1.14.2011

Dear Rachel Dratch,

There is never really a good time to bring up stress crafting. There is never a good time to bring up most of what we do to take the edge off, or to bring us down when we're wound up. Sometimes I eat my feelings, especially when I am feeling like blue corn tortilla chips. Sometimes I paint my feelings and they take the form of a picture that looks so child-like that an actual child may have painted it. My mom once took all three of these paintings I did and created a mini-gallery in her house for me. The kicker is that this gallery existed behind her bedroom door and could only be seen when the door was shut. The other kicker is that a twenty-year old me is the one who painted the beauts, not an actual child.

So while many times I would just eat my way through whatever I was letting bring me down, there have been very distinct periods where instead of turning to food I would instead turn to crafts, in general. I don't know if painting is exactly a craft so I'm not going to count it. But I think it was after my freshman year of college, a couple friends and I got really into making bracelets, necklaces and tye-dying. My friend Megan went up to a school in the mountains and came back a changed lady. I mean, she was always kind of crafty and into hippie-ish things, but there was something about that spring semester that really left her with a thing for creation and it rubbed off on me.

I learned all about how to make hemp necklaces and bracelets from Megan. The tye-dying we did was not very good, and everything ended up a weird shade of purplish brown. Gross. I remember spending a large amount of late-night time up at the Wal-Mart in the craft section debating over which bag of wooden beads would be the best purchase or which thickness of hemp I really wanted to work with.

The thick kind was clearly too hippie for me. You remember those dudes and possibly ladies who wore those really thick hemp necklaces, right? I always kind of judged them because hemp that thick is ridiculous. But something too thin wouldn't work either. I wasn't trying to have my jewelry be a non-presence. I needed to make a statement when I stepped out wearing these things. What kind of statement? Maybe that I'm super cool because I am wearing a hemp and puka-shell necklace. Or maybe that I am so crafty that I can recreate styles from Claire’s at a fraction of the cost. We did contemplate selling these things. I'm not sure who the audience would have been, but there's always some white kids running around wearing some hemp necklaces and I just needed to find them!

We bought the medium thickness and got to it. The first few times we made jewelry, we would go at it for hours. This was before any of us really drank alcohol so were stonecold sober and making necklaces. It was really fun. It'd be me, Megan, and my friend Beth just sitting around discussing what kind of bead we'd want to use, what would make the most appropriate hemp necklace to wear everyday and what might be more of a special occasion piece. We'd discuss making bracelets that matched the necklaces (which is weird because all hemp kind of matches itself). I was never much into the bracelets, but let it be known that is the way to go if you are trying to break into wearing hemp jewelry.

Of course I made myself an awesome everyday piece that I instantly vowed to wear until it literally fell off my body. This necklace was great. It was simple, with just a few classy wood beads to give it the requisite oomph. But what you don't know about hemp unless you are wearing it is that that shit can get itchy. Like you'll get a little itchy burn situation on your neck if you react like me, which is to say to scratch like crazy (but not Black Swan crazy). I tried to grin and bear it. I even wore this hemp necklace in the shower. The shower! Gross. I'm not sure now how long the necklace lasted, but it wasn't much more than a few days. So maybe wearing hemp jewelry wasn't for me, but I did enjoy making it!

Sometimes I think I get why carpenters do what they do. They get to work with their hands all the time, and they just kind of work it out and make something beautiful without hemming and hawing. It can be therapeutic to create something with your hands. It's a different kind of therapy than writing because you have to think about and choose words to get your point across. A cabinet or a stool really speaks for themselves. So does hemp jewelry.

Long story long, I started to work on my hemp outside of the hanging out time with Megan and Beth. I have long struggled with irregular and crazy sleep so I am always on the lookout for a new sleep aid, be it a book, an herbal supplement, or just something to do to wear my ass out. There really is something therapeutic about working with your hands that leaves you tired and exhausted, and clears your mind right out. It can also be hell on your fingers. As was the case with hemp, sometimes I would be working my hands on necklaces until my hands were a little raw. I guess this is what it's like being a child necklace worker in Caribbean. Your fingers really start to take a toll after six hours of weaving and knotting. But you ended up with something so beautiful, like a necklace with one giant wooden bead in the middle, and you just knew all that hard work and blistering was somehow worth it.

I took to making hemp things that summer when I couldn't sleep. I would lay there for a little while and decide that my time would be better served creating a hemp belt. This belt would come to symbolize my trials with sleep and stress. My fingers would be a little raw, the strings would be flying all over the place, but I would still be working that belt. It never really amounted to much more than a few inches because it's tough working trying to weave a belt in the middle of the night when you're also trying to watch Cosby Show reruns. Sometimes I couldn't hear Cousin Pam because I would get so into making that belt that I would eventually shove the belt in the drawer and just cuddle up to her voice.

There was definitely something bizarrely soothing about saying to myself, "I'll just do a little hemp work tonight before I go to bed." It seems like this went on for a while, but it was probably just a couple weeks. But it really became a thing I was into whenever I was feeling stressed out or anxious. I wonder what might happen if therapists would just hand people a ball of hemp string and told them to have at it. Actually, that's probably how all this began: a couple stressed out hippies realized they needed something to wear with their tye-dye caftan and they just turned to the one thing they know--crafts.

This sort of makes me want to ask people who sell those weird designer-y bird houses at craft fairs to say more about their inspiration. I hated wearing hemp necklaces, but making them felt so good. I wonder if they actually hate birds, but love making bird houses. Some things we'll just never know.

Jon