“That’s It, I’m Craft Shaming!”:30 Horrendous DIY Projects That Got Shamed In This Online Group

If I've learned one thing in my quest to find new hobbies as an adult, it's that practice makes you better. I, too, have once looked at a craft tutorial and thought: "Pfft, I can do that. Flawlessly. On the first try." But that's just one of my toxic traits, I guess. You have to try and fail many times before actually making something beautiful.

Having a hobby in the crafts realm also has benefits to our mental health. Research shows that it can help us manage stress better. When we do crafts or art in a group, it also makes us feel more connected to society.

"But how can I feel zen when everything I try to craft turns out trash?" you may ask. Well, that has to do with us always reaching for perfection. Your first (or second, or tenth, or hundredth, for that matter) craft doesn't have to be perfect. In other words, it's more about the journey than the result, if you will.

In fact, in some cases, making bad crafts might even be more therapeutic. Sam Reece, the mind behind S****y Craft Club, can attest to that. The community she started is all about gluing beads and rhinestones onto everything and anything. Reece calls it "low-budget, high-impact crafts."

Some call Sam's crafting club "lightly unhinged," but she says it's a way for her to explore her relationship with perfectionism and do her best to make art enjoyable again. To those who attend the club meetings, perhaps, it's something similar as well.

Sam started Craft Club in 2019 when she was feeling "creatively burnt out" by her everyday job. She started organizing club meetings in Brooklyn, and when the pandemic hit, it went, in her own words, "modestly viral" on TikTok.

Reece claims bad crafts help her heal her inner child. "With every [crappy] craft I make, Kid Sam is right there—reminding me to play, to make art that's just for me, and at the very least, to just create something. Because when we're dealing with [crappy] crafts, it's not important that it's perfect—it's important that you made it."

But what about the times we intend to make something good and it ends up looking horrible? Well, sometimes, you just gotta accept that you'll make some duds. Blogger Felicia of The Craft Session writes that sometimes projects just fail. She asks her readers to look for joy in their failed projects.

Felicia writes how she makes a conscious decision to feel joy about being wrong. "This is not a reframing where we are trying to make a pile of elephant dung be a cookie. But rather, it is a cookie that, upon first glance, can look like elephant dung." Failure teaches us something, she says.

She also touches upon an interesting subject: that we take failure way too personally. When we fail at something, even at crocheting a granny square, for example, we think this says something about us as a person. That we're not capable enough, that we're too dumb, or that we just don't have the talent. In reality, mistakes are opportunities to grow.

Craft blogger Cintia of My Poppet also writes that we sometimes tend to be harsher on ourselves than we need to be. She invites crafters to ask themselves: "Is this really a fail?"

"Just because you don’t love it doesn’t mean someone else won't," she says.

From a more practical perspective, there can be lots of reasons your DIY craft failed. Some projects (especially when you're a beginner) need a lot of attention to detail. Sometimes, we might overlook instructions, swap the listed supplies for something we have at home, or just be in too much of a rush. Slow but steady wins the race, y'all.

So, which craft fails did you like the most, Pandas? Have you ever made something so atrocious it was worth shaming online? If you're brave enough, come forward and show us your bad crafts! Perhaps I should share my pathetic attempt at making paper bag snowflakes with you? But maybe let's leave that for the next time.