Coming Out of the Craft Closet

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Cross-stitching. Hand quilting. Macramé. Knitting.

I learned it all. So did my siblings. You had to, if you wanted to spend time with Mom. Even if the television was on, even if we were at the beach, in a movie theater, she was always making something. Her fingers never stopped moving.

My best friend, Anne-Marie, had the board game Candy Land. I asked for it every time I went to her house, then just stared at the board when she took it out. The ice cream-covered castle of King Kandy, the Lollipop Woods, Queen Frostine. It was foreign and magical to me. I didn’t play board games at six; I did needlework.

“Why would you play games when you could make something, something wonderful? Something useful?” asked Mom.

I suppose games could also be useful. In a cabinet in my childhood home I once found a dusty, torn-up Scrabble box, missing most of the letters—the ones Mom had used years before to make necklaces that spelled our names.

Plastic needlepoint. Crochet. French knots. Wheel-thrown pottery.

Most children think about what they want to do when they grow up. I thought about what I didn’t want to do. I never wanted to spend my Saturday mornings in another fabric store or yarn shop. I never again wanted to rip out 14 rows of stitches because I had lost track of how many squares the damned cross-stitched duck feet took up in the pattern. As God is my witness, I whispered over macramé knots that scratched my fingers, I will never do craftwork again!

Christmas was gift time, show-and-tell. Everything handmade. I gave my Grandma a plastic needlepointed Kleenex box covered with bright orange yarn sunflowers.

Aunt Mae thanked me for the lovely set of hand-painted ceramic life-like fish hanging by their mouths from a real metal fishing stringer. Saint that she was, she even hung it on her wall.

Our Christmas tree was covered with cross-stitched ornaments we kids had made in bright plastic, circular frames. Little drummer boys, geese with Christmas ribbons wrapped around their necks, tiny drums worked with metallic gold thread.

I yearned for the ornaments only a mall could provide. I longed for something painted by an underpaid laborer, or even a small child. But one who lived far, far away—in China, or Japan.

Embroidery. Machine sewing. Gold-leaf rubbing. Stencil painting sweatshirts.