DAY THIRTY FOUR

What inspired you to first start making things? Was the urge to create always with you, did you discover you had a talent for something early on, did you take up a craft as a hobby with an intention to learn something new when you were older, or was it a someone who set you on the path?

I guess with me it is a combination of the first and last of the options I mentioned, with quite a bit of the third and certainly not the second; I can only wish that I believed I had discovered a talent. 

 

As I've written in other posts I've always had a thing for recombining items, or putting an object to a use it wasn't intended for and that has fed through into a lifelong desire to make original things, especially to solve real-world problems. I'm talking about on a small and domestic scale here, not setting the world to rights or discovering a new technology.

 

I'm trying to think of examples of this from when I was a child but nothing readily springs to mind, it was just that I was always exploring what could be done with 'things': (it occurs to me now that this is what other people might refer to as playing!). And then later, and it continues to this day, I was inspired by my big sister, who had an insatiable desire to try out new arts and crafts. Not just try, but to master. 

She did not teach me directly, apart from some basic cookery skills, it was just that she never seemed to be without a pattern, or a piece of material, needles, or on the culinary side an icing bag for decorating a cake. In fact she came to be well known for her cake decorations and was able to set up a small business designing and making wedding cakes.

Her ambition to try so many differerent crafts didn't always go down too well. There was one year when these wool and cane diamond shaped things were all the fashion - I want to call them Mexican God's eyes but that may have been something else - and seeing as they could be made in an hour or two, respective members of the family received several as gifts. There is only so much wall space one can give up in order to be polite. 

 

And I'm not sure my nephew and niece necessarily appreciated all those lovingly home-made versions of High St fashions. Let alone having to wear home-made jeans. But there she was. Like many of the women in my wider family something of a human dynamo in the making of things. 

 

As I come to write about this I realise that the thing that was and is inspiring about her was not just her willingness to throw herself in to a new activity,  it is the vision of her curled up in her rocking chair, glasses perched on the end of her nose, peering intently at a piece of work with absolute concentration to see what she needed to do next, or often, what she needed to undo in order to improve on what she had already done. Half-measures just wouldn't do for her and she was ruthless when it came to starting over again. That sort of commitment and intensity is inspiring and something I continually hope to emulate.

 

Onwards...intensely.                

Picture credit: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons