Advice

The benefits of crafting

It’s Like A Mini Holiday From The Day-To-Day. Being creative and making stuff with your own hands is awesome, from crocheting a scarf to building a funky piece of furniture. Plus, you feel like a total boss when you finish a project – there’s just something about creating something with your own hands that gives you a dopamine hit like nothing else.

And you can do it almost anywhere! From the comforts of your sofa to joining a local crafting group to taking a class, it’s a guaranteed way to relax your mind while feeling productive and even meet like-minded people.

Cat from Knots & Xs holding a spool of macrame cord over her head and looking up at the camera

But, how to choose your craft?

With a plethora of crafts to choose from, how do you pick the right craft for you? You don’t want to deep-dive into something you have zero idea about and end up with bags of tools & supplies stashed away in a cupboard that you end up never using. Nor do you want to be unprepared and feel unable to get stuck in.

Have a look at what you already have in your house. Are you potty for pottery? Nuts about knitwear? Mad for macramé? If you already have an interest in displaying a particular thing, why not take the next step and learn how to do it yourself?

With a mother into knitting & sewing and a father into DIY and woodwork, I was lucky to be exposed to crafts and making stuff from an early age. So I had a rough idea of what tools/materials were needed, where to get them and how to find out more. A few decades later, I am still a keen DIY-er and lover of all things crafty but I ended up immersing myself in macramé & cross-stitch (or X-Stitch as it is often called) and I love helping people to share these passions.

Why it’s easy to get disheartened, and how to avoid

But getting here was not without trial, error and a lot of money and time spent on researching materials or tools that I later realised I didn’t actually need. When I started out, I found a lot of the information available online was either outdated, overcomplicated or confusing (for me anyway!). When you’re starting out, this is one of the quickest ways to be disheartened. And nobody wants that!

Once I had waded through a mountain of overcomplicated instructions, ineffective tutorials and all the other noise out there online, I quickly realised that these crafts were way simpler than I had been led to believe.

The problem was that I had spent so long trying to unpick overly-complicated instructions that I got lost. What I needed was simple, to-the-point instructions that just focused on the necessary information.

Cat from Knots & Xs holding a Fall of the patriarchy cross-stitch design

How I can help you!

So I put my classroom experience as a teacher to use and wrote two essential (and free!) guides – ‘How to Get Started in Macramé’ and ‘How to Get Started in Cross-Stitch’ – so that other beginners could access these beautiful crafts way more easily than I did.

They’re free, simple and to the point, only telling you what you do need from tools, materials and where to get them, plus some of my Golden Rules for success. Straightforward, helpful information.

Want to know more? Then just click on the links below to grab yourself a copy of my free guides and see what all the fuss is about.