Georgetown sophomore and freelance artist Alexandra Bowman wanted to keep up with her art and find some semblance of structure during local stay-at-home orders for the COVID-19 crisis. So she decided to launch #CatADayApril on Instagram, an Inktober-inspired drawing challengewhere artists of all levels draw a cat befitting a daily theme (the theme for April 8 is “Sassy,” for example).
“I figured it would be a great way to keep up our discipline every day as artists,” says Bowman, who’s riding out the general quarantine from her home in Centerville, Va. “Having some form of discipline can be a form of respite during these times. In the beginning, I was in a rough place.” The daily cat doodles have helped, Bowman says, by letting her carve out a time to be creative.
While some Washingtonians are using their free time during the pandemic to pursue baking or gardening (others, especially parents, may say “what free time?”), many of the region’s artists are upping their game by learning new skills and honing old ones. Arts-and-crafts businesses are also innovating, in part out of survival, with revenues plummeting due to cancelled classes and the overall retail slowdown.
In Hyattsville, Md, Three Little Birds Sewing Co. is receiving a ton of calls. “Everyone’s buying stuff, either to keep sane or to make face masks,” owner Kate Blattner says. “I stopped answering my phone—I can’t even answer the phone.”
Blattner and her boyfriend are working to package online orders and deliver volunteer-sewn face masks to local hospitals (more than 400 masks have been delivered so far). In addition, she’s offering virtual classes for crafters who want to develop their handwork or join a new community.
A beginner’s embroidery class, conducted over Zoom, was Three Little Birds’ first offering, “because that’s something you don’t need a machine for, and people might already have supplies,” says Blattner. (She shipped kits to participants who lacked the required materials before it started.) The class wasn’t an exact substitute for one-on-one learning, but Blattner thinks it was relatively successful. “Instead of just watching a video…people could ask questions, and if they wanted me to repeat a stitch, they could see it again,” she explains.
Normally, classes at the studio are capped at about six people, both because of space constraints and because people start comparing themselves to each other when they’re working in close quarters. But Blattner opened up the Zoom class to 20 people and says the next class offering will be cross-stitch. For more experienced sewers, Three Little Birds is also holding quilt-along sessions, over Zoom.
It’s not the only local shop that’s taking to virtual platforms to host interactive lessons.Through their D.C.-based business Rock Paper Plant, Alicia Mazzara and Cielo Contreras teach people how to grow and mount indoor plants and craft plant accessories, including felted cacti. Their transition to digital classes wasn’t seamless at first.
“When I teach felting, I walk around the room, I lean over,” Contreras says. “When someone’s struggling [at an in-person workshop], we take their [piece] and show them how to do it. So…I had to figure out a few things” with the new format.
On April 4, she and Mazzara held their first felted succulents workshop, with six attendees. “My husband’s a teacher, and he’s been teaching over Zoom, so he was mostly helpful,” Contreras notes. “Like, ‘try this, try this, I learned this thing about how to mute people.’”
While needle-felting is a beginner-friendly craft, Contreras says she initially worried about not being able to physically interact with her students. Still, she thinks things went well, and as the coronavirus outbreak persists, she and Mazzara are hoping to add more virtual classes soon.
Local artists say they’re not entirely surprised that some people are turning to DIY crafts amid the disruptive pandemic. “We can’t control what’s happening with coronavirus,” Blattner, of Three Little Birds, says. “We can’t control the fact that we can’t go anywhere or do our normal everyday lives. But if we can do one thing that is good for your soul, then at least you’re doing something good for yourself.”
That’s a sentiment Bowman seems to agree with. She says she’s using her at-home time to work on freelance projects that she previously didn’t have as much time for, and also going deeper with her classwork than she might have otherwise.
For her Georgetown animation class’ final assignment, Bowman created a stop-motion animated movie set to the first 24 seconds of the overture for “Cats” (the stage show, not the recent Tom Hooper version). She wants to finish the entire song, even while acknowledging she’s “taking [it] to an irrationally complex level.”
“I know we’re not supposed to try to write ‘King Lear,’ but when I’m in the right mindset—when I don’t not want to do it—I’m trying to get to all the art goals I did not have time to do before,” says Bowman.
