Quite A Trip

Continuing this trip along the craft road, I am constantly being reminded of other crafts that I picked up along the route. There was the brief crocheting stint in college. . . . one Christmas I crocheted hats for several of my sorority sisters. But, crocheting confuses me because I never seem to know which opening I'm supposed to put the hook into. Now, in knitting, it's pretty straight forward and hard to mis-judge, but crocheting just gives too many choices of openings, thus, chances to be wrong!! Also in college, I developed my tendency to always be a "colorer" and never an artist. I had several sorority sisters who were art majors and very good at what they did. Whenever we had to make signs or scenery or whatever for Rush, skit nite, homecoming, Braves' Day, etc. they would draw the work of art and I would be one of the masses who came behind and colored. . . . inside the lines, mind you!!! When you combine this with the fact that I was a business major - well, there just wasn't any hope for my creativity. Or, was there? I seem to have been on a journey ever since. A journey to find the art or craft that I'm really good at.



Eight months after graduating from college, I married Ben (the owner of my beautiful needlepoint fraternity crest. . . . of course I had to marry him!!!). Within 7 months we had bought our first house, so new crafts started entering the scene at a staggering rate. I took stained glass classes because we were going to fix up the house and have lots of stained glass windows throughout. I actually did make one small window (which has been propped up in my playroom window - different house - for the past 32 years) and one candy cane Christmas ornament. Lots of supplies there: glass cutters, fancy pliers, goggles, solder and flux, brushes, and lots and lots of glass pieces. Ben finally talked me into tossing out the 2 gigantic boxes of glass pieces about 5 years ago. Now, I really don't like tossing out anything, but he finally convinced me that there would probably not be an awful lot of stained glass artisans at the Goodwill store. I say, "Maybe, maybe not!!"



Then there was an upholstery class. I had picked up a wonderful old fainting couch from the side of the road and was going to reupholster it for our bedroom. Also, we had Ben's Grandmother's old goose neck rocker, a caned love seat from my favorite antique store and a wonderfully comfortable easy chair from my Mother's house. We recovered the love seat and it sits in our bedroom. I did reupholster Grandma Lucy's rocker and it's in my breakfast room, but to this day still doesn't have trim around the edges to cover the tacks. Actually, a nice throw covers most of them pretty well. We paid a professional to redo Mother's chair and we re-tossed the fainting couch. It was a great idea, but just not for us!! Of course, along the way I had to get GIGANTIC scissors, tack hammer, stretcher, boxes and boxes of tacks (as if we were going into the business!), fabric, etc. Lots more tools to add to my collection.

I'm going to have to speed this up, so that I can get to the original aim of my blog - The Hoarding of Craft Supplies! So, I'll briefly mention that there was cake decorating, basket weaving (both with traditional reeds and with my own weaving supplies that I picked up where ever I could find them - think privet hedge in my back yard and kudzu on my back fence), macrame (now there's a craft that I really didn't mind being bad at), tole painting, one-stroke painting, loom weaving, calligraphy (that's the one where the teacher broke my calligraphy pen over her knee and said not to come back!!!! Just joking, but I was about that bad at it), drawing class (can you say "she sucks at this"), adult education sewing class (still messed up on the sleeves). Then, when I had just about given up, I took several classes in rubber stamping. Bingo!! This is my calling. . . . well, I didn't totally stink at it!

And each and every class and craft has added tons of supplies and tools to my supplies. There's just nothing better than shopping for arts and craft supplies. And I discovered something a couple of years ago while going through a stage of buying more and more kitchen tools. I finally realized what I was doing!!! I had bought in to the theory that "If I get enough supplies and just the right tools, then I'll be good at whatever I do." An amazing concept!!! However, it didn't work with the kitchen tools and I'm beginning to realize that it doesn't work with the craft tools either. But, I keep trying.