Shitty Craft Club is Making the World a Craftier Place
⤏ SHITTY CRAFT CLUB’S SAM REECE ON BURNOUT, FRIENDSHIP, AND IDENTIFYING AS AN ARTIST
⤏ IN CONVERSATION WITH CHELSIE RIVERA
⤏ PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUDRYANA CRUZ
⤏ STYLING BY KELLY LOVE
⤏ MAKEUP BY ERIN WALTERS
Sam Reece is an actress, comedy writer and CEO of one of the happiest places on earth: Shitty Craft Club. Whether she’s gluing beads to a basketball or discussing the importance of friendship bracelets and having a thousand soulmates, Sam focuses on creating a safe space to be silly and imperfect while making art. You can expect explosions of laughter and sequins on her TikTok, pop-up workshops and now at home with her book, Shitty Craft Club: A Club for Gluing Beads to Trash, Talking About Our Feelings and Making Silly Things. Don’t worry, having your floors covered in glitter is just a part of the shitty crafting process.
CHELSIE RIVERA: Congratulations on your book! What about the release are you most excited about?
SAM REECE: Her birthday is coming up. She’s my fellow Virgo child. I am just so excited for everyone to see it. This is the third summer I will have been working on it since it started so it's been quite a journey. I'm just so happy to share it with everyone since the community started on TikTok. Actually, the community started in person and then moved to TikTok and Instagram. There are lots of people in different corners of my life that will get to finally see it, and they're all part of it. It's going to be really cool to hear people's reactions and to see people making the crafts from the book. That would be cool.
CR: They're also cute too and the glitter everywhere.
SR: Oh my God. My partner is always so charmed by it most of the time. He just pulled a sequin out of nowhere and I was like, “Yeah, that would be my fault. Sorry about that stuff everywhere.”
CR: It's always cute until you sweep up a pile of glitter on the floor.
SR: It's the most beautiful trash though [laughs.]
CR: How did Shitty Craft Club start?
SR: It started in 2019. I had been working full time at an ad agency as a copywriter, and I really was just so burnt out from using all my creative energy for ads for Men’s Warehouse. I was also performing comedy at night or going to rehearsals and doing auditions during the day. I was really firing on all cylinders and as you can imagine, I was pretty tired but also really missing just being creative for fun. A lot of my hobbies have become my career. I'm a professional at that.
So I decided what if I get a bunch of my friends together and have this cute little craft night? Which of course —for a Virgo— it's not as simple as just a cute little night. I had to rent a space and hire a photographer and make it have a dance party with pizza and cake. I ordered all the supplies not even sure if I would be doing it a second time. I was like, “We're just gonna go all in” and it was great. All of my friends are creative in some way even if it's not their profession. It was just so nice to be around peers, from all different corners of my life and just make silly stuff together and listen to music. It was a smash hit, so I started doing it every month for about a year. I was going to have the one year anniversary party when we had to cancel everything for the pandemic.
CR: Burnout is so real, especially just being an artist. There's a million things, a million ways you can approach it and you’re everywhere. You’re on TikTok, Instagram, pop-ups around LA and New York. Being a SheEO sounds exhausting. How do you deal with burnout?
SR: Oh, great question. It's just one burnout from one thing to the next. I started doing events with small businesses and corporations. I was doing everything, probably like two or three events a month plus all the other freelance jobs I was taking on. I definitely hit burnout on that because it was —I cut all my hair off. But now I'm trying to find more of a balance between all of the things I do and setting up rest breaks ahead of time, and knowing what my schedule is. Right now I'm visiting my cousin in New Mexico and this is such a nice break before I walk into the book tour madness. Knowing that I'm pretty introverted and it takes me a lot of energy to do those events, and to interact socially —which I love to do — I just have to build in a lot of recharging time. I'm just more conscious of how much my body needs these days.
CR: Yeah, that's essential. I would have never guessed that you were introverted just by briefly meeting you. Your capacity is very encouraging.
SR: I guess there's probably seasons where my introversion shifts a little bit and maybe it changes. I think when I interact with very like minded people and our energies match, it doesn't really matter. I'm like, ”We're connecting here. This is great.” I don't need to perform for you, it's easy.
“A lot of my hobbies have become my career. I'm a professional at that.”
CR: What was your favorite childhood craft?
SR: I used to draw all the time as a kid. I had a little room in my dad's apartment for drawing that he set up. It was so cute. There's always a certain point where teachers start to recognize this person has natural talent and for me that started to be theater, acting and singing and not drawing specifically. So I was like, “Guess I can never do that again.” So I didn't do a ton of arts and crafts after a certain point, but I think drawing and doing these little lizard keychains out of pony beads were probably my two [favorite crafts.] I've recently come back to drawing and I'm doing a lot of art just for fun and it's been really lovely.
CR: Hell yeah, you have to nurture that inner child. It seems like there's almost no boundaries for what you consider art and art medium. Have you always approached art in that way?
SR: Maybe? I went to college for musical theater and the whole energy of theater is pretty serious. I was very serious about it for a while and it started to feel too restricting and I was really seeking a lot of creative freedom. That's when I found comedy so I think it was natural. What are the boundaries that I could push? What is interesting to me that people aren't doing and how can I make it my own? I've used a lot of my musical theater training to make comedy what is right for me. Then eventually crafts and comedy melding together, and using all of my skills in projects that really make me excited is what I'm always going for. What's fun? What's exciting? It doesn't necessarily have to be stand up or singing or gluing beads to a trash can. All of those things are so much more. I'm still excited to see what else I discover.
CR: I love that. Your book encourages everyone to be their own artist and to just go for it. Have you ever struggled with identifying as an artist yourself? What would you say to artists fighting imposter syndrome?
