I have held off posting about this because I wasn’t sure if it would be a success or a failure, but I recently started a crafting club at the college where I work. The main goal of the club is to make items and donate them to charity. I have had the idea for a good while but was hoping to find a fellow faculty person or a staff member at the school to co-sponsor the club with me. Finally, this semester I decided to just go for it and crossed my fingers.

I filled out the paperwork, got the okay from TPTB, posted signs, and announced it to all my classes. I also asked other faculty friends to spread the word for me too. I had about 20 people tell me either in person or via email that they wanted to participate, but as it got closer to the date of our first meeting, those 20 people got pretty quiet! So I was starting to freak out that it might just be me and 2 other people who had bothered to reply to me emails.

Well, today was the day. I had bottled water, hot chocolate, hot tea, cookies, yarn, and hooks (H and G) ready to go. I had resolved myself to just try to restart the club during spring semester if our first meeting was a failure.

To my relief, 12 eager students showed up! Plus we had a little cold snap down here in Florida, so it was a perfect day to sip hot chocolate and play with yarn. We only were scheduled to meet for an hour, but they probably would have stayed two! We elected officers, made plans for spring (including making and selling Valentine’s Day cards and other paper crafts as a way to earn some much needed cash for more crafting supplies), and spent the rest of the time learning to crochet.

Luckily, two people besides myself knew how, so the three of us taught the rest of the group. All of them left with some scrap yarn and a hook, and we will be meeting again next week. These folks even want to meet two times a week! I’m not sure how I will manage to swing that, but I’m so glad that we had such a great first meeting.

While we don’t have expert yarn crafters as yet, I have to say that I was pretty impressed how in less than an hour, most of them had caught on to doing chain stitch and were attempting single crochet. Sure, their work was a little uneven, but they were “getting it,” and they were having a good time too. In fact, it was funny because most at first were freaking out: “How did you do that? Oh, I can’t get this. Boy, this is hard!” But then as they did more and more chains, they started to relax and were so pleased with themselves and surprised that they were able to do it. This is one of the benefits to learning a craft too, self-esteem! When you can make something with your hands, it is just an awesome feeling.

The club’s first charity project is to make baby afghans for Healthy Start. Members will make 10 inch crocheted squares and then we’ll stitch them together to make the blankets. If that works, then I hope we can also make some baby hats, but I thought the 10 inch squares were an easy first project for beginners. Instead of making the customary pot holder, they will make squares.

Now I need to figure out how to get some more yarn and hooks for these folks and try to get another college employee to help me out, yikes! Both are good problems to have, but I am just feeling a tad overwhelmed right now. I’ll definitely keep posting about our progress over here.