Around a year ago, “Gus” the bus took the giggling kids of Moss Street Children Center on field trips. Now he’s being filled with glitter, paints, chisels and mini pottery wheels. This is the first step of the bus’s transformation into a mobile craft studio. The craft center bus will travel to events around campus and possibly the broader Eugene community to share the joy of crafting.
“Every time I am out here working on the bus, people are walking by and going, ‘Oh yeah! There’s a craft center!’ And that’s a win right there,” Terrence Heldreth, the craft center’s assistant director of operations, said. “You can walk past the craft center, but you can’t walk past a big yellow bus.”
Heldreth, who has worked at the craft center for over 20 years and has a background in sculpture, sees crafting as an essential part of the college experience and simply being human.
“When you see people get out of their head and stop staring at their screens and start doing things with their hands, it changes the way your brain works. Your brain is hardwired to do things with your hands, whether you know it or not,” Heldreth said.
Heldreth is happy to see artsy people use the bus, but he is more excited to attract people who think they’re “not crafty.”
“It’s really fulfilling when you get one of those people. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m not crafty.’ And I can always say, ‘I guarantee you are, you just haven’t figured out how yet. You do want to make, you do want to create, you just don’t know where yet,” Heldreth said. “And seeing them find it is magical… It’s a co-curricular piece. It’s part of the education you need that’s not necessarily covered in the classroom.”
The bus’s only excursion so far has been a trip to Coburg Community Charter School, where students made fairy houses, but Gus is getting ready to go on more excursions soon.
This summer, the UO Craft Center plans to take the bus to the Museum of Natural and Cultural History’s bee festival, where participants will have the opportunity to embroider several types of Oregon bees and make honeycomb-pattern bookmarks out of copper. The center also wants to move the bus around campus in the fall so students can enjoy study breaks.
“We’ll have the mobile unit where people can come in and just enjoy doing a little craft, something very simple, let their mind relax, enjoy a moment of just de-compressing, that kind of thing,” Cece Anders, the craft center’s assistant program director, said.
But Heldreth and Anders’ vision for the bus expands beyond the boundaries of campus. Heldreth is brainstorming ways the bus might stop by the Eugene Saturday Market or the summer downtown Thursday Night Markets.
“It really would be nice to get out and just do some events with people from outside the university community, because then those people come in and they do things here, and then students are exposed to more people (at the craft center),” Heldreth said.
The bus might also explore UO’s satellite campuses in Portland and Charleston, and even other schools.
“We keep dreaming about taking it a little further afield and connecting with other partners,” Anders said. “Because it’s mobile, it’s a unique opportunity to connect with students who are further afield.”
Between conventional rows of grey bus seating, Heldreth has installed tables built from the wood of the craft center’s 1970s shelves. Heldreth describes the layout as a “train setup.”
“These are parts of the original craft center,” Heldreth said, tapping on the tables, “I really wanted to tie the old craft center to the new craft center.” Right now, the bus is classy but undecorated. Heldreth and Anders said the no-frills interior keeps the vehicle multi-use.
“We’re staying pretty bare bones with it now just because we want to make it a pretty multi-functional space, just being able to have it be usable and changeable at any minute to something else if we needed to,” Heldreth said.
Still, Heldreth said they might display prints of photographs and he also thinks hanging stained glass lighting above the tables would be neat, but isn’t sure it would be possible in the realm of physics.
Whether it’s building lighting or installing tools, Heldreth has a contagious can-do attitude. There is only one outlet in the bus, but Heldreth is thinking outside the box, pondering how tools can be converted to battery operation instead. Heldreth welcomes almost all the challenges that come with remodeling a bus, though the leaking roofs last month did get on his nerves.
Seeing the “magic” students create in the craft center’s DIY studio has inspired Heldreth to make the bus the best it can be.
“Several times in the last two or three months I’ve gone in there and seen someone making a big banner,” Heldreth said. “And they were happy birthday banners for roommates and friends, and they were just in there making something to make somebody else happy… and that is really neat.”
Heldreth believes using your hands, whether to carefully sculpt clay into a mug, design a button for a protest or watercolor a birthday card, should be part of every student’s experience.
“We need to make things. We need to affect the world around us, and craft is an amazing way to do that,” Heldreth said.
