I started taking pottery classes in May and I quickly got obsessed. I’m not very good which, as someone who is usually pretty intuitive when it comes to crafty stuff, was hard for me to accept. But I love it so much. A lot of the thing I do involve me at a desk or on my couch, hunched over and paying attention to very painstaking detail. Pottery lets me be big and messy (much to my teacher’s dismay) and since I’ve been doing a lot of screen printing onto clay, my pottery classes have also encouraged me to draw more- another thing I’m not particularly good at but am really growing to love.
My second big knitting project of the year was a lace sweater. Just for the hell of it. Again, I like knitting projects where I can learn a new skill, and I like knitting projects that look really impressive. This one fit both of those criteria. And just like the last one, I gave it away as soon as it was finished, but that’s okay-it looks a lot better on my friend Rebecca than it did on me.
Self care has never been something I’m very good at. I can be exceedingly hard and demanding on myself and unforgiving when I don’t meet self-imposed standards. This past year, with all of it’s new stresses and anxieties, only served to further a lot of my bad habits and fingernail biting tendencies. Sometime in June my friend Nico sent me an e-mail and told me that I needed to practice being kind to myself. I’m not great at self care, by any means, but I am practicing and now I have a reminder to hang on my wall.
Yady Kates 