A Peine For Your Thoughts

I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but my tiny little sister is getting married. Next weekend.

Oh dear Lord what is America coming to that they allow 12-year-old girls to get married these days?

What’s that? She nearly 26 years old? Surely not. Because if she’s nearly 26, and she’s precisely two years and 10 days younger than I am, then that means I’m…

…so dad-gummed close to 30. I can’t even talk about it.

I come from a very crafty family. When we give gifts to honor big occasions, we prefer to “make something.” Everyone can and does, even the two accountants, who are surprisingly nimble with numbers, logic AND brimming with creativity. Not that I’m at all irritated, standing over here with one side of my brain just knocking around in my head, completely useless. No. Not at all. It’s a handicap I endure gracefully. Now stop making me do math quizzes before I go to bed at night, DREW.

For my sister’s upcoming wedding, I wanted to “make something” for her and her soon-to-be-husband. I wanted it to be something for both of them, which is not a task that any of my talents lend themselves to very well. A knitted lace wedding shawl? I’m sure her fiance would be thrilled with that!

So, I decided to go outside the box and combine one of my favorite things, fabric, with something I knew they could both use, a painting.

Only! Only. Only it turned out in real life to be NOTHING like I’d planned. In my brain, it was a work of art. In my brain, it was to be their most prized possession. They’d tell their great-grandchildren about it and yank it from the wall the minute the smoke alarm even threatened to go off. They’d leave it to the Smithsonian in their will. They’d dust it with a special feather duster.

In reality, it’s OK. It’s a fine, thoughtful gift. It looks like something someone in the 18-35 age range could have pulled off. Not an 18-35 year-old artisan, mind you. Just an 18-35 year-old normal person who wanted to make something for her sister’s wedding. There are places where the fabric puckered. There are places where the fabric frayed. And thanks to my extreme ignorance, there are even places where the wrapping paper stuck to the surface of the painting, a look that makes me want to torch the whole thing, but Drew swears is “antique.”

In short, I hate it. It makes me want to pull each one of my million hairs out individually with tweezers. It makes me want to put a metal bucket over my head and bang on it with a soup spoon. It makes me want to let the biggest kid in class spin me around on a tire swing after I’ve made a glutton of myself at a Chinese buffet.

I mean it. I hate it.

And when I gave it to my sister and almost-brother-in-law, I acted like I hated it. I told them ahead of time how much I hated it. I couldn’t stand for them to think I thought this gift was good work. I put a million disclaimers on the wretched gift. You don’t have to hang it. Put it up in a closet if you want. Put it under your bed. Put it behind the stove when you fry chicken.

The worst part is I do this with MOST of my handmade gifts. They NEVER measure up to the image I have in my head. I enjoy the process of crafting, but when I’m done, I wallow in a pit of self-despair. Cursed, cursed Taryn Maxwell Peine.

So, it seems, I have two choices. I can stop crafting all together, and since I’m not even REMOTELY good at anything else (ie: math quizzes) that would probably be a bad decision. Or I can get ahold of myself and stop the raging hate temper tantrums that inevitably follow the completion of any project I undertake.

And so, I’ve decided to do the second one. I will try to be a better promoter and lover of my own work, no matter how horrifically it turns out. I will remember that handmade will never look like “made in China” and that’s the beauty of it.

As I endeavor to change my self-deprecating ways, I wonder how the other crafters out there reconcile the look of a project in their heads with the look of the project in reality. How do you do it?

If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen, frying some chicken on my sister’s wedding gift.