Tree of Life

It’s been a long few months, friends. The world is on fire, both figuratively and literally. Things are hard right now, politically and personally. And yet my day to day life carries on, eerily unchanging. I’ve been leaning pretty heavily into crafting as I cope with everything, and I’ve got several big projects that I’ll show you as soon as I finish the last touches and get some good pictures taken! Today I’m sharing a project that didn’t go as planned. It feels appropriate right now.

Here is the half finished, now abandoned attempt at a tree of life. I love the leaf shapes, but they are too big, overlapping too much, and occupying far too much space in the hoop. There isn’t room to add a tree trunk or roots, and the whole thing is turning out messy and jumbled. I’m going to need to try again with a thinner cord.

I’ve been trying to get more into macrame, but honestly it’s a medium I’m struggling with. I really enjoy the process, but so far most of my projects have had major issues and I have found it difficult, sometimes impossible to fix or alter them once they are underway. This one was supposed to be a tree of life, if you look carefully you can almost see the leafy pattern among the jumbled mess of cord in the picture above (see the last picture down below for the example photo of what the final product is supposed to look like). The project is a total wash, now destined only to be disassembled to see if the materials can be salvaged. There’s got to be a metaphor in there somewhere, right?

I was inspired to attempt this project during a “craft & sip” parent meet-up at my kid’s preschool– I love that our preschool organizes these little get togethers, and at a recent one the craft provided was some yarn and sticks and hoops, so I looked up a tutorial online to attempt a macrame tree of life. It was WAY more difficult than I expected, and I barely got a start during the hour long craft & sip event. Then about halfway through I realized that the yarn I was using was the completely wrong size for the hoop and I needed to add about three more branches and double the size of the trunk to make it fit. I made it work, and I’m actually pretty pleased with the way that first one turned out, even if it’s very different from the tutorial I followed!

Here’s the finished product from my first attempt! I think it turned out pretty great, given that I used regular yarn instead of macrame cord! I almost wish I’d just done this same design a second time for the second tree instead of attempting the fancier leafy design

I gifted that initial tree to the wonderful Engagement Director at the preschool who planned the event for us, and decided to attempt an even more complex pattern of a tree of life to hang on my bedroom wall. I got halfway through the second tree before realizing it just wasn’t going to work. Somehow, my materials are all wrong, the cord I bought is too big for the hoop, I don’t have space to finish the design, and I’m going to have to buy different cord and start over. I will, eventually, try again, though it’s on the back burner for now.

These are NOT my products, but rather images of what the finished designs were supposed to look like, taken directly from the tutorial
See how the leaves are smaller here and leave plenty of space for the rest of the tree? I purchased exactly the materials the pattern listed, but somehow my first few rows of leaves filled almost the entire hoop!

I don’t usually share things with you until I have something I’m proud of to show off. But I wanted to share this failed attempt. I still had a lot of fun making it, I learned a ton about the process of macrame that will be useful for future projects. Frankly it feels important right now to write about something that went wrong. Sometimes it’s important to just let a project go, salvage the materials to reuse for something else, and start over from scratch or even abandon an idea that just didn’t work. And no, I’m not only talking about crafting.

  • Featured project: Tree of Life Wall Hanging
  • Medium: Macrame
  • Pattern: Tutorial 1: Emily Could Make That
    Tutorial 2: Knots & Dreams
  • Materials: scrap white yarn (acrylic, likely dk or worsted weight), 2mm cotton macrame cord, wooden embroidery hoops
  • Started November 2024, Abandoned January 2025

#macrame #alwayslearning #abandonedproject #frogit

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