SR: That I feel like is such a big question because you find an interest in something, then you sort of try it and you feel like everyone knows you're not supposed to be doing it. Then you keep doing it and you're like, “I've been doing this for 10 years at this point. I could finally give myself that label and even then it feels wrong.
I've always been a writer, comedian, actor and even [as an] actor I'm like, “Leave it off” but reclaiming it is part of what I do. And with art specifically I'm still working on giving myself permission to use that label. Of course it's true and other people would identify me that way. I would say if you're struggling with a label or you feel like an impostor, it takes practice hearing your name associated with what you want to be and it takes practice hearing yourself call yourself what you want to be and not degrading it. I will do that sometimes where even other authors were like, “Oh, you have a book coming out. That's so cool.” And I'm like, “Yeah, it's just a little project, silly little thing.” No. I'm an author now. That's cool but it takes some getting used to it. I think even just writing it down a bunch, making sure you insert the labels you are proud of into whatever you're writing down. Any credits you're giving yourself, just add it and people will start to accept it and it doesn't matter if they don't. It's all how you feel about it.
CR: That's so empowering and so necessary. I think a lot of people struggle with that.
SR: I think it's so funny to realize nobody really knows what's going on and what they're doing. I talk to any one of my friends who's doing anything creative or in any profession and they're like, “I don't know, I'm probably doing it wrong.” It's like, no, you're doing it right. You're just doing it differently and that can freak people out.
CR: Is there any material you wouldn’t use?
SR: Fire? That's not true because glass blowing, I would totally try that. I guess I would say blood. Artists who use it —go for it but it’s not for me.
“it takes practice hearing your name associated with what you want to be And it takes practice hearing yourself call yourself what you want to be and not degrading it.”
CR: When you first have an idea for a craft, what is your process?
SR: It depends on what I'm doing that day because a lot of the time when I have an idea, I feel like I have to make it immediately or there will be some sort of magic lost. If I write it down as an idea I probably won't do it later. Or there will be something on a list that haunts me and then I'm really excited to do this but I don't have the stuff I need or I'm too busy. Recently my partner and I were trying to decide what to do for the weekend and I was like, “I would really like some time this weekend to work on my beaded basketball. So I'm going to take a few hours to work on that.” Sometimes the process is I'll be in my office for 4 to 6 hours because I just have to make this thing, or I'll think about it non-stop for weeks until I can make it.
CR: It seems engaging with community is essential to your work, whether it’s online or IRL at your sweet events. What about connecting with community is important to you?
SR: It's such a cool thing to be creative with other people. It creates such an important healing energy together. I love giving that to people and watching people just light up at all of the stuff they can use to make something. There have been so many people who have become friends at those events and I think friendship is a really important pillar in my life. I have a lot of really close friends that are like family to me. I hope that my events can feel like we're just a bunch of buddies hanging out and create connections that will strengthen the community even more. And they create their own communities with each other. There's so many people that have met at events that still hang out or get together and make stuff. It just warms my heart. It’s bringing back that middle school friendships energy where for better or for worse we love each other so much that we’ll do all the things together. We make little notebooks together and collages and I just think that energy is so sweet and pure.
CR: There are a million ways to approach a career in art. How do you stay focused and achieve so much?
SR: There are a million ways aren't there? I think it's keeping myself open to anything because for so long, I was so fixated on being on Broadway, being a serious actor and I was very closed off to anything other than that. As I started to grow out of it and question it, I just love to perform and make art, why would I just stick to this? Then comedy opened up. I can write something that's for me, I can perform it and I can collaborate with all these other people. Comedy is something I really like —I don't necessarily love stand up— but I love talking to myself in my room for two hours. And I actually really like editing videos and if that's something I've always wanted to do, why don't I combine those two things and get better at them? If you are showing the universe where you like to go, those doors will open up, Based on all those paths I followed that felt fun and interesting —even if I knew I would be terrible at it or was scared to do it— opportunities just started popping up. Then I followed those and —like the book. I never expected to write a book. My now book agent reached out and was like, “Have you ever thought of writing a book?” We worked really hard on it for a summer and right before we were gonna send the pitch to a bunch of places, the publisher we wanted reached out organically and was like, “Have you ever thought about writing a book?” And I was like, “That's actually so crazy that you would ask that.”
It helped me to write out a lot of lists in the early days of me figuring out what I was interested in, and lists are always ongoing. They're never finished. They're always a draft. So I go back to them a lot to be like, ”What am I interested in now? What feels fun?” Even if I've never given it more than five seconds of thought. Ceramics is one where I was like, let me just take a little intro class, or let me take an intro class to sewing. Feel free to take a little risk, take a class, and see where it goes because it might click or you might be like, “Cool I did that and maybe I won't ever do it again.” But what a fun little experience.
CR: It feels kind of freeing in that way. I feel like you take the same approach trying to fight perfectionism. That must really unlock a lot of things as an artist in your process.
SR: I try to always feel like it’s okay to be a beginner at something even though it feels scary. I’ll be in that mindset for a while and then I will forget, won’t try anything new and be like, “Why do I feel like shit?” It’s because you’re doing what’s comfortable. It’s important to give your brain new experiences and images in order to grow as an artist. I'm always trying to work on that because it fights perfectionism really well.
CR: Couldn’t agree more! What’s next for the future of Shitty Craft Club?
SR: I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts. This is one of those things where I'm like, I'm going to do this little book tour and I'm just going to see what comes out of it and what comes next. Maybe there's another book? Maybe there's an emerging of my comedy writing, and crafting into a TV show. Once the WGA and SAG —once we get all the things we want, we can work on a TV show. I'm so open to whatever is next and I'm excited to find out.