Attack! of the Killer Weblog

Spring is kind of here!

My trees are budding out. My bulbs are sprouting. I am home from work and sunshine is streaming through the window. I have a terrible desire to run out into the yard and start digging holes for plants that will die a horrible frosty death if I even think about planting them for another two months, but I'm holding off, because I CAN.

I have been spending a lot of time on projects. Why? Because they keep me from feeling adrift in a sea of evenings. At work, I can budget my time and fill every minute. At home, for some reason, I can't do that as well. So what do I do? Mostly, I read (I've been sent down the dark path of Terry Goodkind), and I write (the short story that sprawled first into a novella and is now heading full-tilt for novel territory) (oh, and I have a new poem up at The Journal of Asinine Poetry ... check out the front page, too, for a good friend of mine's work), and I do needlework.

When I was twelve years old, I learned how to do counted cross stitch, like any well-brought-up young lady. (Can't fault dear Mother for trying.) I was fascinated by it. Making thousands of tiny stitches in different colors and patterns created a new picture--like pointillism, but stabbier. I may have mentioned how my love of the needle arts is mostly my love of stabbing things, and it's not socially acceptable to take out that desire on anything animate, so, I stick with making scarves and stitching samplers. I finished a sampler just the other day, actually, and after ironing and framing it, I have spent time looking at it and thinking ... "Man. Gaudy." As it happens, this sampler came to me from Mother, who, while cleaning out her craft supplies last month, came across a sampler she'd started before either of her children were born. This sampler. Woo. It's something else. It would have been beautiful. It has flowers, a butterfly, a happy platitude across it. But the colors. O, the colors. Remember 1972? Remember the idea that colors should not be harmonious, but should SCREAM their clashes? War was in Vietnam, war was in the color scheme. And so we wind up with a sampler colored in baby blue, Girl Scout orange, pepto pink, mustard yellow, olive green, drab brown, and this other color that I can't even begin to describe. And I, being the inflexible thinker I am, went ahead and stitched the whole thing in the floss provided. Because what else am I going to do with it? And it was already separated out for me so neatly.

Mom had stitched the border and the lettering, but given up at that point. She shoved the whole mess into an envelope to be discovered 36 years later. I took it home and went to town on it. I'd quit needlepoint in high school. Dunno why. But when Mother handed this barely-started sampler to me, something long dormant in me, awoke. A connection to something larger than myself, maybe. This idea of craft.

Over the weekend I watched a documentary from PBS, Craft in America. It touched on the idea that craft is humanity expressed. And I can't disagree with that. One of the ladies they interviewed is a basketmaker, and she learned the craft from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and on back for hundreds if not thousands of years. In my home, I have needlework displayed from my great-grandmother, grandmother, and now mother and myself. Needlework is a constant along my family tree--all classes, all generations, for at least a hundred years are tied together by a needle and thread singing through fabric. I don't quilt, not yet. I don't have the patience or the finger strength. Great-Grandma used to be able to get five stitches at once onto her tiny little needle--she'd push so hard the needle would bend. Whereas I sew with a very big needle, a tapestry needle if I can get it (a tapestry needle is roughly three times the size of your quilter's needle), and my stitches are less decorative and more about holding together a stuffed animal. Been making dolls and such for more than half my life, with no sign of letting up anytime soon. I just made a stuffed owl last night out of a shirt I haven't worn in three years, and it has been pronounced cuddlesome, if a little spooky. Which is the best kind.

My point being, crafting is what I do. I craft with words a lot, and with physical things. Fabric, feathers, paint, pressed flowers, beads, barn wood, anything I can get my hands on. I'm about to start a project with dried beans and macaroni that will be spectacular, in one direction or the other. I've tried not crafting. I really have. This compulsion used to frighten me--this inability to keep my mind from working in that direction, to keep my hands from grabbing up every found object that might work with some collage/doll/bracelet I'm thinking about. I used to wonder what was working in me, or through me, but now I imagine there's no outside force. It's just how I'm built. It's my talent. I am not gifted with the ability to program Java, for instance, or be a sous chef, or protect people from themselves. But I can make a cuddly teddy bear for a child to love, and that doesn't scare me at all, anymore.