I Need All The Beads - Blog Posts

[image description: A fancy bower bird with a large yellow eye and a jaunty red beret perches on a colorful pile of ribbons, paper, jars, and bags on a table in a closet packed full of fabrics and other crafty objects. Test reads: “artie bower the small god of crafting hoards 229”]

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“Oh, yeah, we’ve got the good stuff.  Cold water-pressed paper from France, hand-spun alpaca wool from a tiny organic farm in upstate New York, glitter mined by the hands of the oreads living deep beneath Mount Olympus, anything your little crafter’s heart desires!  We can get you kitted out right and proper, and all we ask is that you pay at the front till and leave a little something for Artie in his shrine by the door.  He likes buttons and scraps of cloth or paper.  Pretty things.  Useful things, but not too useful, if you get my drift—he doesn’t like feeling the pressure to actually USE the things he has.

“I can tell just by looking at you that you’re one of his.  You may craft on occasion, but mostly, you have.  You glory in the having.  Maybe sometimes you dream about having even more, about being able to make everyone you know jealous without lifting a finger or spending a penny.  And that’s okay!  You know what they say: he who dies with the most yarn is still dead, but wow did he have a lot of yarn.

“What, is that not what they say?  Huh, I must have gotten that wrong…

“There’s nothing wrong with Artie’s service, no shame in a little stash or in shopping the good sales, building up your stockpile against the lean times.  But when your crafting closet goes from pantry to preserve, it may be time to step back and serve another of the craft-oriented gods for a little while.  All the yarn in the world isn’t as valuable as a single set of socks, hand-knitted with love.  Things want to be used.  Life wants to be enjoyed.

“So let yourself use them.  Enjoy what you have while you’re still here to enjoy it.  Artie will understand.  Artie will even celebrate with you, because every piece used is a piece to be replaced, and there’s nothing Artie loves more than a good haul of fresh and new.

“Just remember to make something, if you can.”

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Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and  Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern  world:

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