Bad Crafts: Friendship bracelets

I probably should have mentioned friendship bracelets in my article about macramé, since friendship bracelets are a very small, decorative version of macramé. So that's one way in which macramé actually has carried forward in the crafts world.

In and of themselves, friendship bracelets are neat. They were fun to collect, it was fun to seek out and master new patterns to impress your friends, fun to choose new color combinations, and it was a good use for all that pretty embroidery floss that they sell at the craft stores.

There are some big problems with friendship bracelets, though. First of all, you have the element of competition and shaming. Whoever had the most friendship bracelets was OBVIOUSLY the most popular, since she (and it was pretty much always a girl) had the most friends. Friendship bracelets became a sort of social Coin of the Realm. And the blow-back could get pretty ugly.

God help you if you made friendship bracelets for yourself, or if you gave one to another girl and she refused to wear it. Ugh, just the thought of all the junior high politics makes me nauseous.

The other problem is that you can't really take them off. I mean, that's kind of the point. You have to wear these cotton bracelets in the shower, in the pool, to bed, at the dinner table… it was pretty disgusting, if you think about it. They would get very ratty, and even if you kept adding new bracelets, the old ones always dragged down the property value of their neighbors, so to speak.

Eventually you had to cut it off with a pair of scissors, or work it off your wrist. And you always felt a little bit bad about doing it, like you were dissing your friend by removing this disgusting cruddy old bracelet.

This is a great example of a craft that is great in the abstract, but fails in the real world.

Image courtesy Flickr/silent silk