Posted on June 18, 2013 at 10:13 am
I was having a wonderful chat a couple of weeks ago with some new friends. We were having dinner in the kind of place where the man in gaucho pants asks you if you want what he’s carrying. It’s kind of like a buffet, except it’s the food that wanders around.
We were talking about being people who make things. About our first crafty outputs when we were kids and how it set the stage for our adult lives as artists. I hadn’t ever really thought much of my early crafting before I learned to knit, but I realize how much construction paper and magazine collages were a kind of preamble to what I now do with yarn, and how important all that spontaneous mess making was to how I work out a short row problem.
inspiration, believe it or not.
When I was very young, I made worlds in my room out of cardboard box doll houses, furnishing them with beds covered in fabric scraps and upholstered clothespin couches. I once spilled a quart of red paint during one building session all over the middle of my shag rug and tried to hide the evidence by piling stuff on top of it. The paint dried before it was discovered and so it remained: an indellible testimony to my general clumsiness. The year I was 8 I spent a homesick session at the kind of summer camp where we took classes like weaving and batik. I brought home the unfinished top of a wooden stool I had begun to carve with lotus flowers and a hummingbird, intent that I would finish it someday when I could gather my own tools. Somethings never change.
My favorite place during my brief stay at a wonderful school in the fourth grade was the pottery studio where I learned about the transformative power of the kiln.
That’s a racoon, 4th grade iteration
I learned to sew and was given my first sewing machine before I was 10. I did macramé and made plant hangers with hemp cord and oversized glazed beads of my own making for my mother’s expanding spider plant flock. I was supplied with needlepoint canvases for sick days in bed, and no end of nails and rope for the treehouses that never made it past their first ambitious flush of effort out there in the woods.
My parent’s friends sat for portraits during cocktail parties and went home with souvenirs. I made whole families of hand puppets out of paper maché and rigged working theater curtains in a cardboard box that I moved half of the furniture in my room so I could conceal myself underneath to perform puppet shows without end for my poor patient mother.
And only after all of that did I learn how to knit.
And I was thinking about my 11 year old son, who is drawing and re-drawing imaginary Godzilla creatures and Ultraman characters so much that when I gave him a ream of paper last week, he was excited as if it were Christmas. He’s always been a consumer of paper: I have the grocery bags full of origami creatures to illustrate that point.
The miniature Godzilla “movie set” he abandoned for the current drawing jag sits collecting dust in his room, sprawled across every flat surface like a Lilliputian back lot at Universal Studios.
Like me, he’s a maker. He may not have a red paint stain on his rug (yet), but he does have the vapor trail of half finished projects of the constantly moving mind that I had. He makes a glorious mess, and I couldn’t be more proud. Perhaps he will let me teach him to do something with yarn someday. But until then, I’ll keep letting him follow his heart and inspiration, where ever they may lead.
So what kinds of things did you make when you were a kid?
5 comments
Much the same – my grandmother did tatting, but I never cottoned to that. Our town sponsored summer playgrounds promoting all kinds of crafts, mostly of the gimp and potholder loop variety. (Actually, I bought some bags of beautifully colored portholder loops at the last Fiber Revival and made myself some new potholders – that I won’t let anybody use.) Sleep-away camp had an expanded crafts program, and I also had a mother and cousins who tolerated all sorts of artsy-craftsy endeavors. I was the same sort of mother – and last weekend, my visiting grown-up kids said, “Mom, why are you keeping all this stuff!?” meaning all the cute little things they made that are in a special cupboard and which I enjoy looking at.
1. When I was a kid, Wheaties boxes had a series of vehicles to cut out, fold up, and put together (you had to add spaghetti axles for the wheels). I remember the Gypsy wagon and harness-racing sulky. I learned a lot from building them! That must have been in the early ’50s. I would never let my mother throw out a cereal box. And I remember very fondly a punch-out book that made a whole freight train.
2. potholders from looper looms, and little woolen squares with a weave-it loom
3. model airplanes, wooden ones just for models, before there were plastic ones, and balsa wood & tissue paper ones that might have flown but were too good to try to fly. In the days when candy bars were a nickel, you could get wonderful model airplane kits for 29 cents, but you had to cut the parts out with a single-edge razor blade. I must have been doing that by the time I was in 5th or 6th grade. The balsa wood gliders were good, too, Those I would fly, until they got stuck in a tree or on a roof.
4. Lots of construction paper things
5. I was into fly-tying (fishing flies) when I was a kid –maybe around 5th to 7th grade.
My parents used to stock a ream of manila paper in a drawer in the dining room. We would take out a stack 1/4 inch thick and scribble endlessly,
Still waving to you from exit 57 when I go past– Dean
I was playing with yarn and fabric since I was old enough to hold scissors. I made dresses with fringe with my mother’s scraps and crocheted blankets for my barbies. I built furniture with Legos for cardboard houses (like you). We had high school aged kids across the street, one a talented artist, who used to let me color with her markers and paints. I remember the day I got my first giant pack of crayons. I was obsessed with color even then.
One of my fondest memories is the Winnie the Pooh paper doll set that I made when I was about 6. I was obsessed with the books (the originals – this was before Disney took over).and loved paper dolls so I made my own. It was Winnie and Christopher Robin. Each had at least a dozen outfits. I still wonder where the box disappeared to.
A couple years later, my grandmother taught me how to sew. I made oodles of Barbie dresses for my sister’s dolls. Eventually I started on clothes for me when I got good enough that my mom would let me purchase fabric.
I tried tatting and crochet but didn’t enjoy either at that time. In jr. high, I discovered photography and darkroom printing. That’s been a part of my life ever since.
Knitting is a new addition and has become an obsession.
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