Glue, glitter and craft basket memories

My love of crafting started with Grandma Teddy. And Aunt Marsha, too.

I always gave Grandma Teddy the credit for my creative side. She was an accomplished painter with oil paints her favorite. What I never traced all the way back was the shape that creativity took. Not just that she made things. That she made a place for making things, and pulled us into it.

One of my clearest memories is her kitchen table covered in newspaper. She had small clear glass vases, the plain kind you’d find anywhere, and we glued split peas to the outside, one at a time, covering every inch. Then we painted them white, something my own mother would never have let me do in her house. When they dried they looked exactly like hobnail milk glass, the real antique kind, except we’d made it ourselves. That table is where something started in me.

Years later, on the covered front porch of the Gilbert Street house, I built a craft basket without meaning to. It came together the way most useful things do, by accident. Glue sticks left over from a school project. Construction paper. Glitter that never fully vacuums out of carpet. Googly eyes. Pipe cleaners. Popsicle sticks. Every kid needed this or that for a school project and the leftovers all landed in the same basket. I kept a table out there, and that basket became the center of what my kids and I called Wacky Wednesdays. We’d pull things out, build whatever came to mind, and talk and laugh while our hands stayed busy. Nobody had to perform conversation. The basket did the work of bringing us together, and the memories just happened alongside it.

That basket made it through a lot of years. It didn’t make it through all the moves.

But the idea did. One of the first Christmases at Lexi’s house, I found a big gorgeous basket and filled it with crafting supplies for her home. Big enough to sift through, big enough to lose an afternoon in. I wanted her to have the same place to find peace in creativity that our family always had. When Aunt Marsha passed, Lexi inherited a large portion of her bead collection, the same beads Marsha had spent years turning into beautiful Christmas tree ornaments. They went straight into the basket, another generation folded in.

A couple of years ago, when Lexi came to Florida for Thanksgiving, I started building a new one for myself here in Florida, since the original from Gilbert Street hadn’t survived the moves. I wanted to make an oyster shell ball, and Lexi loves working with sea shells, so we went to the beach and gathered what we needed. Then we stopped at Jo-Ann Fabrics, because we both love wandering the craft aisles more than almost anywhere else in a store. We ended up at my kitchen island, shells and hot glue sticks and giggles, the same porch energy just moved indoors and updated by a generation.

Yesterday it was punch needle, my first mug rug, made from the couch during a storm I didn’t feel like fighting. This morning it’s a Saturday pulling me into my new studio room before the sun even comes up over the pond.

Four generations now. A kitchen table, a front porch, a kitchen island, a studio with a view. Different rooms, different decades, same basket underneath all of it. I don’t think it was ever really about the crafts. It was about having somewhere to put your hands while everything else got to settle.

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My story stack for today:

BUT
[buht] conjunction
Origin: Old English, būtan
The gentle boundary you draw between the world’s demands and what your soul needs first.

FIRST
[furst] adjective
Origin: Old English, fyrst
The sacred acknowledgment that some rituals deserve priority before you give yourself to the world’s waiting needs.

CRAFTS
[krafts] noun
Origin: Old English, cræft, meaning skill, power, or strength of knowledge
Time disappears, hands take over, and for a while nothing else needs solving.

These mugs are part of our Coffee Stories collection – word stacks inspired by my personal journey shared in these posts. Each memoir piece becomes a stackable memory you can hold in your hands. Start your own collection and create combinations that speak to your journey.