Ginger Hendrix, Writer

How Public Rejection Sucks

A couple of months back, I put up a free class on Skillshare, a sort of beginner's guide to getting started at the sewing machine. And, you know, I did it the Ginger way. Pulled in good gob of goofiness so that I could have fun doing it. 

Then yesterday, I got my first real, nasty kind of public comment about it. And, of course, there is the thing of how we always focus on the bad reviews and not the good ones, but there's got to be more than just that too. Something about the hiding that wants to come when the bad news voices come at us. 

I've written thousands and thousands of words about this failure loop, but it never stops intriguing me. So I thought I would just go ahead and list publicly here my best rejection to date--think of this as a christmas gift to you and to me (something almost as tasty as watching ice skaters fall in competition):

Drumroll...

The former university student who wrote: "she is a dry humored left wing cocky bitch..."

And I have to say that after years of receiving public blips of out-in-the-world rejection, this one is still my absolute favorite. It's the one I prefer to quote when anybody else starts to talk about their own rejection and somehow it accidentally turns into a competition.

Score!

And why is this a Christmas post because there is not a single red and green picture included here, and also rejection doesn't seemed related to baby Jesus in the manger or blackFriday or Christmas morning breakfast casseroles in any way that we can muster the connection?

Because we offer our real stuff up to the world in moments of our souls' Christmastimes, those pull-out-from-the-routine moments when we say that other stuff doesn't matter, and that we know we're just supposed to pop a love note in the mail, or spend more money on a gift than we really should, or eat plates and plates of cheese potatoes followed by cookies with sprinkles around a folding table at our holiday office lunch without a single thought of how we will want to go to sleep by 2 and also not be able to fit into our pants tomorrow.

And this courage for jumping to spring up and dive in is a precious thing, a sort of fragile thing that we can't let the world keep us from.

So I raise a glass to you at this holiday time, as you're making your humble crafty gifts happily at night, and then wondering if they're good enough to send in the morning. And I say: stay at it. Glue and glue your heart away.  Sew and crochet and paint into the night. Rubber stamp out all of your real feelings for the people you love. 

And keep in mind always, that not a single one of your friends or relatives will call you something as mean as "dry-humored" for sending what you made.

Where I Make A Movie About Making a Purse, At The End of Which You Will Probably Not Be Able To Make A Purse

I decided to videotape myself making something. Actually, it wasn't a decision--it was an event. I had the thought, "I wanna make a purse" and then I hit "record" and started talking.

Here's a clip about the video piece, "Ginger Has An Idea About Making a Purse," to make you:

        A) Want to watch it    

        B) Wonder why anyone would do this [especially in their Effectual PJ's]  

        C) Want to go make something  

        D) All of the the above

Answer: D.

The full "video piece" (not sure yet what to call it. Not a movie. Not a film. The word "video" makes it sound like a VHS tape.) is right here. You can just click on this link and you'll get to it. This is where to click. 

And this is what I would say after having shot it and put it together:

1) It's long. I mean, unless you are close enough to know my middle name (well, both of them), you are probably not going to watch it in its entirety. OH WORSE--if you ARE this close to me, you're going to feel like you HAVE to watch it and will then have to LIE to me about it. Shoot.

2) Filming from below one's neck highlights one's multiple chins.

3) I should have added some sort of surgeon generals warning about the Need for Dramamine to the opening. Watching it is like seeing something put together by J.J. Abrams or the earliest episodes of ER.

4) When I am making something ABOUT making something, I am a seriously happy human form. Not kidding. Dangit. I had a really good time doing this. I was thinking of you the whole time. For reals.

[insert clip of my good friends shaking their heads while they wildly call each other to coordinate a brief intervention that might involve medication and plans for special "girls relaxation weekends" where we soak our feet and "let off steam."]

Go make something.

Post-Capitalism & Wonk

Mab said something this week that I have said many times to the sort of friends that I can fall into Making Revelry with (translate: the sort of people who will hear me wax on about The Way It Should Be Out There) and I absolutley think it's worth digging around about. It's this:

"Afraid your project won’t look like it came out of a catalog? It won’t. It’ll look like something you’ve created with your hands. If you want it to look like something from a catalog, then have it mass produced in a factory."  --Mab.

