Macrame- Disaster and a Story
- chaoticcrafter
- Jan 22, 2020
- 3 min read
As I am writing this, I am trying to slow my breathing to stop my body from shaking because I got too stressed out. I assumed that macrame would work similarly to crochet, so I jumped in a little faster than I should have and my attempts at making the double half hitch almost made me homicidal. I probably shouldn't have been so ambitious this week since my little one has the flu this week and I'm already sleep deprived and cranky as it is. So for today I don't have a project for you, but I do have a short story about why I decided to just walk away.
Earlier this week we watch a YouTube tutorial that showed us how to make some basic knots. We went over the first three and they were all fairly straightforward. She described the last knot, called the double half hitch, as being a more intermediate knot, but it is a popular one that makes most of the lines that you see in macrame. I decided that my focus for today's post would be this knot. I knew that to really get it right I needed at least six ropes on my wooden dowel, and after I made all of my knots I planned to make a plant hanger which needed eight, so I ended up cutting and trying on eight pieces of rope, each about ten feet long.

When I had everything prepped and ready to go, I found my tutorial video and watched the part I needed a few times, following along as I watched to make sure I had my rope placed right. My first dozen or so attempts were wrong and so I undid them and kept trying until eventually I had one that came out the way it looked when she did it. So I moved on to the second knot with no problems. I thought to myself that this was easy once you figure out exactly where the rope goes, but I must have jinxed myself because after that I couldn't get another knot to work. I'm still not sure where I went wrong because I did everything exactly the same as I had done before but it looked sideways. Then I would watch the video again and do it exactly how she did it and exactly how I had done it the last time, and it looked like a pretzel. This continued for another hour during which I became so frustrated that I was seeing spots. At this moment my son woke up from his nap, and since he's still recovering from the flu, he was very clingy and I wasn't going to finish my project.

So here I am, snuggling with a sick toddler while trying to calm myself down because I can't figure out how to tie a knot. I am reminding myself that I was warned that it was an intermediate knot and that I can't learn everything in a day. Crochet took me months. I am going to accept that today is a learning experience and maybe continue to practice some of the easier knots before I have another meltdown about a complicated one that I had never seen before this week.
I do still plan on making a wall hanging this week, but I'm using a pattern that only uses what we learned on Monday. Check it out later this week!
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