My Crafting through the Years

When it comes to crafts, there are a wide variety of different crafts that you may decide to try your hand at. How you decide which one can be one of the more difficult things to do. Maybe you pick a craft that you remember your parents or grandparents doing. Maybe it is one that your friends do. Maybe it is a craft you have always admired and that you want to learn yourself. It doesn’t matter which one of these you decide to go with, it’s just important that you pick a craft and that you start.

For me, I learnt how to crochet when I was little. I remember always being interested in different crafts and playing with all sorts of things. As I got older, I wanted to learn to crochet as it was what my mom was doing. She already had the crochet supplies required – hooks and yarn. I remember having troubles with making the chain to start a project, but beyond that, I was fine to get going. I even attempted an ambitious project, the afghan you see in this article picture. This took me probably 20 years to finish, a bit at a time when I was feeling ambitious. It is wide enough for a double bed but I am using it as a couch blanket.

I remember my mom trying to teach me how to knit when I was little as well, but it was not something that I connected with. But as an adult, I decided that this was a craft I wanted to get into and be able to say that I can do. As a result, I ended up finding the knitting needles that I inherited from my mother and went and found some YouTube videos to help me get started. I learnt how to do the knit stitch and then I joined a craft group to learn how to purl.

When I was little, a huge craft trend was working with gimp which was like plastic string that was made into bracelets of different types of styles. My dad actually was best at showing me how to work with this material as it was around when he was a kid. The trickiest element of the gimp was making sure the strings didn’t get twisted as it could cause problems.

There are also other miscellaneous crafts that I have done. I remember doing needlepoint as a young girl, which is a craft that my grandpa showed me how to do. I never accomplished many projects but remember my grandpa working on huge canvases in the living room at his house. I think I did complete one or two projects but they were tiny. I still have an 8 x 10 inch flower project floating around somewhere.

I got into scrapbooking many years ago after I got married. I wanted to do something with my photos beyond putting them in an album and having them gather dust. Scrapbooking was huge at the time so I found a local store and was quickly addicted. Over the last few years I have not done as much as in the past, partly due to getting back into yarn crafts and the group that I scrapbooked with fell apart.

I also remember working with FIMO which was clay that you baked to set it. I did do a bit of sewing as well, with my first project being created in the middle of the night at a sleepover, and it did not fit the doll I made it for. My mom showed me how to rescue it the next day so that nothing was being wasted.

The morale of this story, if you can say there is one, is that no matter your age, chances are you can find a craft that will work for you but it may take a few tries to find the right one. I still have crafts that I want to try out such as quilting.