this is another positive effect of being immersed like this in the artisan way; with new skills acquired, the creative font opens, and more and more possibilities make themselves visible.
Well worth the temporary discomfort of seeing an ugly shoe, eh?
Much love to you all in your endeavours this Needlework Monday, dearest people!