I love teaching. I love it even more when I am teaching a new stitcher, and I get to watch as everything starts to click, and they finally fail enough times to succeed, and they begin to get excited. They are excited because they are feeling the rewards of struggle.
That’s right, the rewards of struggle.
No one likes to struggle. We dislike it so much that many of us avoid things we know will be a struggle—that difficult conversation with your bestie. Not telling your children ‘no’ when you should because they will meltdown, and you will be stuck dealing with the temper tantrum that follows. Sometimes you don’t explain your feelings to your spouse because you don’t want to deal with the long conversation that will follow or have to deal with their emotions in return. And perhaps you even avoid looking under your children’s beds when you’re cleaning because you don’t have an extra hour to pull everything out or the energy to make them put it all away correctly.
Nope, we avoid the struggle.
The same is true for learning to stitch. It can be a struggle. And if you aren’t a natural-born stitcher, it can feel discouraging.
But therein lies the beauty of struggle. Let me explain.
To those of you who desperately want to stitch, but when you pick up the yarn or sit down to the sewing machine, everything looks wrong, your stitches are awkward and all different sizes, and no matter how hard you try to mimic the videos you watch, you feel like a neurosurgeon trying to perform brain surgery wearing insulated mittens, I have one piece of advice:
DON’T GIVE UP. Don’t put down the yarn, don’t stop making ugly potholders, don’t quit fumbling with your yarn and needles, and don’t stop picking out stitches and starting over. Just. Don’t. Quit.
You are learning more from your repeated failures than you can imagine.
Have you ever heard the parable of the pottery class? If you have, you can scroll down a little. But, for the rest of you, here it is.
Parable of the Pottery Class (I have no idea if it’s really a parable, it’s just how I heard it)
There once was a pottery teacher who decided to experiment on her students. So, she split the class into A and B groups at the beginning of the semester.
She assigned Group A to make one pot every day for the first 30 days of class, no matter what they looked like, how bad they were, or the pot’s level of failure. She assigned Group B to make just one pot for the entire 30 days and focus on making it well.
At the end of the 30 days, she judged the pots and found that the ten best pots all came from Group A.
Why is that?
The students in Group A benefited from the successes and failures of 30 pots. The students in Group B only had experience from one pot.
So here’s the lesson. Struggling to learn is a gift. It is the gift of experience, confidence from success, and endurance developed through struggle. So don’t avoid the struggle. Don’t shy away from the failures.
Embrace the struggle. Relish in the failures. Post pictures of them online with a string of laughing emojis!!
The Most Important Lesson For a New Stitcher
It doesn’t matter what your beginning projects look like; it matters that you finish them. Then reward yourself for completing the project by starting another.
Then another.
And another.
Until the light goes on, and the experience you have gained from the failed awful projects starts to pay off, and you feel the rewards of struggle.
Happy stitching!
xo- Lavena
