Crafting as lifestyle

I love making things.

My mom nurtured a love of crafting in me: painting ceramics, fabric painting, Easter egg coloring, and so many others, and trips to an arts and crafts store were always special treats.

At 9 or 10 I requested a beginner jewelry making kit for Christmas. I still have a few of the pliers and other tools from it.

I typically find a medium I want to pursue, get into it for a while, learn the basics or get decently good at it, and then move on. I usually have a project or two ongoing and I make most of my Christmas presents for the year from whatever I've been working on (using them as Christmas presents is very motivating, and a good excuse to invest in more supplies...)

This is a sampling of some of the things I've created over the years, and it's far from covering all of the modalities and types of projects I've worked on. These are what I have in my bedroom in San Francisco—my parents' house is a veritable gallery of my work from the many, many presents I've given them for holidays and birthdays.

Here are a couple of somewhat recent pieces of jewelry I've made. This is a slide necklace with handmade pendant.

And this is a multi-chain necklace with several charms.

A couple of years ago I got really interested in macrame and attempted to teach myself. I did pretty well, but it wasn't until I took a virtual workshop this past year that I really got invested.

My Instagram (@falseglitter) is primarily filled with (unstaged) pictures of garbage and other things humans have left behind. I started posting them when I was living in the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco, simultaneously a beautiful and dirty place. I also loved to take pictures of palm trees, which remind me of my early childhood in Florida. You'll find some of my other photos in the background of several other image.

Another project of mine that I exhibited in the same event are what I call "lil tinies." These are very small canvases painted with acrylics and 3-dimensional paint, wire wrapped, and sealed with Modge Podge. My love of wire wrapping comes from jewelry making.

I have a whole box of these, but only have a handful on display:

Last year I made this shelf out of a piece of an old dresser drawer and some macrame chord. At the bottom of the photo are framed skeleton leaves that I made.

I made these upside down yellow cups out of air dry clay, and assembled these little magical nature bits on part of a branch I found in the park.

Here are a couple more macrame plant hangers (the plant on the left I potted out of some cuttings).

Here's a cute friend I hand sewed using felt and synthetic fluff (the lemon button fern in there is dying, I know :/). I went through a very long felt crafting phase.

I love mobiles! For this one I strung up a bunch of felt + fluff puffs (from the long felt crafting phase) on a wire hanger. I also added several strings of teeny tiny paper cranes I made during my paper crane phase.

I like to make some of my own toiletries to cost save and really know what I'm putting on my skin; pictured is under eye oil, cuticle oil, and a bottle with a blend of perfume oils, water, and Polysorbate 20, which helps bind the oil to the water (instead of alcohol, which is typically used in perfume for that purpose).

I've also been making my own lotion for several years. When I was 18 I developed really itchy skin, and what I eventually found helped is coconut oil. So I found a recipe for whipped body butter that works really well for me (I buy most of my ingredients here). This is the haul from a recent batch.

My ears get cold! I wrapped these earmuffs with LED's and hid the battery pack in one of the puffs for parties and festivals.

I've been journaling since I was 13. It's the most important thing I do in my life to maintain my mental health and sense of self. I've always journaled pretty regularly, but a few years ago I committed to write every single day. These are my notebooks from roughly the last two years.

A basket of finished projects waiting for a home: a completed punch needle kit, several macrame plant holders, and a painted air dry clay catchall tray for my stepdad for father's day. The hat box it's sitting on holds all my macrame supplies.

A couple of air dry clay candlestick holders, and on the far right is a beeswax and coconut oil candle I made in my candle making time.

I have a dresser dedicated to craft supplies! And they still don't all fit...

I'm used to not having much room for crafting. This is a temporary set up for painting air dry clay beads and shapes for future mobiles.

As I've put this together I've remembered so many more projects I've worked on. I very recently started making collages and I've been working on creating a zine with a friend. It's endless!

And actually laying it all out like this makes me so pleased; it can be so easy to undermine our talents and creativity from moment to moment, but taken in over a longer timeline, a little bit of crafting here and there can add up to a life spent creating.

I'll leave you with a final photo of my altar (a bit cluttered,...). There are several air dry clay dishes I made, but most importantly, hanging on the walls are a couple of pieces of wood that I cut with a hand saw, painted, doused in glitter, and very simply wire wrapped when I was 11 or 12 years old. They're hanging above my altar to honor the creativity in my life.