My craft drawer gets tidied about once a month, and it stays tidy for roughly four days. Then the seed beads are back in with the washi tape, the glue sticks have migrated under the scissors, and I am tipping the whole drawer onto the table to find one bead cap. I have bought two…
I want to tell you about the coaster that taught me to count. I had a four-inch cork-backed blank, a bag of glass mosaic tiles in about nine colours, and a free evening. I started laying tiles in the top left corner, worked across, worked down, and it all went well right up until the…
A stretch bracelet is the shortest route there is from a bag of beads to a finished gift. No clasp to fiddle with, no crimping, no findings. String, knot, done, and it fits a wrist you never had to measure in front of the person you are making it for. Stretch bead bracelets sized with…
A decoupaged tin can is a ten inch strip of paper, a coat of glue, and about ten minutes at the kitchen table. The first one we made came out of the afternoon covered in blisters. Not creases from a clumsy hand, but a row of raised ridges that ran from top to bottom of…
A wire-wrapped ring is ten inches of wire, four minutes of winding, and two minutes of tucking the ends. The first one most people make does not go that way. The bands wind on fine, the ring looks like a ring, and then the wire runs out halfway through the coils that hold the whole…
The first clay dish I ever made dried into a crisp. I pressed a fern into a round of white air-dry clay on a Tuesday evening, set it on the kitchen windowsill, and by Thursday the rim had lifted off the table on one side and there was a hairline split running across the base…
My mother turned eighty in March and told everyone she wanted nothing. I made her a little photo album anyway, six pictures of her garden across four decades, folded like a concertina so it stood up on the windowsill. It took me an hour and a half, and when I put it in the gift…
For about twelve years I told people I did not make candles. I made a lot of other things, but candles had a stove in them, and a pot I would never get clean again, and a thermometer, and a step where you pour something at 185 degrees while holding a wick straight with your…
I have had the same jar of buttons for nineteen years. It started as my mother’s, it lives on the shelf above the craft table, and until two summers ago its entire purpose was to sit there looking charming and be moved when I needed the shelf. Donna holding a finished papier-mache letter A covered…
The first wreath I ever made took me an hour and a half, and I hung it on the front door for exactly one afternoon before I quietly took it back down. It had little dried flowers spaced all the way around the ring, evenly, the way I thought a wreath was supposed to look….
