It’s raining here. At the moment, I am in most comfy clothes and without a bra. Thank God no one is coming today. Mind you, I am half expecting a National Geographic photographer to be on my doorstep asking for pictures. I never have to worry about wrinkles on my face. All I have to do is take my bra off and as everything slides south, wrinkles gone! Ah, nature so kind. I have been playing on my husband’s tin whistle, while I followed my daughter down the hall. She has a little drum she was playing and my husband was strumming a cardboard guitar and singing the beatles song “hey, you’ve got to hide your love away”, while we marched around the house. That’s saturday morning here, and no bra. And his singing was awful. But it got me thinking about stuff, don’t ask me why. So I thought I would tell you all why Megan and I decided to go into biz, and how two magazines changed our creative lives. This may be done over a couple of posts, like I said, it’s raining and I have a three year old who is potty training at the moment. To be honest, I have been pfaffing about on the net all morning. Thanks Ravelry. My husband has been amazing, so here I am.
Okay, picture two girls who have been artistic all their lives. That’s me and my sister. Our beautiful Nana, who we both miss, taught us how to sew and knit. My earliest memories of time spent with her is of me sitting on the grey swirly carpet in her little apartment that had a view of the ocean. Nana was in her chair, she was doing her cross word while I sat on the floor sewing clothes for my dolls. She taught us both how to knit with endless patience. Same with crochet, and embroidery. She listened to us, laughed at our jokes, listened to us and made us feel like we were the most important people in the world. She started it.
Megan started painting early, and by early I mean early. She was astounding adult artists when she was a kid, and going to art classes with grown ups. She was and is, that good. Me? I just spent years tooling around with drawing, I doodle, that’s why I’m a textile designer. But we both knitted, sewed and made stuff, all the time. Megan went and learnt classical painting techniques and her skills jumped a step up, if that was possible. She went from being really good to uber good. I went to design school. Years pass, and here we are, at home with little kids. After I came back form China with our pretty little Empress, I found myself trawling through a local newsagent. I saw a magazine in the craft section that really caught my eye, but the baby was really cranky so I went home. The next week I was back there, and the magazine was there but I didn’t feel I could justify the $15.00 price tag. I went home. The next week I was back there, and the copy was still there and I thought “aw … bugger it,” I picked it up and bought it. When golden empress was asleep, I read the magazine from cover to cover, and I was on the phone to megan babbling like an idiot. She went out and bought the magazine and then she was on the phone babbling back. Here is the trouble maker:
We both went nuts, really nuts. Our stashes at home tripled in size. This magazine was all about how we saw crafting and art, it was exciting, but it was missing something. Cloth Paper Scissors is a sterling magazine, and we both have all the issues now. It fed the papery/sew-y sides of us but there was a gap. Still we decided after hours on the phone that maybe we should use what felt like our hundreds of years of experience, and start a business. Its very easy to say those words, “Lets start a business” but harder to put them into pratice. But we bought stuff, heaps of stuff, and got our collage sheets sorted. we have our own paper collage sheets. We registered our business names, checked out the taxation bits and bobs and set down a bunch of goals we wanted to achieve and then …. nothing.
For a whole year nothing. One day, I got a call from Megan, she was babling like a fool. She was talking about a magazine she had bought and she warned me, it was going to set all sorts of things going. She said this was the missing bit. So off I went to the newsagent and bought. Here is the issue I bought home:
I read it from cover to cover and my head started to spin. She was right, this was for a better term, the missing link. More tomorrow…
Ashford Joy= deposit pending
Listening to : Duke Ellington