Highly Wonky-Highly Useful-Highly Happy Pillows from Old Quilts. Crazily unmatched corner meeting spots that some would deem Un-Okay.

I think we're at an interesting time in our country. Am I an Economist and do I have the credentials to say this? No. I think more people feel poor and disconnected from the life power of an actual dollar bill than any other time since I can remember. Am I a historian? No. I think we're all scrambling to get more dollars because we don't like to feel powerless. Am I a social psychologist? Nope. And because, of course, we need stuff.

The weird, imperfect back of my favorite summer skirt (made from old jeans) that turns out to be just the spot for my backside but looks super wonked on the hanger. Easy to judge, still wonderful.

And also we're diving in and trying to make the stuff we need. And we're doing this with gusto (at least some of the time--I was glad to hear in your comments that for many of you it's a LOT of the time. Woo hoo!). And so great mothership sites like Craft are guiding us and we're corralling the power of googling How To Do Whatever We Feel Like and we're all helping each other by putting up free tutorials. We're up to our necks in the really fun effort of providing for ourselves.

But then we finish what we made.

And it doesn't look like what we thought it was going to.

It looks, well, Wonky. Off just a bit. 

And we say: Guy. That doesn't look right. I must not be good at this.

And we set that one aside and go buy a (cheap) one that looks more like the one we had in our head.

I know all the flaws in this bag, and I also know that my daughter's teacher really liked it when I gave it to her.Wonk and all.

And we pay double--for the supplies we bought to make the one we wanted + the cheap one that we bought. But WAIT: we pay even more--we pay the cost of this message ping-ponging around in our heads looking for a place to land fester: I. Must. Not. Be. Good. At. This.

I think we have to shift our heads aroud a bit about all of this Making we're tackling to get what we need. And it's exactly what Mab said: "If [we] want it to look like something from a catalog, then have it mass produced in a factory."

We need to make friends with Wonk. Invite it to tea. Service it biscuits. Ask it about its childhood. Consider its finer points and stop judging its obvious irregularities. Because when Wonk is present, it's a sign that an actual human has constructed the thing we're looking at. Wonk indicates Humanity. I mean, sure, it might indicate some factory mishap where fire shot out of some gnarly big machine and smoke blew everywhere and all the little stitched-on animal logos landed on the bellybutton spot of all the shirts, but that's not the scenario I'm envisioning here.

In the things that we make ourselves to provide for what we need for ourselves and for our homes and our familites, Wonk just means that we didn't walk into a store to meet our own needs. And it probably means that we or whoever made the thing in front of us Experienced Something in the making--joy, relaxation, the frustration of trying something never-before-tried and straining toward pulling it off decently.

Wonk means a Something happened for a Somebody.

A highly Un-Factory-Like Zipper/Pocket treatment on a duffle bag for one of my boys. Still useful. Still charming. No need for perfection to be Just Right for camping.

Wonk is lovely. It's not an indicator of lack of expertise of failure or some sign that maybe you should try paper crafts instead. It just means that you made it.

And I'm so glad that you made it.

Time to Grow a Pair, Ladies Part II & Also a Winner

First: congratulations to Holly whose #3 comment was chosen by random to win her very own Go!Baby from the nice Quilt People at AccuQuilt. I'll email you soon, Holly, about how to get your nifty prize. Fun.

And also, I have more to say. 

I was recently sent a review copy of a book about sewing. It's a perfectly fine book. Probably terrific for a beginner because the pictures are clear and there are a lot of them. I would likely use it as a reference if I ever referenced anything myself. 

I'm tackling this ratty one now. Wasn't sure what I was going to do because it's so Completely Tattered.

And that last sentence makes it sound like I know all the stuff in the book. And, in fact, I don't. I regularly botch zippers (I mean, they work, but the ends of them are not Beauty Pageant Material), only recently heard that gray is a better thread color choice than white for quilting, and my eyes roll into the back of my head and the room swirls around a little when anybody talks about warp and weft. (Terms make me queasy.)

