I love crafting tutorials.
What is a crafting tutorial? It’s a tutorial that tells you how to craft something (duh). Sometimes it’s about making your own green grocery bags (have 50 on me). Sometimes it’s about making little girl’s dresses out of dad’s old work shirts (you’d be surprised how many of these there are). Sometimes it’s about repurposing an old thing lying around to be a different old thing lying around (I was wondering what to do with that old Vespa scooter I had lying around. Okay, not true, but I live in uptown. I’m just going to steal some douche-bag hipster’s Vespa to make this).
Many times, you can come up with your own crafting tutorial. Simply put a doily on it.
I’m not kidding. Take a t-shirt and add a doily to it. Take a jar and add a doily to it. Take a cushion and add a doily to it. In fact, I was reading a tutorial that I really liked. It’s about repurposing an old suitcase to be used as a vanity, with hooks under it for towels, and when you close the front of it AAAAAAH IT”S ANOTHER FUCKING DOILY!!!
It used to be Grandpa's suitcase til Grandma got a hold of it...
I think my love of crafting goes back to when I was a kid. In the summers, my brother and I spent our days being watched by a friend of our mom’s who was a Native American (I mean, I bet she still is Native American, but she was also Native American back then). She made her living making crafts out of beads and feathers and porcupine quills off of road kill. I’m not kidding about this… she had bags in the car and if we came across a dead animal, she would carefully (so as not to touch the dead thing) wrap it in a bag and bring it home and boil it. It makes me smile to think of how many fancy ladies bought their oh so authentic Indian jewelry and showed off the dangly porcupine quill earings that they got from a real Indian woman THAT WAS MADE OUT OF ROADKILL.
Growing up, I learned how to do all this crafting. Hell, I probably paid for any daycare expenses by the amount of jewelry I made. I also got to work on feather shields. But the most sacred and holy was the dream catcher. I really had to earn that with her. She told me the stories that her people believed about the dream catcher, how the dreams would get caught in the web, and how the good dreams would be able to find their way to the stones and travel down the feather to the sleeper below, while the bad dreams would get stuck and dry up with the morning sun.
It’s a beautiful story. As I was thinking back to it, I wondered if there was more to it than that, if there was something I wasn’t remembering right. So I hopped in the Googles and looked up dream catchers, and-
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It's very authentic.