Third-year Carleton biology student Brenna Gagliardi is helping students cope with stress and anxiety amid the COVID-19 pandemic through her craft kit company Bead N’ Stitch.
Bead N’ Stitch provides craft kits — including materials such as cardstock, embroidery thread, a needle, and a design template — that customers can use to create decorative wall art or handmade cards. Each kit also comes with a guide on how the materials can be used to manage stress and anxiety.
Having struggled with mental illness for most of her life, Gagliardi said that crafting is one of the best tools that has helped manage her stress and mental illness. When Gagliardi created her company two years ago, she wanted to help others like her who also have a passion for crafting.
“There was just something within me that said ‘I want to start this business,’ and because crafting has been a big part of my life, that’s what I wanted to do,” she said.
“Because of isolation, there is a lot of anxiety and stress because it is not something we have encountered before,” she said. “People being at home, they’re kind of feeling a sense of unfulfillment — there’s a lot that they’re trying to wrap their head around with the pandemic.”
A recent survey of Canadians’ mental health amid the pandemic conducted by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) shows Canadians are battling mental health issues. 21.5 per cent of the 1,002 participants reported moderate to severe anxiety levels. 21.2 per cent of participants also reported feeling depressed.
When the pandemic hit Gagliardi was still in school, but having been turned away from jobs due to COVID-19, she decided to “go all in” on the business.
The first thing she introduced were digital downloads, where individuals can choose from PDF patterns for designs or colouring sheets, as a way to provide support for those experiencing COVID-19 difficulties.
“It was a way for people to instantly get a craft that they could do at home,” she said.
An online study published by the British Journal of Occupational Therapy that surveyed 3,500 knitters found repetitive activity was soothing and relieved stress for the majority of participants. Participants with anxiety disorders also reported knitting helped them cope with stressful situations.
Since crafting is also a form of self-expression, Gagliardi said it can be used as a way to express bottled up emotions.
“Creativity and crafting is actually kind of an essential part of being a human — one of the defining elements of our species was the ability of making tools,” she said. “Crafting nowadays is kind of like going back to those instinctual parts of us, where we are making something out of the figment of our imagination.”
Since the pandemic hit, Gagliardi reported an increase in sales and positive feedback. She has sold around 50 craft kits, and added that her business’ revenue increases each month.
Moving forward, Gagliardi said her goal is to raise awareness of the benefits that crafting can have — both physically and mentally.
“A lot of people were like, ‘I didn’t realise crafts could do that for people,’” she said.
She hopes crafting can be a tool for others like her to cope with mental illness, in addition to more traditional coping approaches, which she said are “all great tools to have in your tool kit.”
Featured image provided by Brenna Gagliardi.
