Abbie Groves Creative

True Confessions - I have a basket of unfinished knitting projects.   Some of them have been sitting there for three years.... or more. A sweater in progress from 2022. A pair of socks that got boring halfway through. A scarf that seemed like a good idea in January but feels completely wrong to me now. For a long time, I felt guilty about those projects. Weren't they failures? What did that say about me as a person if I didn’t finish absolutely everything I had ever started? Shouldn't I push through and finish them? Do I need to finish all these projects before even considering beginning new ones? The creative culture I'd absorbed—especially online—seemed to suggest that abandoning a project was somehow a mark against me, a lack of follow-through or commitment.  But that's a dirty lie. The Cost of Finishing Everything Here's what I've learned: holding onto every project, refusing to let anything go, doesn't make you disciplined or committed. It makes you st...

Finding Joy in Your Craft: Why Clicks Don't Define Meaning When I first started weaving seriously, I had this vision of what it would become. I imagined a beautiful Instagram feed. A growing following. People that are excited about my work. I thought that external validation would be the thing that made the craft feel real and valuable. That lasted about six months before I realized I was exhausted. Not exhausted from the weaving itself—the weaving felt good, felt necessary. I was exhausted from performing the weaving. From thinking about how it would look in a photo. From counting interactions and watching metrics like they were the heartbeat of my practice. From feeling small when a post didn't perform well, even though the thing I'd made was beautiful and true. Grand Prix towel in plaited cobalt twill Clicks Don't Mean Quality Here's something I wish I'd known earlier: clicks and followers and likes don't measure the quality of your work. They don't ...