Phoenixville Blogger Takes Reality TV Turn on 'Craft Wars'

One morning in April, Nikki McGonigal boarded a flight that had been arranged to carry her to the other side of the country. They told her she'd return in a week. “You can’t tell anyone where you are or what you’re doing,” they explained. “Not yet anyway.” Her cellphone was shut off; the tracking on her Facebook and Twitter accounts deactivated. During one stretch, she says, she didn’t see the sun for 36 hours. She missed her children. 

“It was very ‘Mission Impossible,’” she told a reporter later, when it was over. “They snuck us to California and snuck us back.”

But, yeah, other than that she said competing in a reality show was pretty fun.

The Phoenixville resident, and purveyor of popular crafting blog Nikki in Stitches, appeared on an episode of TLC’s Craft Wars that, after a spring shoot, aired last week. Though she fell shy of the $10,000 winning prize, McGonigal advanced to the second round of the reality competition that pits the nation’s top crafters against one another in a series of increasingly difficult challenges.

McGonigal, a pretty and petite third-generation crafter with a self-described Minnie Mouse-voice, said she found out about the show when she stumbled across a call for contestants on a blog. She jumped through a few hoops, and the next thing she knew she was on a plane.

“It was hard for me, because I have little kids and I had to get someone to watch them,” she said of the weeklong California shoot. “But my husband was there to stay home with them.”

So without telling even friends and family where she was headed—contestants were barred from talking about the show until June, and then weren’t allowed to reveal the airdate until early August—McGonigal set out west.

"It was like heaven for a crafter."

When she touched down on the Left Coast, the stealth persisted. Contestants weren’t supposed to fraternize until filming began, and so while the six crafters were staying in the same hotel, separate transportation was arranged for each and they didn’t meet one another for the first time until they arrived at the studio.

Once on set, and the surreality of the multiple cameras, the lights, the closet jam-packed with a treasure trove of supplies ("It was like heaven for a crafter," she gushed) and the general  “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto”-swell faded, the competitors were broken into three teams of two and the games began.

Competition one, which McGonigal and her teammate cleared, was the “pop craft” segment. It involved the fashioning of a Thanksgiving-themed wine rack from, among other odds and ends, a football, acorns, a turkey baster, silverware, and pie tins.

“I made it through the first round really smoothly,” she said. “But my luck pretty much stopped there.”

In round two—a five-hour war of attrition testing the contestants' ability to tailor a sassy Thanksgiving table-scape using just pipes, wrenches, shower curtains, toilet bowl rims, bath mats, curtains, plungers, and other plumbing paraphernalia (one thing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving: you probably won't be eating at a table made from a toilet)—she fell short.

“We had a lot of speed bumps in the master craft,” she admitted, “but we still put in a pretty good project.”

The 10! Show and what's next

Though McGonigal didn't take the grand prize (and there is no daily rate for just appearing on the show), she didn't come home empty handed. When the episode aired, it provided a substantial shot in the arm to her already booming crafting business.

“It’s been huge. Traffic to the site has been huge,” she said. “And it’s gotten so much more in the last week.”

In addition to the page view boost, McGonigal has also parlayed her 15 minutes into a monthly spot on the The 10! Show, where she’ll do craft demonstrations for its hosts through the holiday season. Her first episode ran on August 22 and she’s slated to appear again on October 2 for a Halloween-themed demo.

The opportunity “totally sprang from being on the Craft Wars,” she said. It's also opened her eyes to the places craft can take her.

“Right now, I have E-books. I dream of actual print books.”

“This is really probably just the beginning.”