The Sisterhood of the Travelling Crochet Hook: the creative process:1

People often ask me what is my most important source of inspiration and creativity.

That’s an easy answer for me.

The thing that inspires me the most, is the question:

“What If? What would happen if I……..”

I believe it’s essential to take chances and to be willing to get things wrong in order to find a way to something, somewhere that has ‘rightness’ about it.

That’s what happened for me when I saw a blog entry about an artist who is working with absurdly oversized knitting needles. My immediate response was to think: Why? Why is she doing that? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work with a large crochet hook?

And whoosh! That was it!I was caught up in a torrent of creative exhilaration and excitement.

I rummaged around the studio, and found a large ‘marrotte’ that Jim had turned for me on the lathe. (As well as being a designer and writer, I’m a professional puppeteer. A marrotte is a hand held puppet that is usually a head on a stick kind of thingie).

I charged out to the studio and started carving and shaping and came up with the first Gulliver Crochet Hook.

And, then, of course, it was essential to start exploring what I could create with it. I combined roving and fabric strips and yarn and all manner of things, and made teddy bears and a shawl.

It was a real challenge for me, as I have been focusing on fine to medium weights of yarns and threads for years. I hadn’t realized that I had set up invisible ‘boundaries’ that defined what was workable for me in crochet.

Working on a very large scale forced me to thump right up against that unconscious set of ‘rules of engagement’. And, to be honest, it hasn’t always been comfortable or easy to figure out how large scale crochet is different from small scale crochet.

One of the surprises for me is that it isn’t necessarily faster than small scale crochet.

The other surprise that blossomed so beautifully and unexpectedly for me, out of the seed of the large hooks, is the Sisterhood (and Misterhood) of the Travelling Crochet Hook. The huge hooks quickly decided that they needed to become dolls, and that stirred something magical in me.

The crochet hook that is in the picture at the top of this entry doesn’t exist in that shape anymore. This journey of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Crochet hook has forced me to completely re-configure that hook into something- someone very different. I’ll upload a pic in my next entry.

My voyage of discovery of working with hooks that are extravagently outside my normal comfort zone has opened up new gateways, new paths for me. And, as my hero, Albert Einstein says, that’s what creativity is all about.

And the only constant is change, so in my next entry, I’ll show how some of the Gulliver hooks have changed…..
hugs

Noreen

PS: if you’d like to see more of the one of a kind Gulliver crochet hooks, please click on Gulliver crochet hooks