creaturecomfortsva

[creaturecomfortsva]

some old things i made.

i used to call my crochet shop "sadgirlcrochet". i started posting and selling my crochet stuff in late 2020, was dealing with some serious depression, and had only come to terms with being NB a few months earlier. calling myself a girl still felt right back then, or at least not painful. i put frowny faces on everything.

this was the flagship product, the depressed daisy bikini. I'm thinking about re-designing these because they were always my best-selling product. honestly, as someone who works in marketing, "sad girl crochet" was branding gold. I could make any design that was popular with the tiktok crochet girlies but trade a smiley face for a frown and BOOM. iconic piece. hundreds of instagram likes. for example, my 420 creations in 2021:

these are some of my favorite creations from that year. and while they're adorable, they're also simple. i wasn't exactly challenging myself on a technical level - more of my energy was going towards figuring out how to market via the instagram algorithm. because sadgirlcrochet was, above all else, marketable. the clothes weren't for crocheters. they were for followers.

i redesigned the depressed daisy bikinis in 2021. i sold close to a hundred of these, maybe more. i didn't track inventory too closely (but i DID track my instagram followers, obsessively, at the time)

i also had a really shitty phone camera, so i edited the fuck out of my photos to make the blurriness and low resolution into a feature instead of a bug. it worked for a little while. also, my living situation was hellish at the time, but we had a giant yard with this 70-year-old dogwood tree, and it made for an excellent backdrop.

a commissioned witch hat i made for a friend. one of my favorite things i have ever made. after a while, i realized i liked doing commissions more than just creating products to sell to the masses because it let me push myself on a technical level.

this was my most-liked photo of 2021. partly because of my boobs. that's fine. they look great. i created this top because of a commission that went viral, and it spawned so many copycats and fake etsy listings.

my feelings toward the top itself are mild. it's cute. i made it so that people would like and share this photo. there's not much heart in it, if i'm honest. i look back at this top and know that it was made almost algorithmically. granny square bralettes + halter straps + strawberries were all Very In right then so my hands produced this.

the picture above is one of the first photos i took of myself and felt like i looked like my gender. gender euphoria, i suppose, though the stress of my life at the time dampened the joy. it was then that i started really questioning how i felt about having my online image so tied up in my girlhood. in my feminine body shape. i was 24 and recently estranged from my relatives and working through childhood trauma, including all my preconceptions about gender, and whether or not i owed girlhood to anyone.

i owed girlhood to my followers, though.

when i announced that i would be killing the sad girl crochet brand, a lot of people were genuinely upset. i lost over a thousand followers in three months. people didn't care what i, tabby, was creating. they cared about seeing Content under the Sad Girl Brand. that's okay.

when creating for sad girl crochet i felt beholden to both sadness and girlhood. my primary mode of expression and self-understanding, my crochet, started to be incongruous with what i actually needed to express. instead of contending with my sadness and seeking to understand it, i exploited it. instead of finding my own version of girlhood, i recreated the girlhood that was shown to me online. it led to a pretty significant creative drought from mid-2022 till about three months ago, in late 2023.

when you make the art people expect of you rather than the art that is true, you kill a part of your soul. i know this now.

i did my first craft fair in summer 2022 and immediately after, i was creatively bereft. what little bits of creative energy i had left were spent. a few months later my husband and i moved across the state, away from the hellish house with the beautiful yard, a fresh start. once we moved, i told myself, i would feel at home with sad girl again. and i kept waiting to feel the way i did in 2020 and 2021. but the more time went by, the less sadgirl felt like a creative outlet, and more an albatross round my neck.

and weirdly...i started to feel guilty about ever marketing my sadness in the first place. to grapple with the fact that i was making money off of other women and femmes with depression - and marketing to them on the basis that they were as depressed as me. the more i thought about it, the squickier it felt.

i barely posted anything in 2022 and 2023. i signed up for pattern tests and immediately dropped out of them. i made promises i didn't deliver on. eventually, i just stopped logging on.

