 When I was maybe nine or ten years old, I learned to weave a specific type of friendship bracelet at summer camp: odd numbers of threads folded into loops, lassoed over one’s fingers, then walked over, under, and around each other like dancers at an Elizabethan party. I made absolutely yards of it while eating, watching TV, riding in cars, and possibly while sleeping. I memorized the process in both my spongy young brain and my springy young muscles. Yet some twenty years later when this cord would have been perfect for a project, I could remember everything except how to make it.
I utterly love figuring out new tools, techniques, and materials, but trying to resurrect something that I previously learned and subsequently forgot is infuriating. For another twenty years*, that dastardly friendship bracelet taunted me, resisting my periodic attempts to find instructions online, or reverse engineer the process with diagrams and bits of string. Thank heavens that I’ve since learned a thing or two about learning! Primarily that my memory is not to be trusted. In our costume cutting class at the University of Washington, Laurie Kurutz exhorted us to annotate each pattern piece as if we might get hit by a bus later that day: what labels, marks, and notes would enable another person to literally pick up the pieces and finish our project? In a jewelry workshop, Sarah Loertscher shared her process writing the “recipes” that were the basis of her successful production line; her practice of making a detailed record of each design including materials and amounts, manufacturing steps and setups, and even the time involved allowed Sarah or an assistant to remake any item at any time, and to price appropriately. Now If I think there’s even a remote chance I might want to revisit a project, I leave myself the most pedantic trail of crumbs. It might be a sketch, or a snapshot, or a quick video, but most often it’s a list of specific materials, measurements, and steps in a sprawling “how-to” Google Doc that has the benefit of being easily searchable. Besides keeping me from being in a constant state of rage, these reference materials support my natural inclination is to work in batches (a.k.a “binges”). I refer back to these almost daily; thanks to my “how-to” doc, I was just able to make a batch of concrete bricks for the first time in three years, candlesticks for the first time this year, and a fresh batch of the bunnies I sew every couple of years as baby gifts—all without having to reinvent any wheels! *There’s a happy ending to this story: last year my friend Kit Paulson got into making friendship bracelets and found instructions for weaving my white whale!
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