The Pleasure of the Process
By: Katy Preen
Tags: Life Lessons, Life, Work, Work Life Balance, Writing

The Pleasure of the Process

I took some time for rest and slow thinking, and it brought me back to why I pursue my craft.

Image via pxhere

I’ve not written anything for about a week, as I’ve been experiencing a bit of a lull in enthusiasm. The good thing about this is that instead of mulling this over and over and trying to push myself to do work that I know I can’t, I chose to take a rest and do something enjoyable instead. Unbelievably to many, this took a conscious effort, but that’s how my upside-down brain works. I consider this progress over my guilt-laden days of pretending to write while surfing the internet and playing solitaire all day.

I need some new clothes, but I’m skint and I have a ton of stuff that’s never been worn and doesn’t fit, so I decided to cannibalise a few items to make something new. My current project is a hoodie fashioned from two other hoodies and some random trimmings I found. Sewing is a great thing to do in order to relax the brain. You need to concentrate pretty hard, but it’s on one very specific and repetitive thing.

Because it’s a relatively simple task, my mind was free to declutter during the process, and I had a load of other random ideas while I was stitching pieces of fabric together. Not just for my writing, but for artwork that might actually get my long-awaited Etsy shop off the ground. Of course, I had a notepad nearby ready to scribble all this down, as and when the ideas flowed.

It’s pretty easy to make your own clothing if you’re not starting from scratch, so I just needed to swap some bits around, cut larger pieces off of one to add to the other, and to preserve the one zip that’s still working. I also managed to keep a bit of the print from the least-whole garment, so that was great. There was just one problem.

The smaller hoodie had a really handy pocket on the arm that I wanted to move across to the new one. I’d have to separate it from the sleeve because the recipient hoodie has longer arms. No problem, I thought. I’ll just unpick the stitching on the sleeve, and then re-install it in the new hem I’m creating to make the sleeves wider. A good idea, in theory, but the practical side didn’t go quite to plan.

I fixed the pocket in place with some pins and tacking stitches, and then neatly doubled-stitched it along the seam by hand (I don’t have a sewing machine at the moment, but being able to stitch well by hand has rescued many a pair of socks). I was almost done, and I turned the sleeve the right way round to check it all lined up, and… I had sewn the pocket with the zip on the inside of the pocket.

I was really annoyed and considered just leaving it like that, but I thought to myself, no, I want it done right, so I’ll just unpick it, fix it in place the other way round this time, and redo it. It was pretty awkward because there were four pieces of cloth meeting at one point (probably why I cocked it up in the first place), but I managed to get it sewn together with the zip facing outwards.

Once more, I turned the sleeve the right way round to see how it looked. I had only gone and sewn it with the zip pointing downwards instead of up towards the armpit. I was pretty pissed off by now, but I still wanted to get it right, so I patiently unpicked my neat and strong double-stitching and began the process over again. This time, finally, it was done, and it didn’t look half bad.

Now, I could actually fix the sleeves to the body of the hoodie, but before I started on that, I went for a little wander on YouTube, and I discovered this video of a baby bird hatching from its egg. It seemed to mirror how I felt about the never-ending pocket of doom I had created:

It’s both joyful and frustrating to watch. We first see the chick make a little hole in the shell, and there’s a tiny bit of movement we can spy through the hole. But the chick gives it a few seconds before it tries to peck away at it a little more. It makes an almost-perfect straight line, like you might make taking the top off of a hard-boiled egg for breakfast.

And then it takes another breather. It’s hard work for this little being, and it’s going to take a while to get out. We can see what might be a beak nosing through the hole, and it pecks along the edge to make it a little longer. But this takes time, and the chick pauses frequently while it’s working on chiselling a way out — it looks a little like it’s just having a nice lie-down before it gets on to the next bit.

There’s some visible wriggling, and the crack lengthens. The bird could emerge any moment! But not quite. The tiny creature keeps moving about, and the shell almost looks like it will split into two, but the bird isn’t quite able to manage it. It needs to build up the strength to break free. And so it continues. We can see tiny pink body parts, with perhaps some matted feathers, but we can’t tell exactly what they are yet.

Tiny fragments fall off of the shell as the bird wriggles some more, but the shell is still mostly intact. Every so often, the bird stops and then gets going again. The pauses are almost as long as the active moments. The bird is really taking its time over this. The crack widens some more, and we can see a bit more of the little wrinkled body within.

That was a big push, so it stops and rests again for a few seconds. Then it moves some more, trying to break the shell apart, but not quite able to do so, it pauses for another rest. This goes on for some time, exertion followed by rest, followed by more effort and more rest, until, eventually, a scrawny, naked and helpless bird emerges. It was all worth the wait.