Learning a new craft - and a teaser

 I get obsessed when learning a new craft.  I take great pleasure in learning everything and to find out what the limits of the craft are, what my limits doing that craft are, and what happens when I push past those limits.

Last month, I experimented with pushing past those limits - twice.

First, I finally took the dive into making a fully (ish) homegrown garment from sheep to wearable clothing.  To keep me focused, I gave myself a timeframe - one month - to get it done.  

I choose the wrong month because September is pretty much the busiest time on the farm and the only month of the year the weather is friendly, so I'm regretting this.

But the yarn community is lovely and supportive.  Sure there are opinions, but so long as we remember when someone says "the best way" or "the right way" what they really mean is "this worked well for me", it's much easier to deal with absolutes.

The second limit was to see if I could make videos about this adventure on a time budget.  (time budget?  deadline).  

I did better than I expected.  

And worse.

The thing I'm learning about making videos is that it is a craft - like knitting, spinning, weaving...

I talked about how the craft of weaving has its own personality (ISTP on the Myers-Briggs scale).  I suspect we could do that for any craft.  Video editing and youtube creation is no exception.  Actually, I think it might be entirely off the scale.  

But first, proof that I did finish the cloak in time - even if I'm still struggling to finish the video.

It's a symptom of our times - or maybe just the human condition.  But youtube is often seen as a zero-sum game.  As if there could only be one winner and the only way to get to the top is to trample those beneath. 

I could blame video games or reality TV, but I suspect these are also a symptom rather than a cause.

When in reality, the more we cooperate, the better youtube is as a whole, and there are infinite winners.  

But anyway, learning editing has been a lot like learning any new craft.  I'm in love.  But the more I learn about it, the longer it takes to finish a project.  It's not that I'm getting slower, it's that I'm getting better at it - so I choose harder projects and take more time to fix errors. 

It's like when we first learn to knit and our scarf starts with 42 stitches.  At any given row, there could be between 35 and 55 stitches, but that's all good because we knit!  How cool is that?  We have the power to create a scarf!   

But then, once we learn more about knitting, more time is taken to fix the lost of additional stitches.  To learn how the structure of the cloth builds with each action.  We take more time to prepare the yarn, to get the right needles, to choose the structure and colour and to repair the errors... to rip back and knit again.  To do all the things that are within our power to make the sweater, scarf, hat, or tea cozie the best darn knitted thing we can achieve.  

I still need to find the ballance.  Trying to do this much video creation in so short a time was a good test, but I'm not there yet.  It seems that my productivity falls dramatically after spending more than four hours a day working on it.  Or to put it another way, I've only got about four good hours of work in me a day right now.  

There you go.  A long-winded reason why the video didn't get finished by the end of the month.  I could have forced it, but I wanted to make a really good video.  And I think I am.  I'm happy with it.