a lot of life went by. i crocheted for my family, my loved ones, myself. journaled. got back on tumblr. deleted twitter. started trading screen time for books. got outside more. made friends in the new town. and the longer i ignored sadgirlcrochet, the less i wanted to go back.

see, the thing was, i was actually healing and growing, finally. our living situation was stable. my family found our own little village. i came to terms with being trans-er than i'd let myself admit. sad girl was dead. i'd killed her. and that was healthy for me.

creature comforts was born of a desire to be truer to myself and to live with more love. to craft instead of sell. to share instead of market. to be online without wearing a mask. to be active on tumblr instead of instagram. to be a creator and an artist. to let these desires be misunderstood by others. to love, unabashedly.

i'm excited to see where this takes me in 2024.

#crochet #yarnblr #sad girl crochet #creature comforts #craftblr

[creaturecomfortsva]

the cunty little Ashi top.

I cannot find the meme itself for the life of me. But this top was inspired by that post of a picture of Ashitaka from Spirited Away with a tumblr user admitting (correctly) that his top was kind of cunty. hence. the Ashi top.

also, my lovely husband, who is terminally online but in the YouTube and Wikipedia kind of way, learned that "cunty" is now a compliment while I was making this top. y'all should have seen his face when I proudly told him I was crocheting something "super cunty".

every other instagram crochet girlie has made a top like this and now I see why. they're really fun!

anyway, about the construction. I made this in top-down raglan style (my personal favorite way to make sweaters and garments) with a dc, ch 2 mesh down the sleeves. I thought about adding tassels to the hem of the body, but ran out of yarn, so maybe I'll do that with Ashi v2. I also increased the stitch count after the elbow, but I held back, not wanting to waste yarn. I think in v2 I'll make the sleeves more dramatic and maybe change the mesh to a dc, ch1. While I love the way this turned out I think I could fine-tune these details to make it stand out more (especially amongst all the other insta girlies).

if you wanna see more updates on my crochet, follow me on instagram @creaturecomfortsVA ! i think I'm going to start using tumblr more for this stuff, since instagram is awful (and trust me, I'll post more about that later...), but I post on my IG stories pretty often. with the holidays coming up I am nip-deep in presents and commissions, but have some cool stuff in the works that I'll post in the new year <3

#crochet #handmade #homemade #crocheting #yarn #yarn crafts #crafts #yarnblr #craftblr

[creaturecomfortsva]

Spiderweb Kerchief!

I actually finished a Halloween pattern in time for Halloween. What joy!

Lately I've been enjoying working with finer yarns and more delicate, lacy stitches. I used to stick with mostly size G, H, and I hooks with worsted yarn, and took a lot of pride in that! Especially since so many crafters seem to eschew chunky yarns and big stitches in favor of "fussier" projects. Well, I didn't, for a long time. I liked pieces that worked up fast and looked big, bodacious, and a little tacky.

Lately, though, I find myself with a lot more time on my hands. I'm home a lot more. I rest more. My life has slowed down dramatically in the past year - and this is a good thing! The first 25 years of my life I felt like I was constantly climbing uphill, fighting for something or fighting against someone, working toward the next goal, the next achievement, the next patch on the imaginary Girl Scouts vest I track my life on. But then about a year ago, my family moved from a major metropolitan area to a small rural town. My job changed. My husband got promoted. My kid is getting bigger. And time started to stretch along differently. I didn't measure my time in deadlines anymore. Time passed and I didn't feel like I had wasted it by being unproductive. I consciously stopped measuring my worth by my productivity.

it turns out lightweight yarn and fussy stitches are a lot more fun if you let yourself move slowly. Turns out watching lace work up is as gratifying as finishing a chunky bralette in a day. Turns out I can make things that are genuinely beautiful.

Especially if they're Halloween themed, LOL.

I'm working on a pattern for this spiderweb kerchief headband and will need pattern testers soon! Follow me here or at my Instagram page @/creaturecomforts_shop to see more.

#crochet #crafts #crafting #crochet patterns #halloween crochet #halloween #craft blog