Happy (almost) Halloween! No trick-or-treating for me this week--I plan on
spending the next few days cross-stitching and crocheting while I watch some of my favorite scary movies on TCM, AMC, and Netflix. I
just hope I don't encounter any real terrors while I stitch and snip. If you're
a crafter, you know what I mean. Our seemingly relaxing pastimes aren't without
perils. In honor of my favorite holiday, I've compiled a few tales from the dark side of
crafting. Have any of these horrors ever happened to you?
It's a dark and stormy night, and you're happily knitting or sewing or painting away, when-----AAAAHHHHH!-----you run out of an essential supply. It's too late to go out for the yarn, thread, or glue that you desperately need, so you have to stay home while your partially finished project taunts you.
You're just about to finish an elaborate project that you
spent hours--and maybe weeks or months--working on. Then, just as you're about
to apply the finishing touches, you examine your work and get a feeling of
dread. Your skin crawls and you suppress a scream as you realize you've made a
huge horrific, unfixable mistake. Maybe you measured wrong and your project
ended up lopsided, or you dropped some previously undetected stitches and your knitted sweater has a
gaping hole in front. Whatever your big mistake is, it's going to give you
nightmares.
This horror tale is a sequel to the previous one. You make a
mistake while you're crafting that no amount of reworking or clever
camouflaging can fix, and you end up with project that's unusable (and probably
ugly). What do you do with these craft fails--the hideous creations that cannot
even be given away? You put them in the dead project graveyard, a box that you
hide in a dark corner and visit only when you want to cannibalize its contents for other protects.
Scary things can happen when you're working with scissors,
needles, and craft knives--never mind hammers and power tools. Real injuries
that break skin, burn, and draw blood. All crafters, no matter how skilled or
careful, have suffered some form of bodily harm during the creative process. But what's even worse than the stabbed fingers, snipped skin, and bruised thumbs
suffered by crafters? The fear of getting blood stains on their otherwise
pristine projects, of course.
Enthusiasm is a good thing, but obsession can lead you down
a dangerous path. You thought your new-found passion for crafting was an innocent
pastime, and now your home is under siege. Your supplies and tools have overrun
your workroom and are spilling over into other rooms in the house. Your family
eats on TV trays because the kitchen table is covered with beads and spools of wire.
Your living room is filled with bins of yarn and fabric. You are experiencing
an Invasion of the Storage Snatchers, and it doesn't have good ending.
The final tale is the most terrifying of all. You're sitting
alone in a dim room, your task light the only source of illumination. The
clock strikes midnight and you make the dreadful realization that your hands
are tired, your neck aches, your eyes are bleary, and you have no choice but to put your
project away until morning.