My love for creating art started young. During weekend trips to my grandmother’s house, I would sneak upstairs to her sewing room and dive into her box of scrap fabrics and yarn. Using a miniature mannequin, I pinned together amalgamations of color and texture to create fashion designs that would make me cringe now, but seemed completely on-trend to my 5-year-old self.
As I got older, my grandmother taught me to crochet, which I enjoyed, but my creativity expanded beyond clothing. I filled sketchbooks and watercolor paper pads and lived for the once-a-month Art in Action days at school. When I was eleven, I started attending a small private school with a large focus on expeditionary and experiential learning. As a result, most of my science classes consisted of field trips and fieldwork that incorporated many artistic elements.
So up until I started high school, I was creating paintings, crocheting apparel, and generally just exercising my creativity fairly regularly.
Yet I had altogether stopped creating things by the end of ninth grade. This arose, yes, due to a busy schedule and an overwhelming amount of schoolwork, but also due to a general shift in attitude surrounding art in my social atmosphere.
Going from a small middle school of 50 students to a large high school of 2,400 students brought many changes to my life, a major one being the types of kids I was surrounded by. At my middle school, I was encouraged to explore my interests, however out-of-the-box or quirky they may be. And while arts and crafts isn’t anything crazy, it definitely doesn’t have a place in a competitive public school, where most conversations center around optimizing one’s chance of admission to a top 20 college.
I felt silly trying to set aside time to work on a crochet project or collage when I knew my peers were probably spending their free time studying or applying for internships. Talking about my artistic hobbies felt juvenile and naive. Moreover, there’s a strong culture among high schoolers nowadays that any sort of “passion” one may have must be turned into a project or a fruitful extracurricular activity that demonstrates community impact to make an outstanding college application.
This idea is perpetuated by college counselors, social media, and even colleges themselves. I definitely don’t disagree — it’s much easier to work hard at extracurriculars that you’re passionate about than ones that have little meaning to oneself — but I also think it’s crucial to have hobbies that don’t correlate to any sort of “success” or goal.
Crocheting and painting are two things I am by no means particularly good at — half of my projects end up unfinished or in the trash. But they make me happy, which to me signifies that they add value to my life, even if it’s not by padding my LinkedIn page.
Unexpectedly, a school project started to rekindle my love for crafts. For my Advanced Placement (AP) Language and Composition final, we were required to create an item entirely by hand. At this point, I was so overwhelmed with a myriad of stressors in my life that maintaining a reasonable grade in the class was all I cared about. So, motivated by academic drive, I ended up reconnecting with my long-lost passion for crochet.
My goal was to replicate a patchwork blue-and-white bag that I had saved to a Pinterest board called “Crochet!” that was last active in 2023. It took me over 20 hours to create, which I passed by watching every single “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” movie. It turned into a social event — fellow friends who were in AP Language and Composition would come to my house for crochet and movie nights, and we used it as an opportunity to socialize while doing something that we deemed productive. Even better, it kept my hands busy, voiding hours that could have been spent scrolling through social media.
In the end, my bag was far from perfect. Tufts of yarn stuck out in odd places, and the spiral design on each granny square was slightly off. But I was still immensely proud of it. There’s something beautiful about weaving together an everyday item and knowing its exact origins were not a mysterious aisle in Target or an Amazon warehouse.
I’ve found that the best way I’ve been able to continue creating art is through turning crafts into social time. Pottery painting, creating customized patchwork hoodies, and making flower crowns are a few of the activities I’ve used to bring people together. I’ve found that crafting is a great way to keep your hands busy and requires a level of focus that redirects your energy from stress to creativity. My friends and I are always proud to show off our respective creations.
Boy or girl, old or young, artsy or hopelessly not, I’d implore anyone to try their hand at a Do-it-yourself (DIY) project the next time they feel bored. It’s a great way to destress, keep your hands busy, and create something meaningful.
