Every girl in a sorority can tell you that crafting is a big part of sorority life. Being in a sorority gives you a valid excuse not only to spend a little too much money on crafting supplies, but it also gives you a free pass to get glitter all over your dorm room carpet and maybe in your hair. When I joined Gamma Alpha Lambda this spring, I got a beautiful canvas painting from my Big and quickly realized that I needed to step up my crafting game. It can be hard being in a sorority when you’re not exactly an artist, but with a little bit of creativity and a whole lot of glitter, you’re bound to make something cute.
Here are the ten stages that those of us with little crafting abilities go through in order to make the perfect canvas painting:
1. The first, and perhaps worst, part of painting a canvas is all of the time that you spend on Pinterest looking for the perfect painting or quote. Whether the craft is for your Big or Little, or another sister, it is highly important that you find something that represents their personality, unless you just want to do your Greek letters. With all of the stuff on Pinterest, this first step can take a really long time.
2. After some painstaking (but somewhat fun) time spent looking for the perfect canvas painting, you must then gather your supplies. If you’re new to the sorority world, this means going on a Hobby Lobby or Michael’s shopping spree to stock up on paint and brushes, as well as some gold and silver glitter. For the rest of us, it usually means buying more canvases and maybe some more bottles of paint. The guilt you may experience while paying for your materials can quickly be forgotten when you remind yourself that you’re going to be giving someone a gift, and not just keeping it for yourself.
3. Once you finally know what you’re going to paint, you must put the brush to the canvas. But wait! If you’re anything like me, you realize only once you’ve made it back to your room that you forgot to get a paint palate and you have nothing to squeeze the paint onto. However, because you’re in college, you’re used to situations like this, so you just find a plastic bag or piece of cardboard you can put the paint on.
4. Now that you have successfully avoided your first obstacle, you get to work, and you can’t help but dance to your Spotify playlist playing in the background. Normally, I paint the background first, which is by far the easiest part of the painting process, unless you decide to make your background stripes or chevrons. Then, you’ll have your work cut out for you (and you’ll realize you should’ve bought masking tape).
5. Once the first layer or two of paint is dry, you’re ready to paint a tree or moon, or whatever else you found on Pinterest that you know your sister will love. You tell yourself repeatedly that it’s not going to be as hard as you thought, but then your brain freezes and you don’t know how to even start.
6. Now you’re in straight panic mode because you have a gorgeous background color, but you can’t figure out how to paint a picture on top of it. Finally, you just wing it, because you’re not crafty enough to figure out how to trace a picture onto your canvas. Due to your nervousness and already poor crafting skills, your picture turns out, well, not quite like you imagined it.
7. After the paint dries, you grab your paint pen and begin to freestyle the quote you found, but disaster awaits you yet again. The paint pen starts to practically drip paint out onto your beautiful canvas while you’re writing on it, and now you’re in your biggest situation yet.
8. Because you’re now too far done to go back, you decide to let your quote dry and paint over all of the spots where the paint pen dripped onto the canvas. You also begin kicking yourself for painting the background a color that involved you mixing various colors of paint to create, which means you have to replicate it almost exactly so it’s not noticeable when you paint over it.
9. Finally, you have a painting, and because it didn’t turn out like you expected it to, you decide to spice it up with some glitter, and hopefully hide some of the problem areas. Glitter, consequently, ends up everywhere and no matter how hard you try, it just won’t come out of your carpet.
10. At last, you’re done! Your canvas painting is dry and ready to be given to your lucky sister, and while you’re secretly hoping that she likes it, you’re pretty proud of yourself for how it turned out. Because of your hard work and determination, your sister now has a canvas that she can hang on the wall for years to come!
