Getting Crafty and why Art is essential
Chinese Forget Me Nots are my favorite flower and they are a dream to work with in floral crafting projects
I have fond memories of my mother making arts and crafts during my rather ordinary childhood in the super ordinary town of Toledo, Ohio. As early as 4 or 5 years old, I remember our old basement, with wall to wall green industrial carpet, a fish tank atop a built in shelf with a couple of gerbils, a record player (and my beloved Simon and Garfunkel LP) ... and a craft table. During the holidays my Mom would organize craft time and lead my sister and I in the fine art of making Christmas tree painted wood ornaments, or those cool beaded ornaments with plastic crystals and ribbon. I can recall playdough and normal kid stuff but I especially enjoyed making crafts.
My Mom was and remains a hardcore crafter/artist. In fact, if she could have figured out how to monetize it well, I think she would have been a better fulltime artist than social worker. She always had her hands on a project: sewing, knitting, beading, cross stitch, embrodiary, jewelry, painting, card making, doll making, ceramics, clay art and the list goes on and on. I didn’t partake much as an older pre teen or adolescent and I generally found crafting sort of tacky when forced to sit through my maternal grandmothers craft classes in the summer. Her specialty was making dolls out of toilet paper cardboard rolls, but I digress. My mom definitely “stepped up the craft game” compared to her own mothers version of it. As I’ve gotten older, I am figuring out that the end result of the craft was much less impactful than their love of creating art. They both valued time spent on making pretty things, creating something from nothing, playing with texture, form, color, dimension. They embraced learning new skills of intense hand and eye coordination and skills that required imagination, patience and time to let their brains “rest” in making.
In my adulthood, I have found myself picking up crafting hobbies periodically. I cross stitched for awhile, I tried to draw (and sucked at it), I refinished old furniture, and then my Mom taught me how to make beaded jewelry. Now THAT was some crafting I could really embrace. I could make cool shit and then wear it, gift or sell it. My older sister and I decided to start our own home based jewelry business called “Two Sisters Originals.” We had dreams of something bigger, but it turns out that it was just a cool hobby. A few craft shows and home shows was enough evidence that jewelry making as a career was not a viable option. It wasn’t the jewelry making, it was all the business stuff that got in the way, oh and the full time job, caretaking, and parenting to mention just a few other demands on my time.
And then flowers came into my life. Never has a baby seedling made someone so thrilled. I became obsessed with growing things. It was creative for sure, but in a totally different way. It was far more physical than crafting but I think flowers also fed the inner artist in me. The growing part of flower farming was and is amazing, but it was the art created with flowers that made me swoon. One would have thought that would have propelled me naturally into floral design, but it didn’t. Let me clarify … I was and still am enthralled with floral design. I love it completely. But I realized early on that I didn’t want to monetize it for fear of it becoming a burden rather than a refuge. I play with flowers as art, I read all the books, look at all the Pinterest flower stuff, gawk at the flower designer IG accounts and fall in love, but I’m ok with not trying to be a paid floral designer. Would we make more money? probably. But it has always felt like the money would have robbed the joy out of creating with flowers and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice that.
But I needed to create. I felt a yearning to give our flowers new life, even in their dried “death.” Dried flowers was where it started for me. I loved them and I loved experimenting with whether they retained form and color. I played around with photographing flowers, designing installs and big statement urns for our interior space. Once my brain was unleased in flower creativity, I was consumed. I would spend hours scanning Pinterest for inspiration. I joined every flower/crafting social media account I could find. I was drawn to anything that included nature and art.
I slowly leaned into making framed woodland pieces, then dried flower sculptures, then air dry clay seed bombs, pressed flowers, seed paper and I am not even close to be done. It’s true that flower crafts make up a tiny percentage of our overall yearly revenue. It’s also true that if I did the math like I do the math for our cut flower business, I wouldn't be getting paid more than $10/ hour for my time. When I am in my intense business mindset, I find myself thinking, “is this even worth it if I’m not making any decent money?” Entrepreneur Sarah says no. Middle aged woman seeking solace in a fucked up world says yes. 100 times yes. Those two voices run rampant in my busy mind and I have to constantly re-frame the icky mean internal voice that routinely takes a huge dump on my crafty ideas. Usually the dump lands on the very ideas that feed my soul, which is sort of ironic, huh? 20 years of therapy and I still haven’t figured that one out yet. But what I have figured out are two things that (in the words of Queen Oprah) I know for sure:
1) When I finally became aware of the negative voice and I could observe it, instead of simply reacting to it, I got closer to freedom. Not there yet and may never be fully free of my inner critic, but I am way further along than I was in my 20’s, so that is a win. So when my itty bitty shitty committee is busy telling me that floral crafting isn’t worth the time because it doesn’t make enough money, I gently ignore it and do the crafting anyway.
2) Art is necessary. Whether you make it or observe it, it doesn’t matter. Allowing creativity to be a priority instead of short lived exercise in your “stolen free time” (even if it isn’t profitable), matters. It matters a lot actually.
I am so grateful to my grandmother and mother for teaching me that creativity is crucial and that time spent on self and exploring all of the things you love and want to learn is time well spent.
This season I will be leaning harder into things that make the artist inside of me free. I am going to learn it (pottery, botanical dying, mosaic making), teach it (pressed flowers, hypertufa, paper making, drying and preserving flowers) and enjoy it! Who’s with me? I’d love to connect with you, send me your name and email and I will reach out soon.
Also… if you want to get started on making a flower press and beginning a flower pressing journey, we have a new digital step by step guide that can get you started down the crafting path. It’s pretty damn fun. Warning: once you know how to press flowers the right way … you will be hooked. :)
Grab the Flower Pressing Guide Here:
