Book Review: Kitschy Crafts
A Celebration of Overlooked 20th-Century Crafts
Tanya A. Brown

Dump the trashy summer novels and sharpen your crochet hooks: it's time for a trip into the murky past of crafting. In Kitschy Crafts, author Jo Packham and graphic designer Matt Shay take us back to a time when giant doilies roamed the earth and our foremothers scavenged crafting materials from garbage heaps.

Jo Packham, a veteran craft author and publisher, may be best known for her books on personalizing craft and creation spaces. In Kitschy Crafts she earns her chops as a conservator of craft history, documenting vintage crafts that may be difficult to find elsewhere.

"You could put your eye out!"
Kitschy Crafts is divided into five chapters, covering needlework, crochet, macrame, beading, and a medley of assorted crafts. Crochet lovers will find much to please, with instructions for bottle cap trivets, the ubiquitous poodle-shaped toilet paper cover, and a truly monstrous bed doll. Projects in the macramé chapter include that 70s favorite, the macramé plant hanger, and an odd little wall hanging depicting a giraffe.

Those who aren't so fond of needle arts may find those sections tedious, but will discover a nice selection of no-miss crafts in the beading and general crafting chapters. String art, seashell crafts, and tie dye all make an appearance, as do peach pit "grapes", a sock monkey, a serving bowl shaped from a molten record, and a rather nice wax-covered Chianti bottle.

While thumbing through the book, my attention was riveted by the instructions for resin grapes and pineapples, including an invaluable dissertation on making casting molds. An unlikely hybrid of space-age materials and the plant world, fake grapes once graced every right-thinking housewife's coffee table, sitting alongside the crystal dish of dust-covered candy orange slices. Until now they were only a memory, buried deep in landfills awaiting future archaeologists.

As an unexpected bonus, if you follow the casting instructions you're only a shoelace or two away from making clackers, a 70s fad toy which both improved children's dexterity and occasionally did irreparable damage to their eyes. Packham was wise to not include this particular craft in her book, but those who are hell-bent on personal injury can improvise using her grape instructions as a starting point.

Unlike the authors of other books on vintage crafts, Packham rarely succumbs to the temptation to make a project which is kitschy but not authentic. The sole example I noticed was a juice packet purse, but in fact this may be an homage to 60s purses constructed from product packaging.

Supplemental content appears throughout Kitschy Crafts, including a slang glossary (useful for your next cross stitch project?) and a list of fads. Helpful crafting content is provided as well, including a list of common crochet abbreviations and visual glossaries of macrame knots and embroidery stitches.

Unfortunately, the amount of instruction varies widely, with no directions given at all for some projects and great detail for others. For example, the resin grape section sprawls across seven glorious pages while a beaded necktie is represented only by a photo and some dotty faux advertising-style text.

"You got your crafts in my kitsch!" "You got your kitsch in my crafts!"
Sadly, the crafts and the kitsch in this book don't marry together as well as the chocolate and the peanut butter in the old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ads. The fact that a graphic designer was given equal billing as a coauthor is revealing. The book is so heavily laced with campy vintage ad artwork and cutesy headlines that the crafts are often overwhelmed. Some of the instructions were nearly unreadable, and at times I wondered if I'd opened a Jim Heimann ad art book by mistake.

This is a shame since both Jo Packham's crafts and the retro artwork unearthed by Matt Shay are delightful. One hesitates to suggest restraint for a book celebrating bad taste, but the book would have benefited from toning the use of graphics down a bit - or at least using images with period depictions of the projects.

Despite that, this is an enjoyable, thumbable book. Even those with no inclination to heft a crochet hook or open a bottle of glue will shudder with delight as they remember the dreadful projects of yesteryear.

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