Seventies Crafts
by Lore Sjöberg

Pop-Top Clothing
The art of taking soda pop-tops and making them into fashionable and attractive, in the sense of hideous and ugly, clothing, gets points for sheer weirdness. Pop-tops were the bane of bare feet for a decade, and yet some high-minded soul decided to take these painful, sharp-edged lemons and make lemonade. I have a vague yet persistent memory of two models in a magazine -- one male, one female -- posing in their matching vest-and-skirt pop-top outfits, happy, friendly, free of hang-ups in their shining suits of dorkmail. C+

Macrame
Macrame is the art of tying ugly string and ugly decorations into ugly shapes in order to hold items which, if not ugly to begin with, certainly became so upon being swathed in this low-effort form of hippie knitting. This was part of the aesthetic of the early seventies in which folk art was judged by its resemblance to marijuana buds and/or bongs. Macrame looked like both, and was smiled upon. D

Sand Candles
The great thing about seventies craftwork was that it took the work of centuries of artisans and made it easy, accessible, and stupid. The idea with these tchotchkes was that you poured hot wax into a sand hole and got a candle encrusted with sand. As far as I know, nobody had previously longed for household items that looked like the bottom of someone's foot, but you could do it yourself, and thus it contained love. Sand-encrusted love. D+

Driftwood Sculpture
I can get into the shape of driftwood, but I can't get into the idea of calling the practice of selecting a piece and covering it with shellac "sculpture." Worse than that is making it into a coffee table. Disco may have been ugly, but at least it wasn't made of driftwood. D

God's Eyes
In terms of complexity, God's eyes make lanyards look like renal surgery, but I enjoyed them because while they weren't exactly a thrill a picosecond, they could be completed within my famously short attention span. Making a God's eye involved running cheerfully-hued yarn around popsicle sticks until you got something that I can only hope -- but not, presumably, pray -- looks nothing like God's actual eyes. B