Make a soda fountain chair from a champagne cage. Instructions obvious?

This blog is about three months late — I should have written it for April 1. Because the follow up to “Managing a DIY Addiction” is: You can’t! April fool!

I can blame my DIY addiction on many things, starting with the lack of toys available when I was a kid. The proliferation of toys now is exponential; they’re found in just about every retail outlet from bookstores to produce stores and even at the dry cleaners. (We wouldn’t want the sweet little tots to be bored while the nanny picks up Mom’s business suits.)

Not that our family could have afforded toys anyway, but I consider myself lucky in both regards – few toys available and little money to buy what there was. I, and my friends, were left to our own imaginations.

My father built me a crude dollhouse and that’s all I needed. I’ve written elsewhere (ad nauseum, you might be thinking) about furnishing that house and probably hundreds more scenes, roomboxes, and houses in the intervening years. Thank goodness for the countless charity auctions that are willing to take the finished products off my hands, or I’d have to have a separate dwelling for my crafts.

DIYing my dollhouse carried over to other areas. Not, I’m sad to say, into major work like painting a life-size house or fixing the plumbing, but to many other crafts. From my earliest days, I would look at something in a store—a greeting card, say, or a skirt, a bookmark, a scarf, a calendar, a paperweight, an ornament—and think, I can make that.

Of course, sometimes the attempts were colossal failures, but enough projects succeeded that I kept on going. From friends and relatives, I learned sewing, knitting, crocheting, drawing . . . whatever it took to make that thing that was in the stores.

One time I took a cartooning class so I could make a comic strip for our Christmas card. The instructor was about 17, and worked on Toy Story! Fun, but that was my last try at that.

Dick (note the pocket protector): How do you like our tree this year? Camille (remember this was 20 years ago): It's our best ever! (And you see the "tree" is really a tv image.)

Crafting as therapy. There's nothing like it. It's impossible to stay stressed and unfocused while trying to glue tiny pieces together.

More miniature scenes are on display in the gallery on my website.