Getting creative in isolation

A while back a tweet was doing the rounds asking, in the event that you’d been kidnapped, what would be the coded message you might post on social media to alert your friends? A friend said she imagined mine would say, “Shop-bought is always best”.

I guess it’s fair to say that I like to be as self-sufficient as possible. I make my own clothes, grow and preserve fruit and vegetables, bake sourdough bread. I’m not a big fan of going out, and since last year I’ve mostly been taking up job opportunities that enable me to work from home. You would think I was ideally set up for social isolation. Husband and I have often joked that we could live like hermits.

But this current crisis has taught me a massive lesson in humility. I had to tell my daughter, who has a chronic health condition, not to come home for Mothers Day as she’d planned. A discussion with my other daughter ended in the decision not to continue with our regular grandkid-sitting. With both myself and my husband experiencing chronic health conditions, taking isolation seriously has been essential. But I’ve had to face up to the possibility that if a member of my family becomes ill, I may not even be able to see them. And the reverse also applies. It’s breaking my heart.

So I’m ramping up the doing-creative-things to stop my brain from thinking too hard. Digging the garden till the back of my thighs burn. Filling the conservatory windowsills with seedlings. Pickling vegetables, making kombucha for the first time, baking sourdough pizza and focaccia. I have four ongoing crochet projects and have just bought the yarn for one more. My (not-very) secret fabric stash threatens to evict my clothes from the wardrobe.

I don’t think I’m the only person turning to creative pursuits as self-care. The cross-stitch kits I sell on Etsy have been flying off the shelves, to the extent that I’ve run out of stock and have had to let one listing sell out and not renew until my online supply shopping arrives. I’ve noticed several social media posts about people learning to craft or bake. So I thought I’d bring together a few ideas for anyone looking to start a new project.

Sourdough baking

Growing your own sourdough starter is an amazingly creative and joyful thing to do. The idea of making a growing, living thing out of little more than flour, water and patience, and then using it to make something to eat that is both delicious and good for you… well, how could it not make you feel better?

You do need a bag of flour to get it going, but once it’s established you just feed it once a week, and you can use the discard to beef up other baking, so it’s not as wasteful as it might at first appear. I’ve blogged about getting the starter going in Project Sourdough: getting started, about the first time I used it for baking in Project Sourdough: the first loaves and, later in my sourdough journey, my tips to make the baking process easier, in Project Sourdough: hacking it. And if you’re not ready for sourdough, make some Super-easy soda bread, souring the milk with lemon juice if you don’t have cream of tartar.

Learn to crochet

Crochet is having a bit of a craft moment, for a number of good reasons. It’s much quicker than knitting, there’s only one stitch to drop, and you don’t have to get to the end of a row before you take a break. If you’re used to knitting though, do be aware that it works up to a thicker fabric so can end up using more yarn.

There are lots of excellent video tutorials on YouTube for the absolute beginner. Once you’ve got the basic stitches, you’ll want some easy, quick patterns to give you a chance to practise and gain experience. I put together 23 Things to Crochet as a progressive set of small projects to build experience for those new to crochet. Start at the beginning and work through, or pick out patterns you’d like to try if you feel more confident. You could also try the list of patterns I’ve posted on this blog. Maybe this quick easy headband?

Start a herb club

When I was confronted with empty shelves in the vegetable aisle in Tesco I asked Husband if there was any chance of us digging up the lawn and planting potatoes. Luckily (because he’s not always averse to my madder ideas) he loves the lawn more than… well at least more than spuds. It’s not practical for me to try and keep us in vegetables, and we have a decent-sized (for a town) garden. Many others have smaller gardens, a courtyard, or no more than a windowsill. But it’s life-affirming to grow something you can eat, however small. And something delicious and fresh to look forward to as the days get warmer must be a good thing.

A couple of things you can grow easily anywhere are herbs and salad leaves. But if you sow from seed and don’t have a proper vegetable plot or allotment, you’ll probably end up with far more than you need, or can cope with if you’re growing in a small space. The solution is to gather a few friends with each choosing one thing to start from seed. Good things to try include basil, coriander, parsley, pea shoots, mixed salad leaves, baby spinach, rocket. Each one sows a few seeds in a small pot or pots (depending on whether you want baby leaves or individual plants) then pots up the seedlings if necessary and shares them out. If you’ve got kids at home, you could get them keeping a growing diary: recording how long each seed takes to germinate, measuring the height of the seedlings each day, drawing the leaf shapes etc. You can buy seed very cheaply online (try The Real Seed Company for quality and unusual varieties) and if it doesn’t arrive with instructions, just Google them. For pea shoots, I buy boxes of dried peas from the supermarket (50p for enough to keep you in pea shoots for years!) and follow Alys Fowler’s guidance. Don’t forget about mustard and cress, and lots of pulses can be soaked and sprouted. More ideas for self-isolation gardening.

Let off steam with cross stitch

In the guise of my alter-ego, Smut and Tut, I supply the nation with slightly rude cross stitch patterns and kits, all suitable for beginner cross-stitchers. But there are much ruder ones available via Etsy – just do a search for ‘rude cross stitch’. Great for letting off steam in these trying times, and popular with Dame Judi Dench, apparently.

You could also try designing your own – great if you have a favourite expletive like my daughter’s “Shitballs bananas!” For simple designs, just use an excel grid and colour in the cells. For more detailed designs, you could use a program like C-Stitch, but do keep the shapes simple and limit the range of colours unless you’re planning on making a needlepoint tapestry. Standard cross-stitch patterns use 14 stitches to the inch Aida fabric and two strands from a length of six-stranded cotton like DMC or Anchor. So if you want to fit something into a 6″ hoop, the pattern needs to be less than 84 stitches wide or high (i.e. 14 stitches x 6″) at the centre line of the pattern.

Anyway, stay safe and let’s get through this.