Sam Reece Blends Crafts with Comedy, Leaving Perfectionism Behind
Photo by Lizzie Darden Books Features Sam Reece
Sam Reece is a Los Angeles-based writer, comedian, actor, and recovering perfectionist. Reece, who initially began her comedy career at the Upright Citizens Brigade and with sketch comedy teams like Girls with Brown Hair and OSFUG, found in 2019 that she was burnt out from bringing her signature perfectionism to all aspects of her life.
With the stakes of her creative pursuits feeling too high, Reece looked for something low pressure. From there, with lots of multi-colored beads and a hot glue gun, the Shitty Craft Club was born. Since then, the Shitty Craft Club has taken on a number of iterations: a monthly hang out, a viral TikTok, and now, a coffee table book.
Shitty Craft Club: The Book, released last month, is an opportunity for readers to join Reece on this journey of abandoning perfectionism. The book blends heart and humor, with Reece recounting through personal essays why these crafts helped her, and how to make them yourself.
We chatted on Zoom about the journey from stage to phone screen, how to bring your whole self to your art, and as the comedy landscape changes, shifting your goals with it.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Paste Magazine: I’d love to hear about the process: When you started Shitty Craft Club, where you were at with your comedy career and why you felt like you needed that outlet.
Sam Reece: I started the craft club in 2019, which to me feels like last year [laughs]. So crazy. I was coming off the heels of a big breakup and also feeling hatred towards my nine to five job. Deep hatred. Someone’s gotta write the Men’s Warehouse captions and it had to be me. I was feeling super drained and also in addition to this nine to five, we were all going to shows, performing in shows, rehearsing in shows, from basically 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. every night for 10 years.
Throughout the workday, I was also auditioning for commercials and having existential crises about that every single time. You know, to basically do an SNL audition to be the Lactaid cow feels horrible. So that’s sort of where my mind was at and I was living by myself for the first time, and paying 60% of my salary to this apartment that didn’t have any windows in the living room.
I came across this designer named Rachel Burke, who makes amazing shit, like tinsel jackets. And she’s super creative, super cool, and she had posted these crazy sunglasses that she makes. She sells her stuff—she’s a professional, but I was like, “I wanna make those.” And I gathered the supplies for it and made them and I was like, “Wait, that was really fun. What if my friends who are also feeling sad and burnt out and crazy stressed wanted to do this too?” And I, sort of in that, like—I call it like “the virgo haze,” planning—I planned a full event in a blackout. I made a deck—a pitch deck—and sent it to New Women’s Space. We had a meeting, and then it was done. The first Shitty Craft Club was born.
Paste: Did you have a background in crafting at this point?
Reece: No, I think the extent of my craft experience was, I was always the girl who would do the bubble letters for the group at camp, and I was very, as we all were I think, intense about my handwriting and I used to draw a lot as a kid. I was, I think, pretty crafty as a kid, like at camp. I was the girl who could start the little lanyard.
Paste: I feel like you’ve always had a good eye though, you know what I mean?
Reece: Yeah, I do remember—this has unleashed a memory. I was very into this show Trading Spaces. Do you remember that? Ty Pennington, icon. Still going. I was obsessed with shows like that. And I don’t know where I found this forum, maybe it was like—if Pottery Barn Teen had an online forum—I was really in it giving people design advice. And for context, my bedroom at the time was hot pink. One of the walls had rainbow splatter and my bathroom was neon green. Which, for a middle schooler doing makeup, was probably like a good glow.
Paste: Why did you decide to bring Shitty Craft Club online?
Reece: Once the pandemic started, I didn’t do much online for a minute. I started with what I would now call an “In Craftersation.” It was Instagram Lives with other artists who I liked and I would chat with them and they would show me how to make what they do. So, I did that three or four times. I did a couple virtual craft clubs, but the energy it required to keep up a Zoom, I was like, I don’t think this is worth it. There was value to that space if that’s what you need; a bunch of people there, listening, hanging out. It’s a totally different thing. So I stopped for a minute and then I joined TikTok in the fall [of 2020].
Paste: How would you describe your voice versus the voice you have with Becky [Chicoine, of Girls with Brown Hair] or another one of your groups?
Reece: For me and Becky, we’re very focused on character comedy, musical comedy, and there’s always a wig. And for other group stuff, pretty similarly character-based, tiny, short, crazy sketches, which have definitely influenced, of course, what my voice is as a solo comedian, where I think I’m more focused on my own point of view, and real experiences that I have had. My middle school self is a huge, central focus of the content, and celebrating my inner child and really making comedy about failing up, at making stuff and trying new things.
Paste: I feel like there have been a lot of comedians who have spoken about needing to do something a little different or more tactile because the comedy landscape has changed so much and even the fact that this came out of a TikTok speaks to that change. Why do you think the need to create something has become so prevalent among comedians?
