The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

Narrative & Memoir 49 VBS was never complete without heading to the basement of the church’s recreational building for craft time --craft time with Mrs. Dana. Mrs. Dana is my best friend, Kyla’s, mom. The basement was always freezing, which made craft time a refreshing way to cool off after sweating through an active game outside in the June heat. We made everything from picture frames to painted flower pots, and every year the crafts seemed to get better and better! By the end of the week, each VBS student had a collection of handmade masterpieces to take home. I loved every minute of craft time and was always devastated when VBS was over. Lucky for me, I was best friends with the daughter of “Mrs. Craft Time” herself! That meant that every time Kyla and I had a sleepover we could take advantage of the two large drawers in Mrs. Dana’s kitchen that were full of craft supplies! We would sit at the wooden kitchen table with warm sunlight streaming through the sliding kitchen door and painstakingly decide what to make. Our favorite craft to make together was window-clings, flat pictures made of special paint that hardens until you can peel your whole picture away and stick it on a window, or, in our case, in one of the squares on the sliding kitchen door. We wanted to make enough of these clingy things until every square had one. My favorite thing to do at Kyla’s house was make crafts, and I think that the many hours we spent together crafting were equally enjoyable for us both and gave us an opportunity to bond through collaboration. The next step in my creative journey was my fourth grade history project--a seemingly unlikely avenue for promoting creativity. Nevertheless, my saint of a mother suggested that I do a project about the Underground Railroad and make a quilt for the display part of my project. So, that was the plan. I got to choose the colors of the quilt-- purple and green, my favorite colors, and white, because my mom said we needed something to break up the darker colored shades of green and purple I had chosen. We worked on the quilt for at least two months, if not more, in a cluttered corner of a little room in our house we lovingly call the “storage” room. This is a place where we keep everything from a spare refrigerator to our Christmas decorations, but, at the time, this room also housed a small crowded table with a sewing machine on top and a small pedal for the machine underneath. My mom taught me how to cut out the necessary squares and pin them just so. She taught me how