On Inspiration–Part 1

I’ve been thinking a lot about inspiration.  What inspires me?  Where do I find those sparks and flashes of ideas?  How do those little shards become tangible item?

One place is my family, which is full of creative people.

My paternal grandmother (for whom my daughter is named) was an amazing seamstress.  I have two of the dresses she made.  One of them she made to wear to my parents wedding and it became my wedding dress.  The other is a gorgeous dark navy taffeta and I love it.  She made needlepointed chair cushions as well as kneelers for her church and many other such projects, she made felt churchmice that wore choir robes (adorable), knit slippers for an old folks home at a time when she was well older than most of her recipients, made pretty tissue holders for handbags, and used to latch hook while listening to baseball games on the radio.

My Mom is the ultimate crafty housewife.  She painted, she used to knit,  she made these adorable little mice that slept in milk weed pods, made quilted pillows when we were kids, and is an amazing seamstress in her own right.  She used to make these cool corn husk dolls.  Some she made as scarecrows and put them on old wood shingles.  She also dyed some husks red and made kitchen witches.  Every year at Christmas we made different projects.  Wacky things like using broken windshield glass in test tubes as icicles.  She used old cashmere coats from Salvation Army and turned them into teddy bears. My grandmother (her mother in law) taught her how to decorate eggs and she makes gorgeous dioramas inside eggs as well as painting them and gluing ribbon and tiny pine cones and whatever else she finds on them. This woman can look at the most mundane thing and figure out how to use it in an arts and crafts project.  It’s astonishing.  However, I can tell you that my sister and I spent a lot of time picking up milk weed pods, pine cones, and whatever else she saw from the highway.  Embarrassing is not a strong enough word!  We HATED doing that.  But these things were always used in something (or stored because it “might” be useful someday).

My sister definitely inherited the crafty bug.  She doesn’t take it to the same place as my mom…it manifests in other ways.  She has a type-A driven personality that gets the project done.  She pours it into decorating her home and smaller-scale craft projects.  She is an amazing seamstress as well.  One look at the pink lame ruffled prom dress she made in 1987 is all the proof you need!  She is the go-to gal among her friends when they need a creative solution.

My Aunt used to make us incredible things for Christmas.  I posted previously about the hand-made doll that I still love and the quilted dress.  She also made us each a gorgeous appliqued quilt.  The top of the quilt is a girl who is asleep and the rest of the quilt is her blanket that has a night scene.  She made us a scare crow and a clown one year.  She needle pointed Christmas stockings for us and we still use them today.  I was the willing recipient of all her knitting patterns, needles, and tools, which also included my grandmother’s items as well.  (I posted on this previously too).  There are sketched out intarsia patterns of fraternity crests that she knitted into socks for my father’s friends.  An undertaking that makes my head hurt just thinking about it.  I still have the poncho she knitted for me in 7th grade and now have the pattern for it too (it came in the big box of knitting goodies~).

When we were in 4-H my mom was club leader as well as the arts and crafts leader.  She made sure we had all kinds of opportunities to try different types of crafts by seeking out local artists who could teach us.  We did stained glass (we both still have our stained glass mirrors).  We whittled (the little boot toothpick holder is at my mom’s house).  We did ceramics…casting into molds, painting and glazing the item.  I learned to knit which spawned this lifelong passion.  The list goes on and on and on.

Growing up watching these creative women spawned a deep appreciation for the creative process and the specialness of those things made by hand.  I continue to draw from these experiences as inspiration in many different aspects of my life.  I’m so very, very lucky to have them in my life and in my family.  I ardently hope that my daughter and any other kids that become part of our family enjoy creative expression as much as I do.