A Legacy of Crafts

I grew up surrounded by women who were craft-capable. Knitting, tatting, cooking, painting, crocheting, gardening, quilting, scrapbooking and sewing. I learned at their feet how to knit afghans, and square cotton dishclothes. My Barbie doll collection was dressed to the nines in hand-sewn clothes, including a knitting coat with a fur collar and a dress to make Dolly Parton proud for square dancing. Everywhere I went - from my home to my maternal Grandmother's home in Scranton, PA, her and my Grandfather's hand-built cottage in the Wayne Highlands, and my various Great Aunt's homes in East Poultney, Vermont, and Whitehall, New York, I was surrounded by craft projects.

My Great, Great Aunt Maude was a painter and tatter. Her palettes, brushes and tubes of ancient, dried oils filled the house in Poultney. My Great Aunt Gert made lace and cooked (though mostly she read Mickey Spillane and watched Yankees games). She loved the old shade garden beside the house, filled with pieces of granite spiked with quartz. Her sister, my Great Aunt Mildred, a teacher by trade, a cat lover and a collector of odds and ends also cooked, and also gardened, and she gifted me with pencils (100 every Christmas embossed with my name, albeit spelled wrong), crayons, coloring paper and books.

My Great Aunt Ruth loved cooking and set a mean table in her spotless house. And my Great Aunt Stella loved jewelry and the finer things and I came by my love of sparkly ornaments by her.

In Scranton, however, I was at the feet of a master of all things crafty and domestic. My Grandmother Helen was a formidable cook, a seamstress without par, and a knitter and crocheter whose sweaters were works of art and who could knit the tiniest slippers for children, oodles of hats and mittens and thick, heavy, amazing afghans in a wild array of shapes, sizes, colors and designs. Her gardens - both vegetable and flower - were small but packed with color and purpose. Her aprons were hand-made and her dresses sewn with loving care and attention to detail. She donated her creations to men in the prisons near Scranton, to the homeless orphans, to the mentally handicapped and those down on their luck. She cooked with great care and cunning, living frugally (as only the wife of a Scottish coal miner can), making hearty and delicious meals from all manner of odds and ends.

As a pre-teen, my Mother and I created linoleum cut and hand-stamped Christmas cards. We made Easter Egg trees, and spring wreaths. Fruit cakes and muffins and puddings. I learned how to make a pie at the cottage using fresh picked blackberries and I learned to whittle from my Grandfather, making an odd game reminiscent of the game played by Laurel & Hardy in Babes In Toyland. I made kites, I made paper dolls and I drew like crazy. Crayons and paints, charcoals and pastels, and designing clothes were my passions.

One of my most prized possessions is the scrapbook my Mother made for me one year in college, after a tough event that left me emotionally exhausted and physically weak. She created the most amazing Halloween costumes and to this day I remember the wondrous angel ensemble, replete with coat-hanger wire wings covered in gold lame.

My Christmas tree - a tiny one this year, a scant four feet tall and narrow by our usual standards - wears crocheted ornaments from my Grandmother sewn with sequins for sparkle. I have a paper ornament that I made at Mother's behest with old wrapping paper and, my favorite, GLITTER. There is a tiny clothespin wooden soldier made by Gram and somewhere we cannot find at the moment, the quilt top that she had made that serves as our tree skirt.

So it is no wonder that I come by a love for crafting.

Sadly, adulthood has been filled with other pasttimes. From 21 to 30 I indulged in social activities in Manhattan where I worked, including acting and singing classes. From 30 to 40 I lived in NYC and pursued my performing career, though my crafting zealotry was exposed in my preparation of costumes and makeup.

When I hit 40, and discovered my Mother's health was deteriorating and that the burden of my mentally handicapped brother as well as my recently arrived 95 year old Grandmother from Scranton, was too much for her, I packed up my sheet music and my scripts, and thousands of books, and moved back to the family home in which I'd been raised.

A few years earlier I'd started a garden, which I had thought would help my Mother and Gram bond. I visited on weekends and helped with the rose bushes. I had knitted a huge afghan for a dear friend while in Manhattan and upon coming home I turned to my Grandmother for knitting tips, in an effort to engage her.

At a time when most women (and men) hit that legendary "mid-life crisis", and become wild and crazy, I reverted to a simpler mind-set. I gave up the wild and crazy life filled with flirtations with gay men and too many margaritas and began to immerse myself in the creative and crafty life. I fell back into knitting. I expanded the garden and started to cook, and to my Mother's surprise was handier at it than both she and my culinary institute trained brother. I returned to baking pies, and making soups and stews. I fashioned odd garden ornaments out of leftover detritus. I put together and painted wooden benches and chairs for the garden and made birdhouses and feeders.

Now, past 50, still (and forever) single and childless, and far removed from the wicked stage, I am a crafter reborn. My Grandmother died on April 21, 1999, at the age of 99 (4 short months from her 100th birthday). My Mother has sunken into depression from which she emerges only infrequently to indulge her former love of creativity.

But I am overwhelmed with crafty desires. I've also overwhelmed my credit cards with craft purchases, from enough yarn to knit a battleship cozy, to dozens of yards of fabric for quilting. I have hooked rug kits, numerous stamps, oil paints, water colors, pencils and crayons and Play-Doh and pastels. I have all manner of odds and ends from ribbons to paper buits to cardboards and pictures for paper crafts. I have pounds of broken crockery and plates for mosaic work. Not to mention bags of beads and bits and pieces for jewelry making (and a life-long love of sparkly things!) I have tools for woodworking and books galore for all sorts of activities from yard signs to baking bread to knitting, sewing, quilting, crocheting and designing the perfect craft room.

In the end, however, I am a novice. What skills I had are rusty and nearly all my craft mentors are gone. My desire is there, but my talents are modest. So I'm embarking, anew, on a journey toward the handmade. From clothes to gardens, from foods to fripperies, I'm a Crafter-In-Training.

I'm going to share the fun and the frustration of using my hands to create beauty. As an author, I'm very used to using my mind to create. Now I'm going to see how it works putting my mind, and my hands, together. It's going to be quite an education!

Where to start? So many crafts, so little time. But I think I'll start where I'm most familiar.

Knitting anyone?