Get your craft on

My mother has always been the craftiest person I know. In the seventies, she crocheted sweaters and made beaded macramé holders for our potted plants. In the eighties, much to my embarrassment, she sewed some of my school clothes. (Remember that plaid material with metallic threads running through it? Yeah, me too.) Today, she stencils, sponge-paints, and whips up sofa cushions and curtains that would make Martha Stewart weep with envy.

Sadly, all this crafty talent almost completely passed me by. I dutifully labored over the cross-stitch and needlepoint kits my mother gave me for birthdays and Christmases, but I never had much luck with them, and as an adult, I tell anyone who asks that I'm "just not good at making things." The only problem is that G seems to have inherited the crafting gene from her grandmother, and guess who she turns to for help in realizing her artistic visions?

Right. Me.

On that note, a couple of weeks ago G decided that she wanted to be a skunk for Halloween, and she begged me to please please please please please make a skunk costume for her. I weakly suggested that perhaps she should ask Grammy to help, because Mom is a bit of a dolt when it comes to costume creation, but G, who is still convinced that I can do anything, insisted that she wanted me to do it.

So, I managed to find directions for a skunk costume in a Halloween magazine, and today we went to buy the faux fur to make the skunk tail. While I was getting the fabric measured, the lady offered to let me have the bolt end for half price, and I said yes, thinking that perhaps G would like to turn it into a dress-up stole or a teddy-bear blanket or something.

"Oh, cool!" G said as soon as she saw it. "Now we can make a stuffed animal!"

"Um, I don't know about that," I said. "Stuffed animals mean sewing, and I can't really sew."

"Yes, you can," said G, in a don't-be-silly voice. "You sewed up Delilah's belly when she got a hole in it." (Delilah is a Webkinz cocker spaniel, BTW, not some desperate neighbor who can't afford medical care.)

"Sewing up a rip in a seam is one thing," I said, "but a whole stuffed animal ..."

"Pleeeeeeeeease!" said G.

Well, with the pleading and the big brown eyes fixed trustingly on me, there wasn't much I could do but suck it up, try to remember my mother's long-ago hand-sewing lessons, and try to make a stuffed animal to G's design. And much to my amazement, I didn't totally fail. Here, with a face by G and a body sewn by me, is Miss Kitty:


My mother would be proud!