Cousin Craft Day!

My sister and I grew up in a small town, with a very big family. Family get-togethers - and we had a lot of them – were filled with dozens of kids running around, aunts and uncles everywhere, tons of food, and loads of fun. Everyone always had the best time. It was fun growing up in such a large family – you always had someone to play with and there was always a birthday or milestone to celebrate. Because it was a small town, our cousins all attended the same schools, and were often in the same classes. Our grandmother owned the local newspaper, so all of the kids spent time working and playing in the newspaper office after school and during the summer.

When I was in about fourth grade, my dad, who was newly divorced, shared a house with his cousin, Gary, who was also newly divorced. They rented a three-bedroom cottage, and my sister and I spent every other weekend at the cottage with our dad. My uncle Gary had his daughters every other weekend too, but on opposite weekends, so we didn’t interact with Gary’s daughters very often when we were with our dad. Every once in a while though, our time with our dads would overlap for a night or two. There were a lot of girls trying to share one bedroom, but we all managed to have fun together.

At some point, there must have been a rift or some sort of “growing apart” within our big family, and Uncle Gary and his daughters sort of drifted out of the picture. Even though we all lived in a very small town and our big family continued to have parties and get-togethers, we didn’t spend time with them anymore. I think at the time, the rest of us kids didn’t think much of it, because for us, there were so many other kids to play with and so much else going on at family events, we didn’t really make the connection that people were missing.

Fast-forward thirty years to the time of social media – an amazing tool for keeping in touch with your friends and family, and also for re-connecting with people you haven’t seen in ages. Both my sister and I are Facebook friends with all of our cousins, of course, but also with Uncle Gary’s daughters. It was interesting to see the lives they had made for themselves and to have a peek into their family lives – from the safe distance of social media.

Uncle Gary died recently, and my sister and I were chatting about him and remembering the year our dad lived with him in that cottage. We started to realize that we didn’t know why our family stopped spending time with Uncle Gary and his daughters. We knew that we wanted to put an end to whatever was standing in the way of reuniting us with our cousins.

My sister and I reached out to the girls – Christa and Terry, to see if they wanted to get together with us one afternoon for lunch. They did! We met in our hometown, a nearly three-hour drive from where I live now. We all brought old pictures and scrapbooks, and we spent all afternoon reminiscing about old times, talking about Uncle Gary and the rest of our aunts, uncles, and cousins, and sharing what we knew about our family tree. When it was time to leave, none of us felt like it had been enough time.

Over the course of the few hours that we were together that day, we learned that we all love to craft. Each of us had different talents and likes and dislikes, but we all share a creative gene. We decided to get together again in a few weeks to make crafts.

Over the next few weeks before we got together, we started making plans. We decided to each bring a craft idea and all of the supplies necessary for each person to create our craft. The idea was that we would each make four crafts and we’d have enough food and drinks to keep us going. But as it always is when a group of women get together, everyone brought more food and more crafts than they signed up for, so on the day we got together, we ended up doing seven or eight crafts, and we had enough food to feed an army. And oh! We had the best time! We painted a Christmas scene on a metal canvas, made magnets, made a wood craft with picture frames and wooden boards, created (and failed at) a Mod Podge bowl, and more. We started the day early in the morning, and didn’t finish until after midnight. We had a few random pop-ins during the day from my dad and step-mother, my mom, and our Aunt Sheila. My mom brought photos of Uncle Gary for his daughters and we all spent time just catching up and enjoying each other’s company. We knew we had to do it again.

And so, Cousin Craft Day was born! Christa, Terry, my sister Cathy, and I get together every six weeks or so. It has turned into a two-day event, and we’ve begun to include our mothers in the fun. We rotate houses, and we always have a ton of food and multiple crafts. In fact, we’ve had to limit ourselves to bringing just one craft each, so that we have time to finish everything. We all have our own style and our own favorite medium, so it has been really fun to try new crafts, using different materials than what we might try on our own. And even though we are all making the same craft, they always turn out completely different from each other, as we add our own flair.

One weekend, Christa mentioned that she had a sewing machine that she didn’t know how to use. My mom, being an accomplished seamstress, volunteered to teach Christa to sew. So, at the next Cousin Craft Day, everyone brought their sewing machines (Christa even purchased a sewing machine for Terry so we’d all have one to use), and we made several sewing crafts. As it turns out, we all really love to sew. My mom has been sewing her whole life, but my sister and I have only recently started sewing ourselves. The three of us (mostly my mom and sister) made hundreds of masks during the pandemic, and my mom and sister have really gotten into quilting recently. And Christa and Terry took to it as well, and now Cousin Craft Day always incorporates at least one or two sewing projects.

Recently, we all made pillowcases. The pillowcase pattern calls for three different pieces of fabric – one for the body of the pillowcase, one for the cuff at the top, and one for an accent band between the cuff and the body. For this pillowcase, my mom and I picked a multi-colored pattern for everyone to use as the accent band, and then we bought coordinating fabric in everyone’s favorite colors, to use for the body. At Craft Day, we then all picked our cuff color from the remnants of fabric that everyone else was using for the body of their pillowcase. We all ended up with very brightly colored pillowcases that matched our own personality, but that also contained an element of “sameness.”

I am so thankful and grateful for Cousin Craft Day. It’s a day of fellowship, family, and fun. We spend as much time laughing and telling stories and giving advice and gentle ribbing as we spend making crafts or sewing pillowcases. It’s been such a blessing to my sister and me to have our cousins back in our life in such a meaningful way. We never did figure out what caused our family to drift apart when we were kids, but we’ve decided that’s not our mystery to solve. We’ve become friends, we’ve shared secrets, and Cousin Craft Day has helped to bring our family back together. Together, we are much like those pillowcases we made last month. Just like us, they are all different. We all have our own personalities and we’ve all built lives independent of each other. But like the matching bands, we have the tie of family bringing us all together to remind us how lucky we are to have each other.

So, my favorite craft? Hands down, it is whatever I am making on Cousin Craft Day!