Craftiness
I've added a new category to my blog called "craftiness", for all of my hobbies that involve making stuff. I crochet pretty well and I knit, but only poorly crafted rectangles. I haven't been drawing much lately, but I used to do it a lot. I'm pretty good with painting and stuff too. And I know how to sew and quilt and stuff. As mentioned in my last post I've been playing around with weaving.
I've been thinking about crafting a lot lately. Not just what to make next, but why I think crafts are important.
For the last couple generations, people have not been making stuff much. It has been a society of providing services rather than making things. We buy everything we own and most of us don't even know how it's made. More and more, I think that petty crime is tied to not making anything.
I hate vandalism. I hate people who randomly destroy other people's stuff. I think I'm more sensitive to it because I make stuff. I have a quilt that I made by hand when I didn't have a sewing machine. That quilt represents months of cutting and sewing without even a table to work on when I was living in Seattle. When I first lived here, I had the quilt on the couch, and I eventually had to move it into the bedroom, on my side of the bed because my husband had no respect for the quilt. He threatened to spill things on it, and got guinea pig fur on it and squished it into the crack of the couch. He has never sewn a quilt by hand, so he does not know why I'm protective of my quilt. He's no longer allowed to touch it. And none of what he did was on purpose.
All over the place here I see trash in the streets and bus shelters that have been broken or defaced, just for fun. I think that people who do things like that are people who have never made anything. If they had ever had to build anything from scratch, they would not be so eager to destroy something someone else has made. They were the kids who smashed other people's sand castles and Lego skyscrapers, and the people who contribute to the world are the ones who built the sandcastles and Lego skyscrapers.
If you have kids, do them a huge favor. Teach them to make things. Teach them jewelry making and pottery and painting and cross stitch and quilting. Buy them play-doh and weaving kits and knitting looms. Risk stepping on some Legos for the sake of making your kids better people.
Shop on Etsy. Buy things that are handmade, to show your kids the value of the hands that made them. Don't let your kids break things without understanding how much more work it takes to make things. Make sure they grow up to be builders, not destroyers. The world has enough destroyers.
Alana
