Is crocheting a stuffy a creative endeavor?
Hierarchy of needs in action, sooner than I expected
In case you missed it, I shared some of my thinking around the hierarchy of needs on the way to creating space and desire for creative self-expression.
Check out the first two posts here:
When I published these, I thought of this framework almost as breadcrumbs to my future self. Hey, if you ever lose your way back, follow these stages!
Space to not be exhausted
Space to do whatever
Space for joy
Space to create (finally!)
I thought they would be more applicable during major life changes, like years down the line, but even in the last week or so, I’ve been delighted to see that I’ve already been reaping the benefits of clarifying my own thoughts on my hierarchy of needs.
I’ve been recovering from jetlag this past week, while also at a work offsite in San Antonio. In moments of not being able to sleep at night, or having some time to myself in the hotel room, I found myself thinking that I should be writing. If I’m not carving out space to write wherever I can, do I even want it that badly??
BUT, the very first stage of my hierarchy of needs is “space to not be exhausted,” so my most foundational need was to rest. In the moments I could not physically sleep (jet lag), I let myself have judgment-free space to do whatever, which turned out to be binge-watching Love is Blind.
Referencing my hierarchy of needs made it much easier for me to let go of the “should’s” around creative output.
My hierarchy of needs also helped me make sense of past questions I’ve had.
About a year ago, there was a period when I got back into crochet. My grandmother had taught me how to crochet and knit when I was a child, and every few years, I pick up a crochet hook or knitting needles and start a few projects.
Last year, I started making crochet stuffies for the first time. Octopi, hippos, turtles, fish, and more.
But the question that haunted me was, is this even creative?
I bought and followed patterns, crocheting each row exactly as dictated by the pattern. One row of a pattern might look something like this:
10: 3 sc, (2 sc, 1 inc) x 5, 3 sc (21)
This means: 10th row. 3 single crochet stitches, then 2 single crochet and 1 increase stitch (where you crochet twice into one stitch, so each stitch becomes two stitches) repeated 5 times, then 3 single crochet stitches. For a total of 26 stitches.
So, it feels very much like stepping through a basic program with for loops.
Is this creative? To me, creating new patterns is clearly creative, but following a pattern is less creative, but maybe still creative. Maybe there is some room for creativity in choosing the color schemes or embellishments?
Regardless, after publishing Space to do whatever, I realized this was all just a ridiculous line of questioning.
I was trying to justify time spent on a hobby and force myself into a creative space when I hadn’t yet gone through the more foundational levels of needs for space. It didn’t matter if crocheting by following a pattern was creative or not. I was successfully making space to find enjoyment by letting myself follow impulses that led to joy.
Interestingly, I haven’t crocheted much the last few months. My critical self might have thoughts like… Why did I buy all this yarn if I wasn’t even going to stick with this hobby? I never stick with anything long enough to do something with it.
But through the lens of my hierarchy of needs, I look around happily at all my unused yarn, knowing it is all a part of my creative journey.
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If these last few posts about hierarchy of needs and the path to making space for creative self-expression have led to any insights or thoughts for you, I’d love to hear about them! One friend reached out via text, saying “Jean’s Hierarchy of Needs is my new religion!” which made my week.
Amigurumi, FTW!
The question of whether crocheting a stuffy is creative or not got me thinking about two different kinds of "creative" and how there's one type of "creative" that feels like an explicitly novel endeavor and another type of "creative" that feels like it's all about creating a [possibly very small] change in the world through doing. (Maybe terms for these could be "novel-creative" and "doing-creative").
At least in that second sense of making a change in the world, crocheting clearly is doing-creative.
I suppose there might be a 2x2 matrix here of: having novel thoughts vs normal thoughts and creating change-in-the-world vs just thinking about ideas. So someone who has a lot of novel thoughts but never does anything might be one form of creative, someone who has no novel thoughts but makes things happen in the world is another form of creative. Someone who is both novel-creative and doing-creative might be fully-creative (but I suspect that might be privileging that quadrant too much.)
If I had guess, I imagine that optimizing for being doing-creative is the quicker path to becoming fully-creative (i.e. moving to the novel-creative side of the thinking axis) because the nature of human learning and thinking seems to benefit from the doing. So even if doing something in-the-world feels less novel than trying to come up with novel ideas, it seems like it might be the best bridge to doing that. (I also wonder if there is a reflexive or self-reinforcing component to it--creating a change in the world is kind of energizing, and that might stimulate new creative thoughts.) For example, in the case of crocheting stuffies--it seems to me that as you do more of them, there is an emergent novel-creative (vs doing-creative) component of choosing which patterns to make, how to display them, etc. (Not having crocheted, I hesitant to push this line of thought too far, but as someone who has gone to craft fairs to buy nice things to display, I've observed that there is what feels like a novel-creative component in thinking about how to combine those things together in a room, even though I didn't make any of them myself.)
I also tried to map this model into your creative journey model. I think they're more complementary ways of thinking about creativity than they are isomorphic, but it seems like there might be some tendencies for your stages to pair with the quadrants--for example, it seems like someone who needs space to be exhausted is probably in the quadrant of thinking normal thoughts, but not doing. On the other hand, someone who is thinking novel thoughts, but not doing might be more likely to be in the stage of "space for joy" stage.
Anyway, I found your prompt enriching and am glad to have thought some of this through for myself, and I thought you or others might enjoy the places where your post took me.