We recently connected with Acacia Harris and have shared our conversation below.

Acacia, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I feel that everything happens for a reason and everything has its time. I feel like I would be a lot further ahead in my creative career if I would have started sooner. But, I also realize that there were so many valuable lessons that I have learned as a result from starting later. I would not have the same amount of wisdom and strength that I do now, if my creative career started sooner. I’m happy that I can finally be content with where I am in my journey. I embrace the fact that I had to travel a different path initially. It’s not over until it’s really over.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I want the world to know that my brand Crafting with Cass derives from my urban city culture. My brand is a reflection of me! My childhood nickname is Cass. Which is short for my full first name Acacia. I have always enjoyed creating since an early age. I would always put my all into grade school projects that involved me creating a visual presentation of something I made. In high school, I crocheted personalized scarves and sold handmade jewelry after college. Throughout my life, I would hide in my room and craft as an outlet. I would create art with all types of mediums with no formal training or advice. I would wear what I created or have art framed and hanging throughout my home. I didn’t realize until I got older that I was teaching myself positive ways to cope from things that were going on in my family and life in general.

My brand’s design and creative direction all come from the things I like or exposure from my urban community. I craft and create to show people that you can use what you have to make something beautiful. I like to show that everyone can have nice things, even if what you want is not what you’re able to afford at the time. My brand is authentically me. I create things that I actually would want to have and that fits my style. I work hard to make quality everything. My brand is “Crafting for the Streets” and showcasing affordable DIY craft projects that I hope people are excited to incorporate into their home decor, party decor, wardrobe, outdoor decor and everywhere else.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

There is a particular mission that is driving my creative journey. My goal with my creative journey is to break generational curses within my family. Throughout the years I noticed that a lot of my family members were creative and artistic. No one ever spoke about being artistic or creative in my family.

I remember my grandma entering art poster contests and taking over some of my art projects when I was a young child. I noticed other family members were creative as well. There was never a conversation about practicing your creativity and artistic skills when I was a child. Life’s obstacles and adversities halted everyone that I saw that was creative in my family.

It took years for me to realize that being creative came natural to me. I always had to find out how to make things work with what I had. Creating has got me through a lot of alone time as a child. It wasn’t until I got older, and started going through my own life changing adversities and obstacles, that I realized I always ended up back to crafting.

Hopefully, my generational curse breaking within my family, will spread to others and they can see the power in crafting and creating. Crafting allows you to constantly be resourceful. That is a valuable tool in life. My goal is to be an example and show what I’ve learned as a positive outlet to others.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience! Let’s talk about it! Lol. I don’t even know where to start on the subject of resilience. I have secretly had so many set backs and obstacles during my journey. I save sharing all of my obstacles from my community because that’s not what I created my platform for. I created my platform as an outlet to everyday life stress. As I have tried to not give up on my journey and grow my business I have had adversities in various areas of my life.

One of the obstacles that I faced was having my house broken into and a lot of my possessions stolen. One year I had taken the time to batch a lot of video content. I was so proud that I had a lot of content saved and ready to go. I was balancing content creation with working a full time job and everything was becoming overwhelming and exhausting. Well, my laptop was stolen in the robbery. Multiple external hard drives and a jump drive were all gone to never be seen again. All my work I spent so much time on was all gone. All of my footage, photos, clips and early work were all gone in a blink of an eye. I didn’t have anything back up in a cloud in the attempt to save money. It wasn’t even a newer version laptop. They didn’t even have the courtesy to leave the external drives. I was devastated to say the least.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.craftingwithcass.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craftingwithcass/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/craftingwithcass
• Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/craftinwithcass
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CraftingwithCass
• Other: https://www.amazon.com/shop/craftingwithcass

Image Credits
Crafting with Cass