"Cock your hats--angles are attitudes."--Frank Sinatra

This is the tale of my biggest crafting disaster…the purple knit hat with no earflaps.  Argh!  It still hurts my heart to look at it.




The purple knit hat with no earflaps.  I kept it to remind myself

to never get too big for my crafty britches.



Yeah, so, the purple hat thing.  I begin this story by saying that I’m an amateur knitter.  I learned in college when, for reasons I don’t recall, I ended up spending a weekend alone in the dorm.  I bought a pair of needles, a skein of yarn and a book. Then—ta-da—I taught myself to knit.  Well, sort of.  I only knit stitch.  I only do scarves.  And they aren’t particularly well-made scarves.

However, one blustery Friday afternoon in the winter of ’06 I decided I was going to knit a hat with earflaps.  A coworker (a Rhode Island School of Design student being well trained in all things artfully perfect) who was showing off a sweater she was knitting, inspired me.  We chatted a bit about knitting, and at the end of our conversation she photocopied for me a hat with earflaps pattern from a book she had in her bag.  RISD Girl assured me if I followed the instructions carefully, I would have a hat by the end the weekend no matter how inexperienced I was in knitting.



I left work that day full of inspiration and intent!  I bought two skeins of a lovely purple yarn, my first pair of circular needles and everything else my hat pattern called for and raced home to feverishly begin my project.

To this day no one is quite sure what went wrong.  Despite my reputation for skipping steps when reading directions and leaving ingredients out of recipes, I followed the pattern to a T.  I knitted, counted, bound off and observed that my hat was a FREAKIN’.  HOT.  MESS.

It was pretty much shapeless.  Well, shapeless by the standards that it didn’t replicate the shape of a hat.  It was huge.  It looked like a yarn bowl.  I knitted a giant yarn bowl!  I can’t begin to tell you how broken hearted I was.  And maybe I cried a little.  I didn’t even bother with the earflaps.  (Let me tell you, four years ago when this story takes place you couldn’t find a freakin’ knit hat with earflaps anywhere.  You now can’t spit in Target without hitting seven of them!)

When Monday came I took my terrible hat to RISD Girl for inspection.  She, too, couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong.  Her theory: my yarn and its elasticity were the problem…maybe.  We joked I had made a great toaster cozy.  Later that night my husband wore it on his face declaring it a hockey mask while I laughed hysterically.  So, what is the lesson I learned from my knitting debacle of 2006?  I learned to laugh at my crafting mistakes…you know…because they are funny.  It’s as simple as that.







Craft Blog Link of the Week

I love reading craft blogs!  The only thing I love more than reading them is sharing the really cool stuff I find.  Below is my first craft blog link!

Ten Minute No-Sew Recycled T-Shirt Bag

The blogger behind this instructional post is not only a super crafty lady, but she wears a pair of orange glasses I find quite enviable.  This particular project seems simple enough for even the most inexperienced crafters.  And kudos for using recycled materials to make a bag that will fold up nicely in my purse until I need to whip it out at the grocery store or library.  I just love it when being environmentally friendly is easy and, in this case, fashionable!

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."--Maya Angelou

I thought my first crafty post, though technically my second post, should be about my current project.

It has been evolving for about a year or so.  It started out as a bright red canvas discarded by my sister which sat untouched in my craft room for quite a while.  Eventually, I ran across an interesting print in a magazine and decided to glue it to something to see where it might go.  The above picture is where it went.    

I must say at this point that Modge Podge is my craft true love.  It all began in junior high when my speech class was assigned the task of making a collage about ourselves from magazine clippings.  Little did I know this project would be the catalyst for my lifelong love of modge-podging.  Ever since I’ve kept a box filled with pictures, words and patterns I’ve found in magazines in the hopes I might someday glue them to something. 

 

Here is some of my very early and very embarrassing modge-podge work circa 1995.


 

Here is a lamp I’ve been modge-podging since 2007.  I’m a slow crafter to say the least.



So, now back to the “bird picture” as it has come to be known by my friends and family.  I’m not sure where it’s going. At first I didn’t think it had anything to do with me and my husband and our little nest of a home,  Yet the longer I work on it the more I realize it’s totally about us.  The bird’s nest is made of bright colors and patterns mixed with pictures of computer hardware.  The leaves are cut from pictures of flower gardens and industrial images.  It’s a nice blend of me, the bright, flowery one, and my husband, the concrete, technical one.  It has come to represent us, the unlikely pair who are in a constant state of building our nest.

I was recently told by my harshest craft critic, a dear friend whom I think of as a brother, that 1) he thought it was my “best work yet” and 2) I shouldn’t add a single thing to it because he declared it done.  But as a girl who never thinks a craft is really done…I’m not so sure.  When do you know a project is done?

"Whatever it is you do you have to master your craft. "--Snoop Dogg

I’m a crafty girl.  And being even a bit crafty is awesome in 2011 because it’s huge right now.  The market is absolutely flooded at the moment with tons of books and blogs dedicated to crafting.  I should know.  My day job involves both books and crafting.  And I also know what you’re thinking: That lucky girl gets to hang out all day with crafts AND books?!?  Yep, it’s true.  And one of the many reasons I have decided to start craft blogging.

Since I spend a large portion of my life perusing craft blogs for job-related and personal reasons, I currently have a ridiculous number of craft blogs, all with clever craft pun names, bookmarked on my computer.  I visit them daily.  And while I love each and every one of them…and get fantastic ideas from them…and find other amazing craft blogs through them…they quite often leave me feeling a little discouraged about crafting.

Their supposedly simple how-to instructions make me feel practically illiterate.  Their posts, which are accompanied by triumphant pictures of their perfectly finished products, rarely to never mention failing miserably nine times before they got it right.  And—my personal favorite—they present a cheap project, only for me (the not always prepared crafter) to discover it will cost me more money to make the darn thing than to buy it because I don’t have all the materials on hand like they do.

These people are usually experienced, if not just unbelievably dedicated crafters.  They aren’t learning to sew, knit or paint.  They’ve been doing these things for years.  They know the rules.  They have all the equipment.  Some even run successful crafty businesses.  And then there is me with my non-talent for knitting, a love of Modge Podge and an overwhelming desire to create…anything!

For months now I’ve been on the hunt for a craft blog written by a crafty girl like me.  I want to read about craft mistakes, misadventures and disasters.  I want to find other crafters who read the directions wrong, cut the fabric too short, or realize something looks homemade cheap rather than handmade chic.  But I have yet to find the blog that fits just right.  So in true crafty girl fashion and with much urging from those I hold near and dear, I have decided to write my own!

I promise to unabashedly tell my blog readers of my crafting calamities as well as triumphs.  I plan to post links to the amazing crafts and crafters I find on the web as well as the stuff that makes me utterly embarrassed to be a crafter.  I pledge to deglamourize all the craft websites, blogs, books and shows that make crafting seem often too hard or simply unattainable.  (Yes, Martha.  I’m talking to you.)

Because as my blog title says…craftin’ ain’t easy.