CRAFTING no. 2

Pick up a hot glue gun to heal your inner child, etc.

Next weekend being Memorial Day weekend (it comes as a shock every year) has left me feeling the angst of not having planned anything, ever. What I really want is a beach house to casually visit for the weekend, a de facto location to spend all of the summer holidays. They say as you get older you realize your priorities in life, and I at the age of 25 have realized that in this life I would like to maximize my time absorbing the sun next to water. Unfortunately, being in a landlocked state prohibits that, regardless of the fact that we’re going to be renting a primary place to live, much less a secondary place, for the foreseeable future. The weather here has *just* begun to crack the 70s, so it’s not quite swimming weather yet anyway.

In the last year I have been determined to enjoy the seasons as they happen, rather than wishing it was cooler, warmer, etc. I do feel like I’ve enjoyed being cozy and knitting in the winter as the snow buries us, and patiently dressed for spring transitional weather, which hasn’t been very spring-like at all. One way to maximize the season you’re in, I’ve found, is to remember what about that season made it fun to you as a kid.

My sister and I were great devotees to American Girl magazine growing up. For several summers in a row, we waited with anticipation to receive the summer edition, which contained a large format coloring pull-out poster. We would lay on the floor of the screened-in porch and color these highly-detailed posters in — who knows if we ever finished one.

The summer edition would usually also contain some kind of bucket list, or ideas for affordable crafts and activities to do at home. Imagine — a whole summer, nothing but air and opportunity lying ahead of you, and you’re so bored that you turn to American Girl magazine to fill the languorous hours.

I propose that, in the spirit of American Girl magazine, we all create a summer bucket list. Cheesy as it may sound, you’re going to want it in your back pocket for mental fortitude when the fourth summer in a row of Once In a Lifetime Climate Events starts and every girl with 1500 Instagram followers is in Italy AGAIN. I also propose that you run down to Michael’s and get yourself a hot glue gun. I swear when my sister and I pooled our money for one of these things when we were young, it had to have been at least $25. I went to buy one recently for a different project, and all told, gun and glue, ran me about $6. I went up to the checkout and asked the girl working there, “so what’s the probability that this thing actually works?” She said she had bought one also, and to her surprise, it worked shockingly well. Inflation may be running rampant, but not for hot glue guns!

Unlike the other crafts that will be on my bucket list for this summer, including finishing the quilt I started last fall and some knitting projects, there is nothing regulated or ordered about using a hot glue gun. It is incredibly freeing because there is literally no wrong way to go about it. It’s also satisfying to make something and get immediate results, unlike those other projects of mine that require a long (adult) attention span. My most recent implementation of the hot glue gun was to make a wall hanging using a bunch of scallop shells I have collected for many years from beaches in North Carolina. They’d been sitting in an old iPhone box in a closet collecting dust, so I finally put them to use, gluing them onto 1/2” wooden beads, threading the beads onto some cord I had, and tying the cord onto a stick I found in the woods behind our house. That makes it sound pretty inelegant, and it is! But it was a good one-day craft palate cleanser compared to the ones that take a month or several to complete. And who cares if you fuck it up, honestly, using a hot glue gun is fun enough on its own.

Another ~interior design~ project (if you can call it that) I finished recently was to frame a bunch of the ticket stubs from our Europe trip. Art? Maybe not. But if you could see the Ludicrously Capacious wall space we have in our current place, you too would be desperate for anything to visually break it up. I thrifted some frames, got out my manual Cricut guillotine thing that I bought for our wedding placecards, cut up some leftover paper, and voilà. Another craft with very quick results. That feels like summer to me.

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Other updates: my Lulu Slipover is attracting copious cat hair and is really just starting to look like a thneed. I’ve knitted the main body, it’s now resting and I am finishing the Cloud Top. Michael’s doesn’t even carry the yarn I was using anymore, so I’ve switched to white bamboo (rayon) yarn with the hope of dyeing the whole thing black, but it is going to look wackadoodle for now.

The thneed in question, I tried the seashells on the wall first but Caleb dissuaded me and he was right!

That’s all for today! I’ve been experiencing what I can only describe as craft guilt, that I should be working on one self-imposed project vs. a different self-imposed project, so I’ll be here working on my abundance mindset all week and getting some sun.