I’ve never been a craft person. I’m not a meticulous planner AT ALL. I , in fact, loathe planning things. I do it anyway – I run a business, I’m a mom… but I do not enjoy that part of my adult obligations. Most crafts require so much planning – first you have the idea (or see it somewhere online), then you have to research WHICH products/parts you need (and damn this is ALWAYS a rabbit hole), then you need to research HOW to do it, then you need to find time and space, etc etc. It’s a lot of work to make something small. It’s just not fun for me.
This has typically boiled down to one thing for me: say no to crafts. For things I will be doing often (typically for my business) – I don’t mind learning. I’ll suck it up and do all the hard stuff because once you get something down pat, it becomes much simpler and not very stressful. There are many facets of fixing/cleaning vintage and antiques that feel like an awful lot of research/trial and error – but it’s something I do every day. Worth it. Plus I’m saving things that would have been thrown out! Win!
When an idea for a craft pops into my head, I usually think “Oh that would be fun!” then the mental equivalent of me snapping a rubber band on my wrist. NO EMILY THAT WOULD NOT BE FUN! My husband is always very eager to jump in and tell me also, that NO EMILY THAT WOULD NOT BE FUN.
Then came this August. If I’m gonna do a craft, it’s gotta be duplicatable (for business purposes- I cannot just learn a new thing, spend a bunch of money to get started, and then make only one), and have a vintage feel to it. Bonus if I am repurposing something!
You all know about my ghosts at this point – I found this one thrifting years ago and have always LOVED it! So have my friends/fam/customers. I frequently got asked if I would sell him and I have never been willing to part with him. So I thought… you know what. Maybe I can reimagine him. He’s got a vintage look (I LOATHE plasticy cheap decor… like really and truly loathe), and he’s that perfect balance between spooky and cute! You could easily creep him up if that is your vibe, or make him really tame if your kids scare easily.
THE OG !
I read a couple tutorials, and immediately realized why I hate crafts. Everyone does the same thing differently – which way is better?????? WHO KNOWS! Certainly not me! So I winged it. I really, really winged it. This wound up being the perfect craft for me because it didn’t need to be cookie cutter, and I could fuck it up without ACTUALLY fucking it up. I just got to be creative.
You guys, I made A LIBRARY GHOST! Cue me geeking out. Also these tiny little decorative pieces were WAY MORE EXPENSIVE than they should be allowed to be. Bah humbug.
Now the boys found my supplies for these and immediately burned through all of them making figures and stuff, so ya know, par for the course. But anyway.
There has been a heavy amount of mental health struggle in my household lately. My eldest son has entered 6th grade and it seems like allllllll the pre teen bullshit hit him on the same day. I won’t go into too much detail because this is, in fact, the internet and he will, one day be an adult and have to read this thing about him online. But it’s been a lot of the worst kind of stuff. There are other people in my family as well going through similar things and I’ve been just barely keeping my head above water. Some moments it very much felt like I wasn’t above water at all. One of those, how can you swim when you are trying to save too many drowning people?
It felt great to put the kids to bed, and just be creative for a couple hours at night. I tend to work until I fall asleep (there is ALWAYS SO MUCH TO DO!) and I have a serious problem with relaxation when I feel behind. This was still something “to do”, but it enabled me to sit and focus on something relatively unimportant, but fun. I could trick myself into doing it instead of organizing or cleaning because it “was for work.”
MOVING ON!
If you have followed me for any amount of time, you know that finding uranium glass is one of my favorites! It’s such a fun thing and to me has always felt like a secret society – if you don’t know what you’re looking it, it’s just green depression glass. If you do, what a treat! Behind that black light is an eerie glow just waiting to be discovered.
A downside to my trade is how many AMAZING things I find that are broken. I can fix a lot of them, but I can’t fix chipped glassware. A large portion of the uranium glass I find is chipped, and it kills me a little bit every time I find it, and have to leave it where it is. Then I had a lightbulb moment – what if I buy this chipped/cracked uranium glass, then hammer it down, and use the chips to make glowing jars?!? It took me a while to find jars that were the size I was looking for, with corked toppers (because the vibe has to be consistent!) that were cost effective.
I finally found a few, and got to work! Remember how I said I don’t like to plan? Yeah. I just hammered glass, not really thinking about it shooting back up at me. Turns out that the thin pieces of glass were not glowing well once cracked up, and only those RREEALLLYYY thick pieces were usable. Those are hard to break into small pieces. I got frustrated and started targeting those pieces specifically and one of those very heavy pieces shot back up and essentially punched my knuckle. I couldn’t even be mad, it was a great “FUCK YOU STOP HAMMERING ME!” that gave me a bruised knuckle and a couple inch gash! Lesson learned.
I have way less of these than I wanted to (because a lot of the glass turned out not to be usable) BUT they are EXACTLY how I imagined them, and I found a way to repurpose broken uranium glass. Still my beating heart! I will definitely do this again as I find more glass.
Mental health is a bitch, and I am no expert on it. I do know though, that forcing your brain to focus on something different during times of stress is very important. Anytime you have to learn something new, it’s obviously fantastic for you, but it also gets you off whatever hamster wheel you’re currently stuck on. For me that’s organizing the pit of hell that is my basement, garage, the never ending cycle of cleaning my house, etc. Of course while deeply worrying about my son, my brother, etc. I did none of those things while working on these crafts.
That being said, I think I’m done with my crafts until next fall!
Happy Halloween season!