I have a horrible addiction. It has taken over my life, my apartment and my bank account. It keeps me from my family and my friends, and it has caused my schoolwork to suffer. Sometimes I don't sleep, and when I do, I dream about it.
I know the first step is admitting I have a problem. So here it goes.
"Hi, I'm Kendra, and I'm a craftaholic."
It's a lot easier to admit my problem now that I live on my own, but last year in the residence halls it was not so easy.
I would wait until my roommate was asleep, and then I would pull out my needlepoint and cross-stitch silently in bed. I would do beading projects while she was in class, timing myself so that things would be put away before she returned home. I even hid fabric in a big plastic tub at my boyfriend's apartment so that no one I lived with would be aware of my secret.
Now, my dining room is full of fabric. So is the space under my bed. I have an organizer full of other craft supplies in my living room, and my tables are near outlets so that I can plug in additional lamps and my sewing machines.
Why was I so ashamed? Well, in high school fellow students mocked me for working at a fabric store. Worse yet, some customers disrespected me because they couldn't believe that a teenage girl might know what she was talking about when it came to sewing. I'll admit that I still had a lot to learn then, as I do now, but some of the customers were downright rude about my age.
So, when I came to college I decided to keep my crafting a secret. Something reserved for the "tell me something interesting about yourself" portions of professor surveys.
I worried that my peers would not accept me if they knew how I spent my free time. Slowly I realized that I was not alone.
It began when someone asked me where I got the cute pajama pants I was wearing.
"Oh, I made them," I said, forgetting that my craftiness was supposed to stay on the down low.
"Cool," my resident adviser said.
She later asked me if she could pay me to make a pair for her sister. She also shared with me her love of scrapbooking. After this, I realized that crafting was being done secretly behind locked doors and under the cover of night. I was a member of the secret society.
The more I asked around, the more I found secret craftaholics like me lurking everywhere. There were knitters, beaders, scrapbookers, sewers and, more importantly, there were people who secretly wanted to learn these crafts.
Angelica Zamora, a junior interior design major, said she's always wanted to make a quilt out of her old T-shirts. She just doesn't know how.
Zamora also has an untapped interest in scrapbooking.
"I saw a cool scrapbook my sister's friend made," she said. "So I bought a scrapbooking set on sale at Wal-Mart. It's to make 20 pages of fun."
Zamora has everything she needs to become a craftaholic, except the know-how. The other stories in this series will provide her with this information and help her get on her way to a crafting addiction.
Because once you go craft, you'll never go back.
Kendra Woerman can be reached at:
kwoerman@mail.csuchico.edu
Other stories in this series:
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