Driven to Craft

Here I am on another all night craft binge.  I know I should stop, but I just can’t.  There will always be something that is waiting to be made. I crank out five fleece hats in a frenzy, and my craft-crazed haste I smudge the paint by stacking the printed scarves prematurely.  But I press along with hope, picturing a colorful booth teeming with my handcrafted wares on a cold winter Saturday before Christmas.

My art studio the morning after an all night craft binge

But the next day at the craft fair I have second thoughts about all of it.  I want to disappear into my display. I fear that passers-by will feel obligated to buy something from me because I appear somewhat desperate. I ask myself why I feel the need to sell my wares when I have a satisfying day job. I am hooked on that momentary thrill when a person who is not your relative wants to buy something you have created. This is matched by waves of insecurity and a constant need for validation that summarizes the emotional arc of an artist. Maybe this is why I chose sociology over studio art in college—I loved making art, but couldn’t bring myself to call it my profession.

Photoshoot for my Guad handbag line

My neighbor at the fair, the birdhouse man, has made the transition from an electrician to birdhouse designer for white-trash birds.  His creations are ornate, glimmering stuccoed boots, lighthouses and churches each with a small circular entrance for the bird.  They sell for anywhere from 50 to 100 dollars, and they indeed sell.   Each time he parts with one I can hear his overtly cheerful catch phrase: “you just extended my retirement by another day!”  I can only imagine the crime scene of his garage the night before a craft show like this with an explosion of sawdust and sequins all over the floor.  But he is probably one of those people who has everything neatly organized in shelves and bins, and cleans his workspace religiously with a wet/dry vac. Even so, part of me feels a strange kinship to him3. We both belong to a family that spends weekends at on the road at craft fairs instead of ball games or the mall.

I was born into a world of fabric. I was raised in an old stone house in rural Vermont where bits and scraps of calico were regarded as nothing short of treasures to be transformed by my own imagination. As a child I was dragged to craft fairs with my parents.  They both had day jobs but their idea of weekend fun was to tour around rural Vermont town greens and set up a booth and get to work selling their creations. My sisters and I learned early on that crafting staved off boredom and if you were lucky it could earn you some spending money.  I started out making hand-lettered, made-to-order rainbow striped banners for any occasion, then in my teens I reinvented myself as a fashion designer, making miniskirts for a small company I called “Beyond the Behind.”  The logo on my business card featured a sun setting beyond two cheek-like hills.

My parents saved stuff like this to remind me what a freakish child I was

My mother has always been a complete craft demon. During the Christmas season one could never count on seeing the surface of our dining room table.  It was shrouded in a swarm of calico fabric, colored yarn and various doll appendages, stuffed and in different degrees of assemblage.  In the closing hours before Christmas, Bonnie pulled all-nighters to finish doll orders to get the finished product to the post office in time for it to be under the tree.

So it isn’t strange that I can’t seem to escape my craft obsession as much of my passion seems to be genetic. What if I were to make art purely for the sake of it? I find my joy in the creation, and in the concentration of crafting where my thoughts are free to roam while my sewing machine stitches scenes to life. When I work, especially late on winter nights, I turn on every warm glow of a light in the spare room so I can see all the possibilities.  In the quiet of night I unfold great lengths of silks and velvets and drape them together over the back of a chair.  I piece together histories with bits of bright cotton and then transform them into an entirely different story, and I never know where the process will take me. I find that it is the act of creating, traveling that unknown highway, that keeps me forging ahead into the unknown territory.

Mariachi pillow made with random scraps and iron on transfers