You know how sometimes you have a thought that immediately makes your heart jump and a whole bunch of disparate parts coalesce into one Big Idea? That’s what I had when the phrase “permission to try” got locked in my brain.
It’s one of the things I want to do with Curious Crone – I want to give people permission to try things that their inner voices might otherwise not allow. Permission to explore, to wonder what happens, to break the rules, to try something new.
My friend is interested in making yarn for her hooking projects. She took a drop spindle class, and found it, in her words, “boring.” She wanted to try spinning on a wheel, but was told that before she could try a wheel, she had to master the drop spindle, and before she could make the funky art yarn she wanted for her projects, she would need to learn how to spin fine yarn.
To which I said, “oh fuck that!” Though I am far from an expert, though truly my spinning journey has only begun, I can assure you that there is no reason not to jump straight to trying a wheel and spinning funky art yarn to your heart’s content. Does it make more sense to master the drop spindle first? Possibly. But in my obsessive reading of online forums, I’ve seen plenty of folks who jumped straight into spinning on a wheel successfully – maybe it takes a bit longer to get the feel of drafting and build up that muscle memory, but it’s absolutely possible.
I see the same sorts of questions in tarot forums. Is it “okay” if I don’t read reversals? Am I “allowed” to buy myself a deck instead of having it gifted to me? H*ckin’ YES it is okay and you are allowed, because it’s YOUR tarot practice. Are there norms in reading tarot? Yes. Is it helpful to learn them before you freestyle through your own method? Again, yes. Is it necessary? Nope.
For whatever reason, I have never been troubled by this idea of being “allowed” to try something. In my first weeks of knitting, I charged through colourwork, then double knitting, then double-knitting with two different patterns on each side, because that’s what I needed to learn to make the pattern I’d found. A couple of years later, in a span of about 3 weeks I decided to learn to crochet, figured out how to make granny squares, and drafted a pattern to make a sweater out of them, complete with the math to extrapolate how much yarn I’d need, and then crocheted my first-ever sweater. And my third-ever embroidery pattern was featured in our national embroidery magazine because my use of sea glass and watercolour paint caught the eye of the magazine’s editor. I didn’t ask if it was “allowed” to add drilled sea glass to my embroidery, I just wondered what would happen if I did it. And loved how it turned out.
That’s not to say I didn’t make mistakes – the granny square cardigan doesn’t sit properly on my shoulders, and quite a few of the joins and squares are unravelling. The stitching on the embroidery project is quite uneven. But I sure learned a lot from each of my projects, because I wondered “what happens if I…” and I completely neglected to ask anyone’s permission if I could try.
That’s what I’d like to do with the Curious Crone workshops. I want to empower folks not just with the tools, but with that sense of curiosity, and to reject the idea that anyone needs permission to try.