Our most beautiful and complex art work we can make are our identities - Grayson Perry

So if you haven't been watching Grayson Perry: Who Are You? on channel 4 on Wednesdays, I don't know where you've been! You've really missed out! But don't worry - that's what 4OD is for.

I've seen Perry's work before, seen interviews and exhibitions, and grew a fondness for him as an artist and a human being. I think it's the way he puts pieces together, and how much he looks into his subject, and the way he has of making his journey through the subject to what interests him about it that inspires me most, and I think this new series really shows that well.

I enjoy the fact that he's been given the honour of presenting his works in the National Portrait Gallery, and one of the first thing he mentions or notices is what it's lacking, and so effectively what he could change with his pieces.

I know Perry has a routed interest in personalities and identities, and now what with me going back to finish my BA degree and getting to get into the subject matter of my own choice for my FMP (and heading down a psychological route), I think Perry has an even bigger influence on me.

Every artist was first an amateur.

 

So as I've been having plenty of spare time recently, I decided to try and teach myself something new.

I've always really wanted to be able to crochet as it looked fun (and more modern than knitting), and my mom had tried once to no avail, so I thought out of the hundreds of crochet videos on youtube, one of them had to work for me!

So after watching a few videos, and reading a couple of intro's to 'beginners crochet' books, I just couldn't tell if I was doing it right or not. I mean something was happening...I just didn't know if it was crochet!?

Then I found the one! It was an American guy (without the patronizing/overly excited voice that the others seemed to have) who seems to do videos for a couple of channels ('GoodKnitKisses' and 'The Crochet Crowd'), that were sooooooooooo simple to understand, I got hooked on just watching them all, and started to practice, and finally got it!

So I attempted to do the octagonal motif in one of the books, although it looked a tad different in the pictures in the book, so something wasn't quite right.

So I thought I'd try something a little more difficult, and I noticed it had a stitch in it that I hadn't learnt, so I tried to find the same guy on youtube doing it, but couldn't, so I went to the next best looking video (videojugartscrafts), who right at the beginning mentioned this was the UK stitch, and said what to look up if you wanted the US version.

So I ended up re-learning the names of each stitch (which wasn't so bad as I hardly knew to start), but thankfully all the stitches were the same, just called different things. So I crocheted this rose :)

FINALLY! I think I got it. Now, just got to practice till it's perfect.