Oh I see! It’s been about starting all year, now it’s all about the finishing! ;)

You are right, of course, that the important thing really is stretching myself. I will try new things (see reply to Alison, above), but I needed to start too. And cute monsters and easy collages are a good way of getting in. If I did a monster or a collage every fortnight for 3 months, I’d soon get bored and seek something else to engage me.

Sheep are hard to come by in Brixton. I found a pattern for a felted alpaca on Ravelry though – very cute!

I think I’ll extend myself in knitting and crochet by trying new techniques. This steel scarf involves decreasing and felting, which are new. And the silk neckwarmer involves passing stitches over etc. So they will be new and challenging things to try.

That’s true. I was also going to sew some fabric monsters, for which I have no pattern, so that would be more freestyley.

I would consider taking a commission for a monster, but I have limited colours left in that wool. I have yellow, blue, green, beige, some pink, maybe some red and dark turquoise left. Otherwise I’d have to buy more yarn, and that would be bad. Ask Alex. He’s see my yarn box.

Monsters, though, are very creative in themselves. There are no rules with monsters like there are with humans. They don’t have to have two eyes and legs and arms. They can be green and purple and blue, and a triangle shape if desired.

P.S – Is there anywhere we can order the cute monster you made? ;)

However… That doesn’t seem to be the real truth. Sometimes I write and I find myself coming up with the whole story. Sometimes I know I want to write, but I have no idea what is coming next. The sense of painting oneself into a corner is hugely exciting and motivates you through the slog of writing, and it is a slog. I would say that I always find writing less exciting when I know the end before I get there. But the question is – does knowing make the end result a better or worse thing?

It is hard to know whether the excitement of keeping you guessing distracts you. Does it stop you from seeing the wood for the trees? Do you end up with something hideously unbalanced? And yet the question remains – does it matter if, on the other hand, you enjoy the process so little that you can’t get to the end?

The issue with this is that the process of creation is somewhat mechanical. This is like parts of the edit for me. The sad news is that you can’t have creativity without hard work and a bit of boring mechanical processing. Other people don’t do it because of the hard work, and that’s part of what makes it worth while.

Just think, you could imagine monster, would that be as good as holding monster? I make up a story with every spare five minutes I have. But it is the ones I turn into reality that satisfy me.

Sometimes, you have to overcome your enjoyment of the process to achieve results. My novel, when it is in my head, is perfect, writing it reveals the faults. In my head, nine years ago, it was a perfect story I told myself one rainy evening. I loved it, and now as people read it, I’ll realise the faults and I’ll have to be told about them, because, at the end, the achievement is worth it. Maybe we will see more of monster around the house than your collage?

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do collage, of course, but that part of all creative work involves the horrible difficult part where you have to learn all the new things, create rubbish, fail and learn. And part of that is challenging yourself. Making a collage out of materials you’ve never used before, knitting with a new material, writing a much longer story.

In some ways, if the impending sense of doom and failure are absent, the process isn’t going to be exciting. That’s why to me, here, the collage is more interesting because you had to do something, and publish it, and that’s scary for you. Maybe the next thing is constructing a knitting pattern for yourself, or maybe it’s just pushing the boundaries of the scary and knowing that whatever you did, four things are true:

1) You did it
2) Not many people do
3) You started, which is hard enough
4) You finished

Proud isn’t enough of a word, for what I feel about you. Now keep starting and finishing.