My Favorite Color Is Sparkle

The goal was to create a craft activity for elementary school students. Before us, a class of undergrads in an introductory art for educators course, were glue sticks, glitter packets, bricks of construction paper, thick-handled scissors, and popsicle sticks. Behind those, more supplies loomed. I walked toward the table.

Then, I was a twenty-year-old elementary education major trying to determine if a career in primary education was for me, and that day I had to confront one of my oldest fears: crafts. I had always struggled to make the cleanest folds, cut the straightest lines, stay inside the picture’s frame. My paper airplanes became yachts; a coloring book picture of a field often ended looking like a sad fireworks show in a driveway, an uncle promising some beautiful spark that never happened. I would see the separate materials, review the finished product raised in a teacher’s hand, and my brain would begin its panicked whirl.

I decided to craft puppets. We needed to build our idea, and then we needed to be sure to have a list of steps to get to that finished idea, and we had to think of our audience. We needed it to be challenging, but not too challenging; it needed to be fun, but focused. I began crafting.

The world included a king and a queen, a jester and a knight. Four puppets. The goal was for students to build these puppets, each student with a little kingdom to construct collaborative narratives. For an hour and a half, I focused. I cut shapes, slowly, from colored paper, drew faces, decorated clothing, added fuzzy balls to the jester’s hat—I was proud. Then we were reviewed.

“I wish you didn’t have such a cavalier attitude.” The art professor, a short woman with bright red glasses, dressed in a large brown sweater, exhaled, writing some notes on a pad. I looked at my puppets, confused, and then I looked at other tables, seeing houses, castles, items that twirled. I said nothing, puzzling over what the word “cavalier” meant, as my only frame was a sad indie song and a basketball team in Ohio. She moved on to the next table. It was fall, and through the art room's windows, I could see leaves breaking from limbs. By that summer, my major had changed to English studies and linguistics.

It would be only a half-truth to say my desire to switch was due to my inability to produce and enjoy crafts, but it was a considerable factor.

Now, I am an English professor at a small college in Indiana, and I’m a dad to a five-year-old girl named Madeline whose first favorite color I will never forget: "Sparkle." Her bedroom is full of crayons, markers, and, in a thick plastic tub, craft supplies. We play with dolls and Pokémon; with race cars and plastic Daniel Tiger figures. And we make crafts.

I love making crafts with Madeline.

Far from being cavalier, or showing a lack of proper concern, Madeline and I busy ourselves on paper, crafting multimedia designs, cutting and gluing yarn and rope. A young person expressing their love by building a scene for you must be close to the purest form of care. In the picture above, at the bottom right, a basketball lifts toward a hoop. “I made that because you love basketball,” she says when I ask her about it.

“And what about this,” I say, pointing to a bug at the top left.

“We love butterflies.”

And she goes on, explaining each piece. Sometimes the connection is direct, something she knows I like or we both enjoy and have discussed; sometimes it’s “for beauty;” sometimes, she isn’t sure, shrugging her shoulders, and it’s in these moments where I feel I can shine as a dad, explaining how not everything we do has to have a specific reason. How sometimes it’s enough that we thought it would be nice, or that we thought someone might like it, or that it would fulfill the goal and we have tried our best, or that we wanted to experiment. Or that...

“Do you want to make another one?” Madeline asks.

Without hesitating, and without the slightest bit of worry, I answer. “Absolutely.”