Craft Experiences
Building Community through Craft Experiences
I find immense joy in creating community-based craft projects that bring people together around a shared experience. Sometimes, that looks like a themed pre-concert craft activity that supports young concert-goers in connecting to the story of a symphony kids concert. At other times, it can be a multigenerational community craft, where each participant creates a small piece that contributes to a larger, community-wide art installation.
Regardless of the scale, my approach always encourages participants at any level to tap into their own creativity and joy. Curious about how a craft experience could bring your community together? I’d love to talk.
“Becky’s work is creative, thoughtful, and unique, enhancing the overall concert experience in meaningful and memorable ways. Beyond her artistic talent, Becky is kind, positive, and genuinely fun to work with! She brings both professionalism and creativity to every project, and I highly value the impact she has made on our work together.”
— Vanessa Neri, Senior Manager of Learning Programs, Seattle Symphony
SEATTLE SYMPHONY
Pre-Concert Crafts for Children’s Concerts
For the last decade, I've collaborated with the Seattle Symphony to design pre-concert crafts that align with each concert's musical theme. This helps the concert-goers start to connect with the story of the concert even before the concert starts. It also expands upon the “symphony experience” for the little ones, making the whole event full of interactive activities that add to the joy of the music. One of my favorite things to do is have the craft turn into an item that the kids can physically interact with during the concert, helping them connect even more to the story, and giving young ones a neuro-inclusive way to fidget.
In a recent "Movie Magic" concert for kids aged 0-5, I designed a simple template for a movie director’s megaphone. Kids could easily decorate and assemble these templates into a 3D craft in the lobby before the concert. During the show, the megaphones connected the kids to the action on stage, with the host encouraging the audience to shout cues like “action” and “cut.”
I design the crafts, create any templates we use, and set up a materials list. These crafts usually run at a large scale, around 300-500 kids in one go, with a lot of amazing volunteers helping to prep and run the craft. The goal is to make the craft age-appropriate, but also to provide something that makes the symphony experience feel even more special.
NORTHWEST FAMILY LIFE
Four Seasons Tree Installation
Northwest Family Life is a Seattle-based non-profit focused on supporting victims of domestic violence. In 2024, I partnered with them to bring a community craft experience to their annual fundraiser. The goal was to create an experience that was both meaningful for the participants in the moment, and could also turn into a beautiful piece of art that could live in one of the organization’s locations.
I worked with the Executive Director to come up with a theme: using trees to represent how the four seasons play out in the Pacific Northwest. The imagery of trees is meaningful to the organization, and the staff thought that the imagery of the four seasons (moving through times of drought into seasons of flourishing) could be meaningful to survivors of domestic abuse. Participants at the fundraiser wrote messages of hope and blessing onto paper leaves, and then sprayed the leaves to create a watercolor effect in the colors of each season.
I assembled the trees and leaves onto a watercolor collage background resulting in a series of 4 trees that contained messages of encouragement. We installed it in the hallway of Penny’s Place, a therapeutic, transitional safe house, where survivors can pass by the messages of encouragement and experience the beauty of art in a time of their life that might feel lacking in those things
SEATTLE SYMPHONY
All of Us Belong // Simple Gifts Initiative
As part of Seattle Symphony’s Simple Gifts initiative, I designed a community art project blending Charles Ives’ New England Holidays Symphony with the stories of people in Seattle experiencing homelessness. Across multiple sessions, participants living in transitional housing explored Ives' music together and expressed their experiences using tracing paper and charcoal, while I captured their portraits.
After the sessions were over, I combined their portraits and drawings into videos, which were projected above the orchestra during a mainstage subscription performance of the Ives in January, 2017. The participants were invited to the concert, and got to see their stories and art portrayed in front of a large audience. Many expressed what a meaningful experience this was for them after the feeling of being invisible in the cycle of homelessness.
CROWN HILL CHURCH
Advent Wings
For Crown Hill Church’s 2023 advent theme, “Light in the Darkness,” I created a stained glass window craft that would transform with the sunlight that passes across the south facing windows in the church sanctuary during morning services. Throughout each week of advent everyone in the congregation — kids and adults alike — was invited to color a feather highlighting a brief phrase for the theme of the week (“God Surprises,” “God Hears,” “God Sees,” “God Provides”).
Each week these feathers, printed and colored on marker paper to enhance their transparency, were used to decorate the wing frames. By Christmas, the church had created four unique and luminous sets of wings that looked like stained glass.
Explore More Crafts
Check out my portfolio to see other individual and community craft projects I’ve created. I love figuring out ways to bring creative crafting into new situations and making those situations more meaningful through the craft experience.