She’s Crafty (Not!)

I’ve always wanted to be a crafty girl, but I’m not. There’s just something missing in my genetic makeup for arts and crafts. It’s not that I’m not interested in them—I’m just either not good at crafts or not patient enough for them.

When I was a kid I loved doll houses. I adored the miniature furniture, perfectly detailed and scaled down. My mom was thrilled that I was interested and took me to pick out some furniture for my new doll house. I picked out the furniture that I wished I had in my own room—a large canopy bed with tall dressers that sat on pretty feet. I had kitchen sets, grandfather clocks, a stove, lamps, and my mom even sewed bedding and tablecloths for everything.

My dream bedroom set

It look a while, but I finally found the perfect doll house. It was a stunning Victorian, similar to this.

What it SHOULD have looked like...

It wasn’t cheap. My dad offered to help me put it together but I convinced him that I could do it. So he bought me glue and whatever else I would need to assemble it. I think I was 9.

Had I been less obtuse, this hobby would have been the first clue that I wasn’t the crafty type. I really wish I had a picture of the finished house. It looked less like a stately Victorian and more like a tenement building. The whole thing leaned to the left, the porch was lopsided, the shutters hung off, the roof caved in a bit in one area and the paint job—inside and out—looked like someone had been blindfolded and was turned loose. I had been given a wallpaper sample book as well as some carpet samples. After I paired a gold and blue wallpaper with purple carpet it was clear that I would never have a successful career as an interior designer.

My parents were devastated. That house was probably a couple of hundred dollars and the furniture was probably almost as much. At one point the dollhouse disappeared, never to be seen again. I’m sure it was smashed and burned in the fire place, the furniture lovingly wrapped up and put away for safe keeping.

After that, I moved on to knitting. My grandmother tried to teach me how but I didn’t quite grasp the concept and couldn’t do much more than a 10-foot strand of stitches.

now what do I do with it all?

I was pretty safe with reading and stuck to that for years, but at some point I started to look for other outlets for my “creativity.”

After college I took up mosiac tiling. I bought a bunch of little glass mosaic tiles and some clear candle holders and basically bedazzled the shit out of them. That didn’t last long—they looked cheap and ugly and I didn’t like to use them.

Then it was on to beading. I tried to make jewelry, napkin holders and God only knows what else. Everything was totally Fugly.

A couple of years later, a friend of mine was interested in quilting and convinced me to take a class with her. They taught us the basics of cutting pieces and  hand-sewing squares and triangles in fairly simple patterns. That lasted a while—as long as it took me to hand-sew twelve 12″x12″ squares together to make the topper. By that point I realized I had no skill at the actual quilting part—hand-quilting a pattern to sew batting between the topper and the bottom. That’s still sitting in my guest room dresser, mocking me for getting it so far but not finishing it.

So now I have a big container full of beads, wire, mosaics, fabric, yarn, glue, paint and thread. I wonder what I should try to ruin make next?