The Big Gilt Trip : It’s that time of year again--to haul out the gift-making tools and <i> create.</i> Who are we turning to for words of wisdom and moral support? Why, Martha Stewart, above left, and Aleene Jackson, but of course.
Plunging an arm inside 22 pounds of cold poultry flesh isn’t very pleasant, but it sure beats an electric glue-gun burn.
Scary as it seems, for many, these may be the primary sensory options of the day. Because after the sacrificial burning of the bird and the orgy of eating, the gilt trips will begin.
Gilt trips, as in driving to Michaels for gold leaf, schlepping to House of Fabrics for gold ribbon, descending on HomeBase for gold spray-paint.
It’s loving hands of home time. Time to make decorations, presents, wrapping paper, cards and wreaths. Time to fill the coffers of the multibillion-dollar crafts industry, which not only supports a slew of magazines, specialty stores and celebrity gurus but also nurtures our desire for bigger and more dangerous tools.
The Hobby Industry Assn., an Elmwood, N.J.-based trade group, reports that at least one person in 90% of all U.S. households dabbles in crafts. And three-fourths of them are now busy making holiday gifts. Of course, the association uses a rather liberal definition of crafts: “If you can take two parts and do something, we’re going to call it a craft,” spokeswoman Susan Brandt says.
So if you’ve tied a wedding bow on a pew, made a wreath or sacked up some potpourri, you’re a craftsperson. And this is your moment. The fourth quarter is a big one for the business that has grown 41% since 1988, Brandt says.
“Five years ago, the average newsstand had no more than six or eight craft magazines. Now there are 40 or 50, and at this time of year the number goes up to several hundred,” she says.
In a recent survey conducted by the hobby association, craft enthusiasts said that more than half of their project ideas came from magazines with such titles as Ceramic Arts & Craft Projects and Folk Art Christmas.
But lately, TV has become the place to turn. In growing numbers, the craft population is tuning in to how-to television for inspiration. That’s where I found my two spiritual guides, Martha Stewart and Aleene Jackson, two women on opposite ends of a parallel universe. Other than empires built on television shows, magazines, books and Type-A personalities, they have virtually nothing in common.
Stewart, 53, lives her life as if it were a coffee-table book. Hers is a hand-wrought, picture-perfect lifestyle known in magazine and television form (Sunday mornings at 10 on KCBS, Channel 2) as “Martha Stewart Living.” From her command post in Westport, Conn., she demonstrates the arts of cooking, cleaning, gardening and decorating. She makes topiary Easter baskets out of living succulents, Christmas wreaths from prickly-pear pads and gift baskets for pets.
Jackson, 70, was broadcasting “Aleene’s Creative Living With Crafts” from her Solvang, Calif., ranch long before Stewart signed the mortgage on her Colonial farmhouse. (And when her show got its 9 a.m. weekdays time slot on the Nashville Network two years ago, Jackson built her own television studio.) In the late ‘50s, Jackson was arranging flowers on local TV. In the ‘60s, she took her how-to shows on the road, booking her “Caravan of Crafts” into 20,000-seat convention centers.
Stewart has made her fortune off her domestic skills.
Jackson has made hers off sales of more than 15 million bottles of Aleene’s Tacky Glue, an adhesive sold in craft stores and via her show and magazine.
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Stewart leads me on, Jackson keeps me going.
If I had the time, the money, the patience, a full-time nanny and bigger, faster tools, I’d try more of Stewart’s projects. Lacking all of those, I flip through her magazine (10 issues a year for $24) and mutter: “Yeah, right, Martha.”
(I haven’t forgotten her suggestion to put the dishwashing liquid, so unsightly in its tacky plastic bottle, in a cut glass wine bottle with a special spout. Two hours later, the kitchen floor was the cleanest it had ever been, not counting the shards of decorative glass I’m still finding.)
Jackson’s magazine (12 issues for $24.95), on the other hand, moves me to utter, “Not on your life, Aleene.”
(I could do her projects with one hand tied behind my back if I wanted to, which usually I don’t. Even my Brownie troop refused to make angel ornaments out of recycled shoulder pads, as Aleene suggested. Judging by a recent issue of Aleene’s Creative Living, angels are big this year. Always the recycler, she also proposes making them out of dried-- thankfully--manicotti and wallpaper scraps.)
This business of being a domestic goddess may seem glamorous, but Stewart, who manages to look good even as she spreads manure around her garden, knows that for every disciple there is a detractor. Several years of Martha-bashing peaked last year when Oprah Winfrey pitted Stewart and her fan-club president against a couple of vociferous Martha-haters.
“That, thankfully, is in the past,” Stewart says in a telephone interview from the farm she calls Turkey Hill. “The negative stories and such have lessened tremendously. I think people are finally getting it.” She says it as if it were some New Age religion.
“Of course,” she adds pragmatically, “there will always be detractors, and the people too lazy to do the projects or ones who don’t like to do those kind of homey things.”
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That’s Stewart, an industrious, seemingly humorless homebody who sets a gorgeous table. The equally humorless Jackson declines to comment on her upstart rival, but her daughter, Tiffany Windsor, sniffs: “Oh, Martha makes beautiful stuff, but she doesn’t deal with the common folk.”
Common folk are Jackson’s best customers, and she makes it very easy for them to follow her lead. She mails project instructions for the price of a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Among the most requested brochures is one for a project involving Tacky Glue and white bread. “We do some very inexpensive crafts, junk crafts out of scraps, so people can save money,” says Jackson, whose children help run the business.
If any anti-Aleene forces exist, they keep to themselves. Jackson gets adoring letters, she says, and fans drop by her factory in Buellton, Calif., a town proud of its pea soup.
What Stewart and Jackson share is a following of casual observers, people who think they can occasionally watch the shows or read the magazines and say, “I could make that.”
Crafting is an addiction, tools the fix. Even the pros are not exempt. Stewart says she yearns for a drill press to make holes in acorns and pine cones.
My friend Carey started with a glue gun about 10 years ago, quickly moved through the saw-and-drill phase, acquired specialty tools such as the Dremel Moto-Tool (a tiny drill with thousands of specialty bits), dedicated a room to her craft projects and has lately commandeered the garage for her welding projects.
“It’s a giant mess,” she says, “but good for the soul.”
Two Guides to Supplies
WHAT MARTHA STEWART KEEPS ON HAND
Hot glue gun A selection of glues Home-style drill press Lots of floral wire Floral clay Floral tape Tweezers Needle-nose pliers Paint Metallic paint Paint brushes Big rolls of craft paper
WHAT ALEENE’S DAUGHTER HEIDI KEEPS ON HAND
Scissors, including a sharp pair for fabric Wire cutters Ruler Tape measure Pliers, including needle-nose for jewelry Inexpensive brushes Toothpicks for applying glue Aleene’s special glues Clothespins to hold things together as they dry Battery-operated drill
