“I could never design my own cloth – I’m not creative.”

“Oh, I just follow patterns – I’m not a real weaver.”

Have you ever said something like that to yourself? If so, you’re not alone. Many weavers tell themselves a similar story – and it can be crippling.

“I’m not creative” isn’t usually a statement about actual ability. Instead, it’s about skills and self-belief. If you believe you’re not creative, and it’s not possible for you to become creative, then you won’t work on acquiring the skills necessary to become creative. And that reinforces the belief that you’re not creative and never will be.

Beliefs are hard to shift, though. How can you convince yourself that you’re creative – or artistic, or a “real weaver” – if you just don’t believe that’s part of you?

Usually, we take one of two routes. One is validation from the outside world – having someone “certify” you as creative – and the second is showing yourself that you’re creative. Of the two, the second is far more powerful, because you know it in your bones, in your own identity. That’s something no one can take away from you.

The outside world, though, discourages showing yourself – or declaring yourself – to be creative. Starting with our first “A” (or “C”!) in grade school, we’ve been taught that someone else has to declare us to be good at something before we’re allowed to believe we’re good at it. Declaring yourself good at something is viewed as bragging. If someone else hasn’t said it, it’s not true.

So we wind up saying things to ourselves like: 

“I haven’t graduated from art school, so I can’t be an artist.”

“I can’t do creative things because my art teacher gave me Ds all through grade school.”

Worse, we reinforce this through gatekeeping – if you don’t have a certificate, you can’t claim skills. For example, there’s a vocal faction in weaving that says, “If you don’t have a Master Weaver certification, then you can’t call yourself a master weaver” – even for experienced weavers, or renowned weavers who have clearly mastered their art.

Those claims are just another form of that same debilitating voice – the one that says “I need someone else’s permission before I can believe in myself.”

This makes believing in yourself and your abilities an incredible uphill battle.

But it’s a battle that can be fought and won.

Here’s how you do it.

Instead of trying to do everything at once, start small. Take baby steps. Don’t try to create from scratch the very first time you try to design. That’s like learning to ride a bike by riding in a bike race. You might succeed – but you’ll likely have some serious crashes along the way, and that can crush your budding new identity. If your first ride is a disaster, you might never try it again.

Instead, take designing in steps. Start small. Change one color in a draft, or add two repeats to the threading. Do something easily achievable.

Then, once you’ve had that small success, try something a little more ambitious. Change two colors, or add borders and repeats to your threading. Develop skills step by step, practicing each skill along the way. Demonstrate to yourself that you can create by creating something. Even if the step is modest, it shows you that you can do more than you expect. And soon you’ll be looking at your work and thinking, “Oh! I am creative!” The proof will be right there in front of you. Nothing more convincing than that.

That’s how we teach at the Handweaving Academy. We teach design skills, but we don’t dump a ton of knowledge on you and expect you to apply it all at once. Instead, every design class includes step-by-step exercises every few lessons, each focused on one concept. You practice small components of design, making your own independent decisions. At each step, we support you with video demos showing the thinking and design process. We answer your questions and give you feedback on your designs.

It’s also not all theory. Many of our classes include a project, but one where you make your own design decisions. We give you a full project recipe that you can modify to whatever degree you’re comfortable with – step by step, with suggestions, instructions, and supporting videos. At the end of the project, you’ll have made something that is truly your own – one more step towards saying, “YES! I am a designer.”

If you’d like to start designing your own projects, here are some great places to start.

For project design, Getting Started with Design explains how to modify a project recipe to suit your own tastes and needs.

For color, Understanding Value and Hue and Saturation cover the fundamentals.

For weave structure, Drafts: the Written Language of Weaving starts a series that will give you a thorough understanding of draft structure.

Got more experience? Dive straight into some fascinating color classes, like Color Gradients or Color & Design in Twills. Or head for some structure classes, like Advancing Twills or Understanding Overshot, and start designing your own drafts.

However you choose to learn, we wish you happy weaving.