Crappy Craft Night

For the past six years, my sister and I have held an annual Crappy Craft Night in the week before Christmas. It's become one of my favourite nights of the year filled with friends, food, laughter, and -- of course -- crappy crafts.

Now, I've always been a crafty sort; my sister less so (though she does enjoy putting together model cars). And usually in my stocking, I would find a small craft kit to make an ornament at Christmastime. What I found about these craft kits is that they often were poorly conceived and assembled, with materials missing or incomplete instructions. Even as an accomplished crafter, it could be difficult to achieve the end result pictured on the package. I often ranted about this to friends and family.

Then one year, my sister happened to be in St. John's before Christmas and picked up a few children's craft kits at Michaels. We had a craft night in her living room, with a fire, some wine, and a few nibbles. We did more laughing than anything else as we assembled our crafts, realizing that no child could possibly successfully complete them (at least such that they resemble the package). In those early years, there was a strange penguin made of a gritty clay and some foam that never stayed together despite trying a variety of glues, a polar bear made of white pom poms, and wooden ornaments that you simply coloured with markers (the most successful of the lot). There was also this fellow:

This felt penguin, made by my sister, looks cute enough. But what you can't see is how the pieces of felt weren't cut to the right lengths (so that green band doesn't meet up in the back) and how the glue didn't actually hold the felt pieces together properly (so his red hat is partially open on the sides). That the jingle bell stayed on at all is a Christmas miracle.

Part of what made these early craft nights so funny was that my projects always seemed to work out, while my sister's were (at least in her opinion) utter failures. Of course, the kit was usually the problem, but I'm not sure my sister believed me when I said that.

For sheer entertainment value, we decided this had to become an annual event and began inviting friends to participate. Each participant was to pick out a child's Christmas craft kit and bring enough of that craft for everyone to make one. Purchasing the kits from dollar stores or the discount section of Michaels was strongly encouraged.

Over the years, we've made paper snowflakes, jingle bell snowmen, perler bead ornaments, felt Santas, decorated gift bags... The highlight of one year was the Makit and Bakit "stained-glass" ornaments that had to be baked in the oven so that the coloured plastic pieces melted together (the fumes nearly killed us).

For the fifth anniversary of Crappy Craft Night last year, we decided to decorate gingerbread houses using kits. The kits, of course, contained old, dried out royal icing and therefore were epic failures -- which only made the night better. I didn't have a kit, because I'd arrived home from Cape Breton so late that there were none left in Corner Brook (Trooper Ron drove me all around town, certain that we'd find one somewhere, but we were unsuccessful). I ended up buying the pieces for a train at Bulk Barn and making my own royal icing.

And this year -- 2017 -- we had a Crappy Craft Night: Paint Night Edition. We all followed a YouTube tutorial to paint a snowman (click here if you're interested in trying that out yourself). We bought crappy acrylic paint and brushes, and Trooper Ron made some impressive easels out of kindling in just 15 minutes, and we tested our abilities to follow the tutorial. There was a sense among some that the video was too advanced -- but everyone finished it and all of the paintings looked great in the end. It definitely was one of the more intense Crappy Craft Nights, though.

You see, it may just be Crappy Craft Night, but we're all pretty serious about it.

And the marker of a great CCN is when we laugh so much that my sister needs her Ventolin inhaler.

This is by far one of the best Christmas traditions ever and I can't wait for the next Crappy Craft Night, when we'll return to the original crappy kid's craft kit format!