Two small flowers

You may remember my post about allowing my brain to get to work on the crochet flower pattern while I went out into the garden. Well here is the result. A small crocheted flower, made out of embroidery thread, for a wee knitted tunic.

I have since made a second crocheted flower as “neurons that fire together wire together” meaning that the more we practice a skill, the stronger the connections in our brains and the easier (in theory) things become. My second one is a little different to the first one so I have not polished my skills on this pattern yet.

The other small flower is on the Fuchsia procumbens, a native plant to New Zealand. I have this low growing pretty plant growing in a mass under the Melia tree.

The flowers came out in December and are delicate red and yellow. In autumn large pink/red berries form on the plant. It is an evergreen with pretty round green leaves.

The people who owned this house before us were very keen gardeners and planted some unusual specimens. I think this is one of those.

Advertisement

Sometimes you just have to do something different

My goal yesterday morning was to crochet a small flower embellishment for a wee tunic I had knitted.

I have to confess to putting this seemingly small task off for a number of months now.

But the garment needs to be completed and with the weather looking cloudy and windy I gathered the resources I needed.

My skills with a crochet hook are pretty minimal but the pattern told me “easy”, “simple to make”, “basic” and so I told myself I could do this.

Hmmm 2 hours later my fingers and thumbs were in a muddle, the number of “undoings” was mounting, as was my frustration level.

Right I thought I’ve given this a good go, I’ll go and do something completely different and come back to the crochet later.

The garden work eased my frustration and allowed my brain circuits to focus on weeds but to keep processing what I’d learnt in the morning.

Once back to my crochet project my good old brain suggested I try something new with the crochet hook and suddenly I could see progress and something appearing in my hands that resembled the picture in the pattern. I perservered, reread the instructions, tweaked my approach and voila I had done it!

It really does pay to change pace, environment or activity when things don’t go well or the ideas dry up. All the while trusting that our clever brains are still working on the problem. Then return to the task with freshness and (hopefully) success.