And the book I was asked to review could have fixed all of that for me.

But this is all I could think of while I was reading through the (very thorough) sewing book: we don't need any more information about sewing.

See? Way. Tattered.

We just need more guts and less nervousness and more surety that nothing bad will happen if we just tuck in and try.

I really don't think anybody out there is rightfully confused. And hold on, here's how I mean it: there are plenty of resources (many, many of them completely free now) that will help us figure out the snazzier tricks of sewing. And there are a few pretty friendly guides for getting started (this one's still my favorite). 

But we still just all need some more gallons of bravery.

Somehow, though, publishers believe we need more guides--that our big glitch is informational, some dearth of data--so they must be getting some word that we want them, which mean we must, in fact, be doing something to make them believe that we do (that was Capitalism as an Idea, Working Backwards, by the way).

And I'll allow for this VERY real possibility: maybe everybody does feel this way. Maybe I'm off my thrifted rocker here. It's always a possibility. I recognized that. Sometimes the bats in my belfry need more water and less caffeine.

So I just started cutting it up into panels. And then I put some good ones back together. And now I'm working on turning it into this.

But I'm still wondering what you all think about this.

Why do we feel like we need to know what we're doing in order to do it? What are we afraid of, ladies? What can go wrong? I'm not yelling this. I'm leaning in across a small table at a coffee shop, asking you. What can go wrong? Why do you need to have it all figured out before you dive in?  And I haven't been to some blogger conference that's told me to ask you questions to get you to leave more comments. I'd really like to know what you think about this. And that desire is probably mostly selfish--I mean, I don't want to be the girl at the party with her Creative Philosophy Skirt tucked into the Pantyhose of Her Ideals.

It's just what I kept hearing in my head as I read that perfectly lovely book: We don't need more information. We need more fearlessness, more unbridled willingness to Try.

Because when we do, we figure out all of the things that the lady in the book has tried and figured out and is showing us so that we won't have to try to figure it all out for ourselves.

My favorite part: because I could get panels out of either the front of the back of most of the whole thing, this is the entirety of my Thrown Away Scraps Pile. Excellent.

But having to figure it all out for ourselves is the best part. I'm sure of it.

How I Hate to Wait for Things and How I Am Waiting for Zippers and How I Wait on Purpose

A Craft Debt '11 Update

I am at a bit of a standstill on two projects: both of the pillows for me [#5] AND the two bags [#2 & #6] that I swore a couple of posts ago were my First Priority Projects. And here's the thing: I'm not stuck creatively. They are all projects coming along swimmingly in terms of function and color and the weird combining of strange old pieces of fabric and such that any regular human would have put in a boat and floated off to some Other Country's Landfill long ago. But I heart them all.

I just don't have long enough zippers.

Go to the store and get them, You Say.

That's the thing: that's not how we roll here at WDT. We (and I mean the Royal We) wait until the pieces it takes to put a nifty something together all appear before we run to the store. Even when we are in our car tempted to pull into whatever Zippers for Cheap store may or may not be just a handful of blocks away from Our place of work, we keep driving. We don't go in. 

Instead, we dig through our Monstrous Stash of culled-as-we-go bits and pieces of notions and when we come up short, then we hit the thrift shops in high hopes of the Just Right zipper and when we go there and there is nothing but a Sea of 6" Closures, then we wait.

We wait because we have found that the tension of waiting and the tension of Only Using What We Find causes curious, interesting things to happen as we make. Sometimes the Just Right Zippers never do appear and so we tackle the envelope closure-d pillow or we start to experiment with snaps.

Right now we are waiting.

And in some ways it might seems strange, what with wanting to get those pillows onto my bed and cover up the fugly floral that is currently gracing the top of my (purchased with a christmas gift card) super expensive sheets, but that's how we roll.

And usually the commitment to just sit tight means that Oprah herself (or whoever IS in charge of the universe) drops in our lap the Zipper of Our Dreams.

Or at least a one-day haul like this:

You will be the first to know when when the zippers arrive. Right now we are waiting.