Monday, January 17, 2011

Let's craft!

I’m getting really into crafts these days.  Making something new out of something old, used, out of materials found about my apartment. Maybe I’m just a hoarder, but I love to have interesting things around me. Nate and I want a pack rat home, a place where our friends can just idly gaze around and see lots of different objects that interest or inspire them.  When I’m crafting I feel my creative imagination turn back on; its a bit rusty in these graduate school years of critical rigor.





These crafts sometimes feel silly in the face of the graduate work I do, but sometimes a girl just needs to make a pink paper flower for her stubborn hibiscus plant.  







Or the extra something that is added to a party when you have parchment paper curls lining the doorways and waves of graphic cutouts floating above head.




Crafting is reawakening my artistic imagination while also bringing out the maker in me.  I have been making objects. I believe there is something radical in that act- radical in the way that it unhooks from the consumer-buyer cycle.  Instead of buying, I make.  This is not to say that there are not purchased materials.  I’ve spent my share at Paper Source, Urban Renewal and Goodwill, but I’ve been purchasing the materials (or scooping them out of the recycling bin and my box of random odds and ends that I have for some reason never thrown away) and using these materials to create something new.

  A something that sometimes has no real purpose or even falls apart with enough handling, but isn’t that like much we buy anyways.  Generations before us, our grandparents, some of our parents, grew up with a handmade, craft culture. They sewed their own pillows and dresses. They baked their own bread and might have even brewed their own beer. And before you think I’m just sliding into sentimental nostalgia, there is something really creative, sustainable, and subversive to capitalism in that. If I make more, I buy less.  I believe that we buy the world we will see.  Where you spend your money today matters, and over time shapes the very communities around us.  I think crafting offers a way to spend less on our daily goods (our home decor, gifts, clothing, food), which in turn leaves us more money to spend on the things that we value: travel, time with our family and friends, good music and art, and the causes we support.
Let’s craft!

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