These Crafting Communities are Freaking Me Out

There’s this exercise that I did back in middle school at least a couple of times. It’s the peanut butter and jelly activity. You basically take turns explaining to the teacher or the camp counselor or whatever how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the adult in question follows your directions literally or purposefully misinterprets them. We all have a laugh while learning the importance of understanding where other people come from and effective communication.
This is a pretty solid ongoing lesson through adulthood, in theory, but in practice it can be…weird…
Late last year I talked a little about being in comic book spaces when it felt like new hobbyists did no pre-research. That you have to learn how to meet people where they are even if where they are is a mystery. I still contend that if you’re don’t know how to get through the first round of basic questions on your own, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
There was new chapter in this observation for me recently, however.
A writer I follow got his first sewing machine. Great! He was showing the markings he made to learn it and asking questions. People responded with various advice. He realized, quickly, that he was missing some important vocabulary and decided to backtrack a little on his exploration of the hobby.
Now this caught my attention because I learned to sew on a machine at a really really young age. I should be way better than I am after all these years, but I generally know my way around. I had this kind of moment of, “I’m not sure I know how to teach someone how to do this.” Basically “could I teach a beginner’s adult sewing class?”
Sewing is part of contingent of hand-craft I learned while still in single-digits. Cross-stitch, plastic canvas/Bargello, crochet, embroidery, latch-hook, wood burning, bleach stenciling, screen printing, paper making. If you can get a kit for it at Michaels, I learned it. I also learned how to use a nail gun, change a tire, and lay laminate flooring before my teens, too, to be clear. Don’t want to paint this as a one-sided collection of skills. And I do a number of these still, but it’s only recently I got back into online communities around some of these hobbies, particularly counted cross-stitch.
These new hobbiest have a completely different set of problems than the comic book community.
The first thing I had to contend with was that I was coming into a slightly different culture of cross-stitch than I had learned in. Keeping in mind I had learned hands-on from older female family members in mostly the very late 90s with a little coming into the early 2000s.
When I was coming up, kits existed, but not nearly to the degree they do now. I found that it was a lot more common and way cheaper to keep a stash of raw supplies and pull from patterns. They’d come in your preferred monthly magazine or a little two-page pamphlet at Joanne’s or your favorite company would put out a book a year. Maybe two if you were lucky. This limitation sort of bred the tacit expectation that if you wanted to “evolve” you’d start putting together your own patterns at some point. Maybe just piecing together different things from different patterns to create something new. That was just the thing you did if you wanted to be “better” at the craft. In the general communities I’m in right now, I don’t really see a lot of evidence of that. And with so many patterns and kits available now, I totally understand that shift. When you don’t have to piecemeal your patterns because, statistically, someone already something you’d like, then fuck yeah.
But then I also think it affects the perception of “difficulty.” And it very well may be just me and the way I process the craft. There seems to be a strong correlation between stitch-count and difficulty or number of colors and difficulty, all in regards to a kit or pattern being too “difficult” for a commenter in question. And I think some of these commenters might be underestimating themselves. It’s not like more freeform embroidery where you have a couple dozen stitches to learn and you have to eyeball your needle placement. With traditional cross-stitch, you’re putting x’s and half x’s of a certain color into a grid based on what a chart tells you. It’s paint by numbers with a couple extra steps. Which is not a bad thing. Every needle craft breaks down into some kind of absurdly hyperbolized set of simple steps when you get to the base of it.
I just don’t start to see things as being “difficult” until you start designing your own patterns, and that’s a big reason that’s all I’ve done for a good fifteen years at this point. I don’t find kits and patterns satisfying. Like I find someone else’s simpler self-drafted pattern way more impressive than someone just finishing up a Dimension kit. Which I have to emphasize it’s not anyone’s job to impress me, so literally you do you. I’m just some bitch on the internet.
But it makes me re-evaluate how I interact with the hobby. Maybe I’m the one who’s getting it wrong, and I need to chill the fuck out.