memory jar

It's a busy week in Craftdom this week.

Not only am I under the pump with the Big Market Make but Craft Vic has all sorts of stuff happening. I committed myself to make a piece of work to go in an affiliated off-site Craft Cube exhibition at my friends Suzie and Gordon's shop. With the theme for this year's C3 being 'Childhood' Suzie asked us all to look back on whether there was anything as we grew up that inspired us to be the designers we are today. Did today's furniture designer make chairs out  of matchboxes? Did the ceramicist play with mud pies?

For me the answer is a square of cotton velvet and jars of buttons, my earliest memory, clear as a bell. Sitting at our big kitchen table (which is my kitchen table today) with a piece of cotton velvet marvelling at how if you stroked it one way it was smooth and the other rough, looking at the back, looking at the front, staring closely at the little bits that frayed off the edge. And jars of buttons, cut from worn out clothing and saved to put on new homemade clothes or to replace a lost one. In amongst the tiny shirt buttons, the coloured dress buttons and the giant buttons for coats there was three emerald green glass and gilt buttons, the survivors of the day when aged 2 I shook the tin that contained the glass button collection- my stomach churns to think what I destroyed in my innocence, bad 'Childe Pen'.