I wrote about creative influences of my life in Part 1; here I’ll talk about some touchpoints in my early adulthood. I worked with an international organization in my early 20s. During those years, I was involved with drama, creative movement and dance productions, and dance/mime/theatre classes. My favourite production had me travelling and performing with three different teams for months at a time, playing three different acrobatic and dance characters. I loved it (except when we had three performances in one day in various locations all over New York City in the summer – two a day was enough!!). I played a flamenco dancer, a life-sized doll, and an acrobatic doll.
In my later teens and early 20s, I had mostly set aside handwork. But around my mid-20s, some friends were making envelopes out of Victoria magazine pages (a magazine which I adored). They showed me how, and I went nuts ripping out magazine pages and then acquiring free wallpaper sample books from home improvement stores to use in this endeavor!! Oh, how I wish I had photos of them because they were so much fun to make.
Then I got married and moved permanently to Canada (I had been here temporarily, studying at a performing arts school). We had hardly any income, but I was hooked on hand-making again. Imagine my delight when I opened a small closet in the tiny attic bachelor apartment we lived in, and discovered that the last tenant had left behind a ton of art supplies!!!! The coloured pencils were my favourite find. I made many bookmarks with them. In fact, I still love using coloured pencils.
Soon after the art supplies discovery, my husband and I were browsing in a local thrift store. I spotted a 1960s turquoise Singer sewing machine, which was EXACTLY like the one I had learned to sew on!! And with taxes, it was “only” $6. Yet, that was a lot of money for us at that point. I saw a tag that said the foot pedal wasn’t working, but my husband looked it over and thought he could easily fix it. I REALLY wanted to buy the machine, but kept thinking about what bill the $6 could go to. Meanwhile, my husband was encouraging me to get it, because he knew how much I loved to sew and knew it was a fantastic bargain. We bought it, and that thing still serves me well, twenty-seven years later.
Now, considering that the price of fabrics had gone up over the years, I didn’t buy new fabric. Instead, something occurred to me. Welcome to my ongoing obsession, haha!
I have been creating non-stop ever since. 🙂