Reece: I think it comes back to why we do our art and what creativity actually is, and comedy is a lot of being inside your head, a lot of internal work and then you try that out onstage in front of a bunch of people. It’s not collaborative. You’re trying the same things over and over again to try to perfect them, and creating something tactile, it opens up a lot of new possibilities. It also expands the creativity you’re already working with, so trying anything new or when you’re feeling stuck or you’ve been doing the same thing for a while, like going on a trip or a walk or a museum, taking in new images and trying new things, adds life experience to your work that it needs.
Paste: What was the adjustment like from sketch writer and performer to TikTok personality, and what kind of adjustment has it been from performing for audiences to performing for strangers who are going to find you on the internet?
Reece: Creating stuff for TikTok is me talking to myself in a room for a couple of hours and then having fun editing the video; it’s also a craft in my mind. There are times when I’m like, I’m doing a lot of content and I’m like “Oh, I really miss performing,” and then there are times when I’m performing so much that I’m like, “I just kind of want to be alone at my studio working on things,” so there’s definitely a balance. I work really hard actually on trying to not think of those two lives as separate, and trying to think of myself as this multi-dimensional artist, instead of being like “I do comedy over here and crafts over here,” because I have merged them already.
Paste: How did the book deal come about?
Reece: At that point, a book was not something I had thought about. I was probably still focused on “How can I bring this to television?” Which is still on my mind. But my now book agent at Serendipity Literature reached out and was like, “I love your TikTok. Have you ever thought about writing a book? I work at this agency, we’d love to meet with you.” I was like, “Okay!” We spent the summer working on a book pitch, and it was me getting to make the deck of my dreams. We spent the whole summer on that and [then] it was a synchronicity of all synchronicities. The editor that I am now working with reached out organically before we sent out the book pitch, asking, “Have you thought about writing a book?” And I was like, “Funny you should ask. Here’s all of these materials.”
Paste: What was it like bringing someone else into your creative process with that?
Reece: It was good. It was definitely a lesson in standing for my own work and fighting for things I wanted, which was not new, but on my own it was new. It was the first time I was…diving into it alone, and I was working with a designer at the publisher, and she was great, but also isn’t inside my brain, so I had to be really clear about what I wanted, which in a fun way resulted in me doing a lot of mockups and design examples. It was a lot of editing and going through page by page. And that’s something Becky and I do with our scripts; we go line by line, in the action and the dialogue, and we make sure every word is exactly where we want it, so that skill that helped me say, “Ok, I want rhinestones splattered on this page,” “I want prompts here,” “I want this to look a certain way,” “I want the bookmark to be cute.”
Paste: How did you go about bringing your voice from the TikToks to the book, and balancing the instructions with keeping it funny and deciding the level of personal you want it to be? What was your process and what were those conversations like?
Reece: Initially I was like, “It’ll be a funny how-to book” and I’ll start with the crafts I want to use in it, which were mostly a reflection of the TikTok and crafts that represented overall what I was doing in a nice way. I started writing personal, funny essays and then to tie them together there was this thread I added that made it accidentally a self-help book. That wasn’t the intention, but based on why I started the club, and what crafts have done for me, it was inevitable that it would become a large thread through the book that this was a way to work through struggles. So it’s a nice new coping mechanism you can use.
Paste: Are there any other comedians or creators that inspired you?
Reece: Obviously Lizzie Darden [the book’s photographer] was one of them. Siobhan Gallagher. I love her colors and her characters. A lot of it is millennial, Y2K humor. I really love this creator, @ThatCurlyTop.
Paste: Has it been strange taking this thing you started for fun and now it’s part of your career? What has that shift been like?
Reece: I’m a professional at turning a passion into a career, so…it definitely started as something I wanted for me and my friends and this creative release. My vision of what my professional life was gonna be, it’s from 2011. That was what I was clinging to for a long time: actor, TV writer, TV show creator. And those are things I’m still interested in and want to do, but this has helped me expand what I’m capable of and let myself follow what feels fun and cool and interesting instead of “I’m only working towards this one job,” and that is exciting to me now.
Paste: And it speaks to how this started, where the landscape doesn’t look what it looked like 10 years ago, so how you make money and how you create and how you foster community looks really different, so I feel like it’s kind of holding onto something that doesn’t exist anymore necessarily or exists in such a different iteration than when Parks and Rec was on TV.
Reece: I think that’s been sort of my life’s path, like, “Oh, you have to create your own path. There’s only so many people that get to follow that big classic path that everyone thinks works.” It’s more satisfying to create a new one and bring everyone along for the ride with you.
Paste: Is there anything you hope readers take away from this book, or want readers to take away when they pick it up or do the crafts?
Reece: The point is to let yourself make something silly just for you, just for fun, and hopefully that practice leads you to obliterate the perfectionism that you cling to in every other part of your life. Because it’s definitely helped me in a lot of really big ways. And I want people to be able to have fun and feel joy.
Shitty Craft Club is on sale now.