Are You A Good Crafter?

Posted by Mary Welling-Bonney Feb 8, 2008

This is not the determining factor in deciding if you are a good crafter.

I recently bought the traditional sock monkey socks to make someone a sock monkey. Oddly, for all the years of doing crafts and working in the arts this was a project I have never done. I read the directions over a few times to be sure I knew what to do. I then sewed the legs and cut a slit right up the middle to separate the legs. It was then I realized that I used the wrong end of the sock. To many people this is terrible and they need to throw it away and start over. I look at it this way. I now have an opportunity to create an original. So I have to ask myself, what are others ways that I can make my sock monkey different from the rest.

Directions are great. When we are learning a new skill we need to use the directions as a guideline. That is all they are though. If you want something that looks like everyone else's, buy it premade. Machines make carbon copies, people make originals. Your mistakes are not mistakes. They are the fabric that makes your product unique.

How do you know if you are a good crafter? If you are having fun. Crafts are for the joy of the process and when things work out, the joy of the finished product. If you are stressing over following someone else's directions, put it down and walk away for a while. If it isn't fun, you lost the point. The person who wrote those directions is a self proclaimed expert. We all need to declare ourselves self proclaimed experts in our own pursuits and give ourselves permission to veer off the directions.