El Blog de Naraluna

I have always loved friendship bracelets and they have always had a special meaning to me. I made my first one when I was about 14 years old.  I made the bracelets for my friends and for me. We used to wear them until they fell off. I really never knew why, but it was supposed to be like that.   Now I know the reason. According to what I read, these bracelets come from the Native American Indians particularly from Central America.  It took love and hard work to make them so the person who received it was supposed to honor this work by wearing the bracelet until it fell off naturally. Or it could also be that the person who receives the bracelet can make a wish and when  it falls off, the wish will come true.  What I believe is that they are special gifts for friends. And well, I still use them until they fall off even though I made them myself.

The first bracelets I made were very simple, but it was a start. I gave them to my close friends. I was determined to improve. A friend, who has been like a brother to me, taught me how to make “chevrons” in bracelets. This gave me the possibility to combine more colors and to make more elaborated bracelets. Unfortunately the bracelet he gave me fall off a week later. It made me sad.   But well, maybe my wish was granted very soon and that’s why it fell off so quickly. I don’t remember.  After high school most of my friends stopped making friendship bracelets and even forgot about them. Not me.  Making them is is a way I can express myself and it is also an opportunity to play with colors and create something beautiful.  And making bracelets, like knitting and even drawing, is a therapy for me. It keeps my mind and my hands busy, it relaxes me and helps me to deal with problems and difficult moments.  Besides writing, these are the things that help me pull myself together in times of trouble or loneliness.

This is a chevron…:)

These bracelets have also been a way of communication with my friends who live faraway.  I make them to express how I feel for them, to let them know that I’m thinking about them. I send them as a symbol of friendship from their crazy Mexican friend.

I can also say that making a bracelet, for me, is a metaphor of how I live my life. That is, for making a bracelet first you need to think about the pattern: what you want to do.  In life, first you need to have a goal or a dream, what you want to accomplish.  Then you need to get the materials you need for your bracelets: how many embroidery threads, how long will they be and which colors do you want.  

In life you need to choose the roads that will lead you to your dream, the people who can help you, the place where you will acquire the knowledge you need, the time you are going to dedicate to achieving this goal. After that, you need a lot of patience to tie the corresponding knots to create your bracelet. Obviously, you begin with a simple one and the more skilled you become, the more complex your bracelets will be. It takes time and it is difficult to undo the mistakes. The knots are tight and threads are thin, sometimes it hurts the fingers, sometimes the thread is very tangled. Sometimes one can get lost in directions or the combination of colors we chose is not as great as we expected.  The same thing happens with our dream, with the goal we have for our future. We need a lot of patience to get closer to making our dream come true or to accomplish our goal.  On our way to get there we will find a lot of obstacles we will have to overcome, we may take the wrong way, the job we chose or the major we studied may not lead us to where we wanted to go and maybe when we’re almost there, we may realize that it was not exactly what we wanted or expected.  So we wonder if we chose the right combination of colors, if  our goal is what we really want. We question our ability to make bracelets, we question our ability to accomplish our goals. We doubt. We suffer. We think about giving up and starting over.  And yes, sometimes the bracelet is not just what we really wanted, nor is our goal or dream.  We are disappointed.  And we may  end up starting over. The good thing about that is that when we do that,  we  will have all the knowledge we have accumulated from the previous experience. After the frustration and sometimes the pain, we will stand up and continue working on the bracelet until we get it right; we will stand up and continue fighting to accomplish our goal or making our dreams come true.  But this time we will be stronger and more prepared.

The most important thing is not to give up, to keep on trying and fighting.  At the end, there will be lots of beautiful bracelets to wear and to give and, for some people, even to sell. And talking about life, we would have lived a fulfilling live, because we would have worked very hard to make our dreams come true, without giving up.

If you’re interested in learning how to make friendship bracelets there are several websites on the net. In my case, I love these two:

http://friendship-bracelets.net/  and http://hbernb.atspace.com/ .  There are lots of patterns and the directions are easy to understand.

And now it’s time to find a new design for my collection. My hands are restless today…

~ por Naraluna en mayo 26, 2012.

Publicado en handcrafts
Etiquetas: combining colors, dreams, embroidery floss, friendship bracelets, friendship bracelets and life, goals