Arts and Crafts (South Pole Home & Garden Redux)

Whether you’re an adorable small child, a gawky young adult with no money, or simply a procrastinator who found the stores closed and an extra box of Oreos in the cupboard, homemade gifts fill the holidays.  There’s a certain sentimentality to these kinds of gifts on the part of the recipient; meanwhile, the giver gets to revel in the smugness of moral superiority, having resisted the temptation to sell out to commercial interests but instead devoting time to a personalized memento of love and friendship rather than recognizing that sloth lay at the root of the homemade gifting.  But all scorn aside, what mother doesn’t love that card form her pre-K offspring made of folded-over construction paper with a scrawled drawing that looks like a withered Airedale but is really the Madonna and Child?  Especially when it’s presented on Mother’s Day with LUV ME printed on the cover, complete with a backwards L, and accompanied by breakfast in bed of Froot Loops and Pepsi because that’s all that was left in the kitchen after the bacon grease caught fire and…is that smoke?

Just as homemade gifts add a touch of sentiment to any holiday, homemade decorations can liven up an otherwise drab berth and add a touch of feeling to our Polar home-away-from-home.  The care and time taken in the creation of such décor adds warmth to any room, and outweighs other aesthetic considerations such as beauty, color, design, or even the lack of inherent talent of the creator.

Many of our fellow Polies dabble in the creative arts.  Photography is a common hobby, and we’ve all seen some of their spectacular photos of the Antarctic sky.     Some are good with drawing and paints; others are skilled at creating with fabrics.  We even have a colleague who can cross-stitch a “Do Not Freeze” penguin logo onto a sweater, which must be a European thing because I have yet to see any male cross-stitch on the campus of an American university, and if they did it would probably be not a penguin, but a picture of a well-endowed woman (the kind my father refers to as a “deep breather”) in a pair of Daisy Dukes holding up two jugs of moonshine with the caption, “Get a load of these!’

Even those who choose not to decorate their room with bits of homespun still respond to the creative muse.  If you’re musically inclined, the Station holds The Southern Hemisphere’s Largest Collection of Pre-Owned Ukuleles.  Others use the written word as a means of expression.  But both these art forms are ephemeral, and while they may bring joy to your heart you can’t hang them on a wall to brighten up a room.  You’ll need to have someplace to turn when Erato and her sisters strike out at you like the flipper of an angry seal.

My experience with home-made décor has been limited by the complete lack of any talent in manual handicraft.  My only experience in the visual arts, before the visual arts had enough of me, was in two children’s classes at the Des Moines Art Center.  One lesson was a puppetry class, in which I constructed what I thought was the head of an eagle out of paper mache plastered on an inflated balloon with a beak the crumpled at the slightest touch, but really looked like a…well, it still eludes me.  The second was my introduction to painting, where I created a reproduction of Goya’s “Don Mañuel Garcia de la Prada” because I liked the small dog accompanying the hollow-eyed portrait.  My painting wound up in an alphabetic display of children’s art under the heading “G is for Goya,” and was then was rapidly consigned to somewhere in my parent’s basement, resurfacing five decades later as my brother and I were cleaning out the attic.  The painting was worse for wear, but still had enough of that child-like charm to make everyone go “awwwwww” before noting that even as a youngster, it was clear I wasn’t going to art school.  Even now, when I try to make a drawing to explain something to a patient, I start the conversation with “This is why I didn’t go to art school.”  No one’s ever suggested otherwise.

In textiles, I once had some skill in needlepoint because my Aunt Carole owned a shop called the Stitching Post in the Quad Cities.  (Home of Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute.)  I’m still waiting for someone to be impressed that I can do bargello.

(My Aunt Carole…Aunt Kook because I couldn’t say Carole as a toddler…was a  force of nature  She had opinions, and wasn’t shy about expressing them several times daily just in case you missed the first few shows.    When she passed away, I took my son to visit her grave on our way to a family holiday.  As we walked away from the stone, I asked what he was thinking.  “I think Thanksgiving is going to be lot quieter this year,” he mused.  Nobody disagreed. )  

As far as music, I cannot play an instrument, nor carry a tune.  I do like to sing, but there’s something about my voice that sets off fire alarms and sends the neighborhood cats into a panic, so best for me to stay quiet.  I’ve tried my hand at lyrics, and once made up a song that had the following chorus:

“The water runs clockwise in South America

And I’m still runnin’, too.

So far away, south of the border,

Tryin’ to get away from you.”

And poetry?  Here’s my complete output:

“I lost my love on the Kansas Turnpike.

If you find it, please call the Highway Patrol.”

For the untalented rabble such as myself, crafting often works better in groups, where you can help with the least skilled task and still be a valued participant.  Cutting snowflakes for a Christmas in July party here at the Pole is something I can do, or at least I could if the snowflakes were of the kindergarten variety…take a square of paper, then fold, fold, fold; cut out a couple of random wedges and voila!  Unfortunately, since this is the computer era, one now downloads a snowflake template of the internet that include holes in the middle that can only be excised with an X-Acto knife in a pattern clearly not designed for safety scissors.  Next craft night I’m seeking demotion to gluing rings of paper together in a decorative chain.

As much fun as it is to craft in a group towards common goal, each of us still harbors the need for individual expression.  So after careful inspection of the contents of the Arts and Crafts Room on Station, and a similarly detailed consideration of my manifest lack of talent, I settled on weaving as my creative form.  The Craft Crush Fast and Easy, Award-Winning Loop-de-Loom Weaving Loom (it reads exactly that on the box) is a bar with a handle on one side and fifteen holes for notched sticks.  You take a ball of yarn and cut it into sections about a foot longer than the thing you want to make, and place these segments into the notches atop the sticks.  These are your warp strands.  You then use more yarn and thread it alternately between the sticks, left to right, as your wefts.  Flip the lever, which reverses the direction of the sticks, and then weft from right to left.  Repeat until you’ve woven that which there is to weave, like sunshine out of the pouring rain.  (Weave, warp, and weft are all fun words to use.  Do so often.)

The instruction book gives examples of all the fun things you can do with the loom.  You can make bags, purses, phone covers, shawls, mittens, and even hats that look like foxes.  I thought I would start with a basic Florida Gator, blue and orange potholder. 

I plunged into the project with the enthusiasm of a Q-Anon Shaman at the Captiol, but much like the mob after a few hours things went terribly wrong.  Sometimes the sticks didn’t turn the right direction.   Sometimes I had seven wefts between the warps and sometimes four.  So when a friend came into my office and I proudly showed off my work like a toddler at Christmas with a painted clay handprint for the tree, and she said simply, “That doesn’t look right,” I was deflated.  I would gladly bear the informed criticism of a professional Weaver like the late Pete Seeger, but if a layperson could see how insufferably flawed my work was it must really be bad.  So a month later, the loom sits on my desk in the Medical Clinic, replete with vertical blue warps and maybe an inch of crosswise orange wefts, awaiting the time when the muse strikes once again and I tear it apart and start all over.  Art is hard.

Warp Factor 9, Mr. Sulu.