I Feel Like a Loser

Last night was a Relief Society holiday exchange night. Everyone was invited to bring a holiday craft or recipe to share with others. Because I am in Nursery, I wasn't informed until this week, and therefore had limited time and resources to use. I had already searched online for easy ornament crafts and found some cute ones on Disney's Family Fun site. I decided to make one of the kid-friendly, cheap crafts for that night since there are so many kids in our ward--perfect family activity, I thought. I chose the retro ornament, or cardboard snowflake as I called it, because it was the only one I had all the supplies for.  Here is the photo from the site:

They're just cardboard tubes threaded on pipe cleaners. I only had plain white, not glittery, pipe cleaners, but I amped up the tubes by covering them in wintery paper. Mine doesn't even look like the photo above, though in my defense, I had to make it really fast! If I had had more time, I would have done multiple colors and evened out the spacing.




 I felt a little silly displaying my craft next to all the other fancy ones, but I tried not to think about it. The night was really fun. We started with talking about being grateful and shared family holiday traditions. Then we browsed the crafts and treats and took copies of the ones we liked. We chatted for a long time. Caden did great in the kids' class. He didn't cry for me; in fact, he didn't want to leave. When it was time to go, I got my craft and noticed the large stack of copies still there. I don't think anyone took a copy, except for me to use for future reference. I was very hurt. Yeah, it wasn't amazing, even for a kid craft, but I thought maybe someone would like it for their kids since it was so easy and cheap. I guess not.

I got home and started blogging about it to vent my feelings while Caden played in the bathtub. Then Justin got home as I started to wash Caden and asked me how it went. I leaned against the tub and burst into tears. Poor Justin handled it very well.

Sometimes I feel that the women (and even some men) in our church put too much value on sewing and crafting ability, making unskilled people like me feel inferior. I feel as if my worth is lower in their eyes because I can't do those things. (I wrote about it on my LDS blog a while ago.)

I try to do what I can and share it, but still feel silly because no one appreciates the attempt. That's why I love kid crafts so much. Kids don't care; they don't have expectations or pretentions. They can have fun making anything out of junk, which I'm good at (also blogged about that a couple years ago). That's not to say that I'm not trying to learn, just that I'm slow at it and can't create things on my own. For that reason, I didn't want to bring anything, but I decided that participating was more important. Kind of regret that now.

I feel silly too for feeling this way, but those feelings are very real. I'm not looking for sympathy or pity. Just want to remind you crafty girls to be patient with and understanding toward us artistically challenged women!