Hands are all you see in Connie Kafka’s “how-to” YouTube videos.
With more than 1,700 followers, the Luverne native, who also enjoys sharing her eye-catching paper-pieced crafts on her social media page titled “Prairie Paper Crafts,” is not one to take money for her talent.
Thus her social media is not a business site but a place where Kafka displays her one-of-a-kind creations and, at times, gives away a free completed craft to one lucky viewer.
“I’m like my father was,” she said. “He could give stuff away, and if he didn’t get credit for it, that’s all the better. I’m just kind of crazy that way.”
Kafka doesn’t consider herself an artist.
“I just about failed art in high school,” she said. “Art is not my thing — I can’t even draw a stick person.”
Sewing, learned from her mother, Wanda, is where Kafka developed her eye for piecing items together to form artwork.
“Picking out fabrics fascinated me, especially selecting the right prints on the fabric,” she said.
The ability to see the final product comes naturally to Kafka.
“It’s just a gift from God — I can look at something online and I can’t do it exactly, but it gives me something to create.”
Because she could no longer physically sew, Kafka turned to stamping cards about three decades ago as a creative pastime.
At one point she considered becoming a demonstrator for the Stampin’ Up company.
“I quit right away,” she said, thinking of her late father, LaVern, again.
“I guess, just like him, you don’t think your stuff is good enough to sell. For me, having to create on a deadline takes the creativity away.”
Her fears were realized again later when she turned to scrapbooking and considered selling items to scrapbookers.
The pressure to meet deadlines brought Kafka to a halt.
“I again just lost my creativity when I did that,” she said.
Without pressures of sale deadlines, Kafka began experimenting, finding she didn’t like stamping cards.
“There is really no creativity,” she said. “You use someone else’s images. You were limited on color. With paper piecing, you can make your own.”
She cuts the paper pieces from a Cricut machine she bought on a dare almost a decade ago.
A visiting pre-teen neighbor watched an infomercial about the new Cricut machine that cuts paper into various shapes. The pieces were then used to make the final paper craft. The pre-teen didn’t think the cutting machine would work as well as it was shown on TV.
Kafka proved her wrong, and she still uses a Cricut to create all her paper piecing.
The majority of her paper pieces are assembled as scrapbook pages. She also creates paper treat containers, gift packages, tags and other special projects for friends and family members.
To initially learn and to stay updated on her craft, Kafka became a frequent YouTube watcher.
“I think I should have a YouTube University degree,” she said.
Kafka stills fills plenty of trash cans that result from Kafka’s desire to create the right expressions and/or colors for her paper creations.
Her perfected pieces are then featured on her Prairie Paper Crafts Facebook site, as a sharing outlet she started several years ago.
Weeks after she began sharing her paper crafts online, she began making the how-to YouTube videos.
“When you share things on Facebook (she has 1,500 followers), people start wondering how you do things. That’s when I met a fellow creator and he helped me get started with YouTube and it took off from there.”
