HOBBY SUPERSTORE

This piece dates back to last October when the terrifying prospect of another Christmas started to appear over the horizon and began to fill me with the usual jitters. I think that I was in a bit of a bad mood on the evening when I wrote this, but I’m sure you’ll forgive one or two of the more radical idiocies on display. After all, if you’re prepared to let people get away with some of the raffia work you can buy, then you’re obviously very forgiving people...


I popped into one of those hobby superstores the other evening. I wasn’t really planning on it but a specific type of wool needed seeking out for a project that was unfolding at home and so we called in on our way back home and, instead of waiting in the car like I sometimes do, instead I paid the parking fee and tagged along into this world of crafty wonders.

Now, to be brutally honest, I have been known over the past few years to pour massive amounts of what can only be described as being “scorn” upon the whole world of “crafts” and all that it entails. I might very well have been the shed loads of unmitigated crap that I was exposed to at the various “craft fairs” that I was forced to attend as a small person, or it could just be my own mile wide streak of cynicism, but a lot of it used to look like pretty shoddy work created by people of limited talent trying their very best but yet still coming up short.

However, over the past few years, there’s been a bit of an old “sea change” in the old crafty world and a lot of people are making a fair old living at it and producing stuff of the finest quality for us to clutter up our homes with.

Granted, there’s still a lot of Godawful tat being manufactured out there, some of it by well meaning people who really just need to be told how to do it better. I sometimes look at some of this stuff and it resembles the kind of glue-encrusted matchboxes we attempted to knock up into gifts after watching “Blue Peter” as kids and which was always received with the kind of quizzical expression that meant that you knew that it was destined for the dustbin as soon as you had left.

Perhaps some people do like to fill their houses with utter garbage just so long as it is expensive utter garbage, but there is definitely a lot to be learned from the tale of the Emperor’s new clothes when it comes to some of this junk, not least because it gives a bad name to some of the really good stuff that is also getting made out there. Perhaps there should be a clearer distinction made between “home-made” and “craftsmanship” and where the line gets crossed. I could blame a lot of the blurring of the edges on Kirstie Allsopp encouraging us all to try despite a lack of any recognised ability we might imagine we have instead of just letting us admit defeat and watch her making a complete hash of it. Still hopefully we are all still discerning enough to tell our quality from our tat when it comes to things like ceramics and glassware at least, otherwise some of my very good friends are likely to struggle to persuade anyone to part with their hard-earned.

I think that I most object when something that is clearly rubbish is priced as if it really isn’t, or when you are expected to admire a piece of alleged “design” that clearly hasn’t been, and put up with the obvious disappointment when you don’t proclaim a page of manufactured bits and pieces glued in a scrapbook to be the next Mona Lisa, or a coil pot that has miraculously failed to become anything other than an ashtray as a potential Turner Prize winner.

Actually, when it comes to the Turner Prize, maybe they would have a shot…

Oh, I know that I shouldn’t be so mean, and I should admire people for trying to get in touch with their creative side because, after all, anything that is created has its value and should be worthy of our admiration. Perhaps it’s just that I feel that, whilst I do sometimes truly believe that they should indeed attempt to get in touch with it, despite our occasional successes I sometimes think that it is our failures that shape us more, define us and make us who we are, we also need to be aware that some of our failures are best hidden away from the world and its ridicule.

Perhaps this comes from not being successful myself, of course and, conversely, I do actually feel that we should celebrate our failures far more than our successes. It keeps us grounded and prevents us from appearing too smug. Those who continually go on about how great they are and what they’ve done are ultimately, to my mind, tedious in the extreme, but there I am, contradicting myself again, in that truly hypocritical way that only I really could understand.

Anyway, I didn’t get out from the superstore unscathed. I bought an illuminated magnifying craft lamp because I’d been looking out for one and they had them “on offer”. As we all know, there’s one thing an Englishman cannot resist and that’s something that seems like a bargain, and so I snapped one up. Granted, I could probably have searched around on the old internet for a couple of hours and found myself a cheaper one, but instead I bought this one and so now I can hopefully, once we’ve cleared all the clutter from our various work surfaces, resume my own hobbies and pastimes once again.

They had been rather set aside of late, not least because of the vast amounts of tat that are covering every square inch of free space in Blogfordshire Towers, but also because my eyeballs are starting to get a little less efficient than they once were and any “close-up” work now needs the trusty spectacles to be set aside (or rather placed upon the top of the noggin) so that I have the vaguest chance of seeing what I’m supposed to be doing. Any drawing, painting, model work, instruction reading or indeed reading of any kind seems to now require a certain amount of peering and squinting to be done which, hopefully, will be reduced by the coming of the martians, or at least by the switching on of my nice new lamp which has a slight air of the 1950s version of “The War of the Worlds” about its design…

Does this make me officially “old” now?

I don’t mean the failing eyesight, but becoming excited by something as mundane (and “practical”) as a craft lamp. I don’t know, I’ll be buying my jackets from “Millets” next. Mind you, I might have to if I tried to sell any of the tat I’ve churned out over the years…

Incidentally, with regards to the whole car parking thing in these shopping centres… If you pull into a parking bay but never actually leave the car, have you ever officially parked? I only ask because I did once see an item on the news about people getting fined because of video surveillance camera evidence which showed the just pulling into bays for a few moments before driving away, and this has led to me meekly going over and popping my coins into a machine at ridiculous times of the evening, even though they’re before the official shut-off time of 9.00 PM, despite the fact that there’s not the remotest evidence of any parking attendants in the vicinity and I’m really only likely to be there for five minutes. I’m tending towards the “safe rather than sorry” principle here, but I do wonder whether I’ve teetered over the precipice into “A fool and his money are soon parted” territory…

These car parking people… Now they can be really crafty…