Suffer for Craft

When I was 18 I had this running joke that “when I grew up” I was going to pursue writing and art on the side and that, after long days at the office, I would come home, sit in the windowsill of my studio apartment, drink gin and chain smoke cigarettes. “I don’t smoke or drink but I believe in suffering for my art.” I would always add. “I believe there are few things more artistic than lung cancer and liver failure.” This running joke went so far that I spent my first two quarters of college studying to be an accountant. It ended abruptly when I realized how deeply apathetic I was about business calculus. 

By a twist of fate, I ended up as a housewife. While I have plenty of time to pursue art and writing, the windowsill is too tiny to perch on and we don’t have any gin. Somehow I doubt sitting in a cushioned swivel chair sipping tea and chewing candy cigarettes is suffering by any stretch of the imagination. 

I wasn't joking about the candy cigarettes. My sister was kind enough to send a carton for NaNoWriMo.

Cozy and full of cookies and bonbons and other stereotypical housewife foods, I decided tonight I would suffer. Not for art, not for writing, not for calculus. Tonight I suffered for craft.

I try to avoid crafts. We don’t do cute tea lights in mason jars with raffia tied around them to light up the porch table. We don’t even have a table on the porch. There are no rustic “Welcome to Our Home” banners cut from Tim Holtz construction paper and threaded with hemp. No faux succulents planted in gold picture frames. No heart throw pillows with our faces and wedding date printed on them, or coat hooks with our initials or corkboards made of actual corks. For the longest time our only Pintresty item was a flat black canvas with green ombre lettering that read “WELL DOUBLE DUMBASS ON YOU”. It has since been joined by a tea holder made of clothes pins and cardstock.            

I wasn't joking about this either. No jokes allowed on this blog.

I have nothing against crafty décor in theory, in fact I am all for it, as long as it’s just a theory. When people tell me how they made x,y,z thing for their house or post all their mason jar creations I smile and nod.

But I suffered tonight. I suffered for craft because of a photo my sister sent me.

It was a collage of three photos, no words; it didn’t need any words.  The first photo showed a Ziploc bag of felt scraps in analogous colours. The second showed a few coiled around each other with a glue gun off to the side. The third showed a finished shoe mat. A really cool, simple, felt shoe mat. I was sold immediately, and picked up three big sheets of felt the next time I was at Daiso.

It was going to be perfect; I would finally have something to replace the rice bag I was using to hide the stain in the carpet and for a fraction of the cost of buying one wherever you even buy mats at. I had just recently gotten my first glue gun since mine had been confiscated at age ten and I was in love all over again.

I started on it tonight as a way of unwinding from a stressful week. I measured the felt into one inch strips, which immediately somehow warped themselves into weird 3/4^th inch on one end 1 ½ inches on the other. I free handed the rest of the strips (all 4 sets of them before I got bored) and they turned out slightly more uniform. So far, so ok.

I put on some relaxing music and coiled my first color. And added a few strips here and there. I glued and squeezed and bent and rolled. The glue kept squeezing out onto my fingers; there were slight gaps between the felt layers, not a big deal. I kept going until an hour had passed and I got a glob of very hot glue on my thumb. I decided it was time to take a break and reassess. 

oh. well... I guess...

Time spent on project- one hour. Progress on project- maybe 15%. Blisters- one on my thumb. And the project itself? covered in glue globs and weird hair like glue strands, some of which may be actual hair too, because who knows. Is it the worst thing to ever come from my crafting? Certainly not. But the more I stare at it the more I know if I admit defeat I just wasted an hour and ten bucks and if I persevere I stand to waste up to 6 more hours on it… for something that will get shoe stains on it and be next to impossible to clean due to all the ridges and crevasses.

You can suffer for art, you can suffer for writing, you can even suffer for business calculus, but if you’re suffering for crafts you are probably doing something wrong.

note: this post was written a year and a half ago, when I was thinking of starting a blog but decided not to. I left the post mostly as was, but will add the epilogue that the shoe mat was thrown in the trash bin in a wave of defeat. Further more, the Double Dumb Ass On You wall hanging was covered to say "fuck yeah potatoes!" because my husband hated it. He hated that as well, so the canvas is patiently waiting to be covered in not so subtle vulvas and rehung in the kitchen.