Progressively pursuing more and more painful and tedious crafts

(until I’m convinced I want to be a 4B major)

By Shelly Yang Sep. 10, 2026

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I’ve called myself an indecisive person many times. For example, whenever I’m hanging out with my friends, I struggle with choosing what to do, but once we figure out an activity, I enjoy planning the logistics of it. When someone asks me whether we should go for Thai or Greek food — two wildly different cuisines — I freeze up, my only vocabulary becoming “I don’t know” or “you choose.”

But what I’ve realized is that I do have strong opinions and wants. I will never pass down an opportunity to go figure skating, even if the weather doesn’t call for it. I don’t typically like Mexican food, because it’s usually too spicy for me. So in reality, I don’t think I’m all too indecisive; I think the more accurate description is that I just want to try everything while bounded by limited time, hence facing endless decision paralysis.

When I first entered MIT, I was certain I wanted to pursue Course 6-9 (Computation and Cognition). In high school, I really loved my biology class, and attended a summer camp on computational neuroscience. I ended up really liking that, and read a ton of books about ailments, medicine, and of course, the brain. In fact, I was so certain about my path that I thought if I found out that the major wasn’t for me, I would be completely, utterly screwed.

Since then, I have switched majors three times: twice unofficially (in my head) and once officially through the Change of Major form. While I’m not completely, utterly screwed, I have decided to pursue more and more painful and tedious crafts until I’m convinced I truly want to be a 4B (Art and Design) major, which is my current fixation.

Stop 1: Nail polish and wire flowers

I first saw this craft from someone who made swift, confident strokes with their nail polish brush across twisted wire shaped like petals on Instagram Reels. Essentially, the wire petals would act like a bubble wand that would catch the nail polish. It sounded simple enough to me!

So on a random Tuesday, my friend and I worked away at leftover wire from my jewelry kit and her assorted nail polishes. We thought this project would take us 30 minutes, maybe an hour maximum if we really stretched it. It ended up taking four hours.

First of all, shaping the wire was annoying. We realized the creator of the reel made a ton of petals per flower, so we thought shaping the wire for all the petals would be the hardest part. We were wrong.

Turns out nail polish doesn’t really hold its shape, nor is it particularly elastic! We had to reshape some of our petals, because they couldn’t be wider than the nail polish brush (or the nail polish couldn’t reach the edges of the metal frame). On top of that, the nail polish we used resisted spreading out. When it finally did, the surface tension sometimes wasn’t enough to prevent breakage across the petal’s surface.

After a lot of trial and error, we realized you had to slide the brush across the wire frame very slowly so that the nail polish had enough time to solidify just enough to hold its shape. Even then, a ton of breakage would still occur, but we slowly got the gist.

Still, it was extremely time-consuming and difficult. Never trust Instagram Reels.

Stop 2: Beading

As if I hadn’t accumulated enough frustration from working with wire, I decided to take on beading. Beading is the art of stringing together beads to make some sort of accessory. I figured this craft could not be any more difficult than making nail polish and wire flowers, given my very short, simple two-step game plan:

1. Create the design.

This would just involve putting an image into a pixel art generator so I would have a pattern to follow.

2. Follow the pattern.

Each pixel is a color, which would correspond to one bead. As long as I follow the pattern, I should be fine.

Since I had a lot of blue beads, I wanted to make the logo of Syncopasian, the acapella group I’m a part of. After matching the beads into the pattern I generated, I got to work.

I very quickly realized I didn’t know how to work with multiple rows, because you can’t just bend the wire 180 degrees to form a new row; the entire structure would be really floppy or fall apart. Working with the wire ended up being really annoying, but this was in part due to the beads I was using. They were this crystal shape and were longer than they were wide. As a result, the beads would clash into each other, and I had to manipulate the wires to go around the beads in other rows.

Additionally, some rows were really long, so I had to work wire between the two rows so they wouldn’t slide against each other and become weak points.

Altogether, this project took me seven hours and all my sanity.

Stop 3: Crochet of various sizes

I’ve been crocheting for at least five years now. It started as a pandemic hobby, and I found that I really enjoyed how meditative it was. Plus, a fun product could come out of it!

All my crochet projects could probably be a blog post of its own, but there’s one project that has stuck with me for a while: Woodstock! I originally made a normal-sized Woodstock, the Peanuts character and sidekick of Snoopy.

But then, I thought, what if I went big.

Like, really big.

Instead of going out to purchase a thicker yellow yarn, I opted for the same yarn I used for the normal-sized Woodstock, thinking I would fare just fine. I was so wrong.

I unfortunately didn’t keep track of how long this large Woodstock took me, but I’m sure it was at least twenty hours. But if I used thicker yarn, it probably would’ve taken me the same amount of time as the normal-sized Woodstock…

For three years, I kept these two Woodstocks together, and didn’t think I would crochet anything related to them for a while. That was until I looked at my embroidery threads this summer and thought, what if I went tiny?

And so I did. Armed with my 1 mm. crochet hook, I spent a couple hours making a tiny Woodstock.

Let’s play two truths and a lie:

1. I have never broken a single bone in my body.

2. I learned how to swim the summer before junior year of high school.

3. I used my 1 mm. crochet hook for all three projects.

The lie is #2. (I learned the summer before college.)

Small but mighty, my 1 mm. crochet hook took on all three sizes of Woodstock. While my hands didn’t take a hit, my eyes probably did.

All of these difficult projects are to say that I believe you can do anything, if you put your mind to it. As cliche as it sounds, if you try your best, even though you might not finish with a project you expected, at least you will have learned something.

Next semester, I’m taking 4.354 (Introduction to Video and Related Media) and 4.031 (Design Studio: Objects and Interaction), and I’m really excited for both. Even though I still have major decision paralysis (see what I did there), for now, I am settled on those classes to work towards my 4B major. But who knows: tomorrow is another day, and the tides can change.

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