Having a reputation as a crafty person can be good and bad. Sometimes people will ask you to work on fun projects, compliment you on what you made, or ask for advice, but when there isn’t a home-baked birthday cake for a co-worker, or when all I can manage for a potluck is store-bought lasagna, people notice that, too. One of my co-workers expressed surprise that I wasn’t going to knit my wedding dress (luckily my fear of the sewing machine is fairly well known. Had anyone suggested that, I would have run away screaming)! Not that there aren’t some perfectly lovely knitted wedding dresses out there (click the photos for more info!):
For me, knitting my gown was never an option. It would drive me batty! I also wanted to be able to try things on, things like finished dresses, not just what I’ve knit so far. There is so much pressure to look so great on your wedding day that it’s pretty overwhelming at the best of times. To have that entire responsibility sitting on my shoulders would be a bit too much. Also, I think by taking on a project of that magnitude, a lot of the smaller details (like, oh, ANYTHING ELSE) would get overlooked, and I am all about the tiny details.
That said, this Martha-wannabe is not knitting, crocheting, tatting, sewing, or otherwise crafting her own dress. She is also not making her own invitations.
…
That was the sound of a collective shocked and astonished gasp from the DIY movement.
My own mum has asked me many times why I don’t just do it myself (once she got over the “THEY MUST BE ENGRAVED!” phase). I love paper crafts. I have a small mountain of rubber stamps. I make all my own Christmas cards, birthday cards and other things, I have boxes of them in my office!
My reasons? The cards I make are not production line cards. They don’t have much room for text, and really, the wedding invite is all about text! I stamp, I hand-colour, I fiddle, I tweak, I can take hours making just one birthday card just because I enjoy it. Each is a laborious piece of hand-coloured, mats-measured-to-the-1/16th-of-an-inch, painstakingly-arranged piece of art. I make them to please the bit of me that loves fiddly, tedious jobs. Making 50+ would not be enjoyable or practical.
I colour the image, then spend ages picking, arranging, cutting, and re-arranging the embellishments and paper.
But then I haven’t knit in 10 years. We all do what we can do, you know?
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