One of the things no one tells you when you get into the Craft Kit business (you can roll your eyes, it's fine) is that you suddenly become very aware about everyone else's kits. Some of these kits existed before the pandemic and to you folks, I salute you. Some of these kits appeared during the initial quarantine of the pandemic as a short-term solution to stay relevant and give people something to do (hey that's me!). Some of these kits will continue post-pandemic and some will be a strange relic of a long lost era (hey that's also most likely me!).
I should actually start off by saying this is not an ad. I just started this blog and don't know how to make money off of it. I just want to share what I know, what I wish I knew, and what I'm learning. (But also if someone wanted to give me money, I'm not above taking it).
I looked at a lot of kits for inspiration for the Craft Kits we put out at my job and came out with the most basic version I could. The biggest change that we've made since the first kit in April was to add a supplemental sheet on a very basic history of the craft. I felt like we were missing an opportunity to add an educational component to our kits. This looks like showing the history and contemporary artistry of basket weaving by the Kalapuya people in our Coiled Rope Basket kit to explaining the symbolism of the colors in the transgender flag for our Coming Out Week Friendship Bracelet kit.
Throughout all of my own kit directing, I was feeling like I was having a hard time working on my own art. I had done some small projects around the house (flamingo skeletons for Halloween lawn decorations as one example), but all of my big embroidery pieces were sitting in our art closet creating nice creases that would be a pain to iron out later. Returning to work in the pandemic threw me off, the raging summer fires threw me off, creating content threw me off, trying to hit my reading goal for the year threw me off. If you haven't caught on by now, I love an excuse. It's a major character flaw. We're working on it.
The thing is, I'm really bad at taking my own advice. I teach a class in creative exploration for crying out loud and I'm the worst student. In that class there's a week where I request students bring an unfinished piece of art or craft that has been lurking in their art closets. We all look at it, they explain what happened (sometimes they ran out of financial resources, most of the time they ran out of steam), and the class offers suggestions on how to quickly wrap it up that day or they offer their condolences and the maker can throw it a funeral. No really, we throw it an actual funeral. I have so many of these projects hanging out at my house with accompanying lists of "I wish I could have, I should have, I would have...". The next part of the PGP (Process Grieving Process) is to sit on my couch watching the Food Network while my brain twists with all the exciting ideas I have, but can't figure out a way to connect that interior movement to motivate my hands and feet to get up and go do the thing. So I just sit there. Watching Guy's Grocery Games getting fooled like the contestants at his 3,2,1, go schtick. Same, tattooed chef from Baltimore, same.
I pull this embroidery piece out every now and then and look at it lovingly and then put it away.
But then like a beacon of hope raining from above, or like that scene in Clueless when Cher goes to the mall and is in front of the fountain with her shopping bags and declares, "Oh my god, I love Josh!": hope fell from the sky. Only instead of rays of light or a relationship with my step-brother (ex-step-brother), it was a craft kit from Curiosity Studio in Minneapolis, MN. My problem with other kits I've seen is that I don't want stuff. I have stuff (See: We have an art closet. Not a drawer, a closet.). And like the former art student I am, it's really hard for me to spend time on something creative if it doesn't fit into my portfolio. Curiosity Studio adds in something I hadn't considered. What if the project took one afternoon and you actually got joy from the learning part and the making mistakes part? What if the final object was not the point? I shudder.
To put it simply: It was delightful. I ordered their first kit which was centered on the idea of shape. The kit took me about two days to complete (drying time for paint) and it made me genuinely laugh the entire way through. The activity was to take aluminum foil and shape it with the help of some prompts in a provided workbook. You then covered that shape in tape and then paint the tape and add "flair" like sequins and feathers. I started out making a cactus that turned into a flashlight best fit for Polly Pocket...you had to be there. Try explaining the process to your partner while holding a very phallic shape of tin foil and try not to laugh.
I'm not a sculptor and, in fact, the idea of working in the round terrifies me. I can barely get a flat thing done and now I have to think of all the sides? No thanks. But the finished product isn't really the point. Why does working 3D scare me? What if I just tried it and discovered that it wasn't as scary as I thought it was? I did so many things with this. I thought about what it would feel like to see through an object or what if it could suspend in air. I thought about if it hung up outside how an animal might interact with it. I thought about six-year old Noelle, always playing pretend, and how she might interact with it.
Like I said, I'm no salesman. But if I were I would be ringing bells and flopping around like one of the car lot dancing tube guys screaming, "Don't sleep on this!" A thing people don't tell you about being a creative person is that you have to step out of your creativity and into someone else's every now and then and play. Like really play as if you were a little kid discovering sequins for the first time in art class. Play can wake you back up and activate senses and parts of your brain that weren't being used before. We don't do it enough as adults and we certainly don't support it enough in students and young adults.
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