You know how it is, being a kid. You make mud pies, and feed them to your brother and make ‘soup’ out of water and weeds. (Or paint/dye, only you don’t know that you need to actually cook the ingredients, and use a mordant to keep the dye from staining everything else on contact.) You do arts and crafts and mostly entertain yourself. You dig holes looking for dinosaur bones (and get yelled at because there’s no such thing).
Well, maybe you didn’t have experience with the last.
I was a weird little kid. (So was my sister, just in a different way.) I learned to like reading, and read lots of books. Mostly fantasy, but also science fiction, mysteries and non fiction books involving history and science. I liked imaginary animals and made up stories in my head that were more or less fan fiction related. I was a big fan of the Little House on the Prairie books. (As I became older, some of the attitudes that came through in the writing were…kinda gross actually!)
Any way! Sister was always a little better at learning some things than I was. She was quicker with answers to questions asked by our parents. (And boy do I have a story about that. But I’ll tell it later as I am uptalking my Sis.) She figured out how to do things and do them well, seemingly with only a few tries. I barely learned how to whip stitch holes in my jeans, she turned one of her cut offs into a cute little purse. I was unable to learn how to crochet, Sister taught herself to knit. (She will in turn claim that I was a great artist/good at drawing. This is inaccurate. I had huge problems with perspective, and I had even bigger problems with teachers, other kids and relatives making fun of my drawing, so I stopped, because I still wasn’t getting perspective right and being made fun of is annoying.)
And sometimes, she’d get a wild hair and get inspired to do some kind of craft project. She experimented with paper mâché. She made a ceiling net for her old stuffed toys. She made little boxes out of Popsicle sticks. Some of her crafts came out amazing, others were…a little less so. For example, toilet paper ghosties. They were ghosts. They were made out of toilet paper. They were maybe four or five inches long. Sister made about ten million of them, strung them together with thread, or maybe yarn. I don’t remember if it was even for Halloween decorations. She wanted to make ghosties, and string them around the house. So she made them, and made enough of them to completely surround the house.
If I recall correctly, the parents were not very pleased with the attempt at homemade outdoor Halloween decorations. Their points: waste of toilet paper, extremely gross, will be even more gross if it rains. (if I recall, they 1yelled at her about it.) I do not know what her counter point was, though I suppose it was. “Look, ghosts! I am making cute Halloween decorations, surely this is not an idea that will bite me in the butt later!”
One of Sister’s many (current) crafts is creating clay art objects/artisan objects. Her preferred method is “handbuilding,” and she’ll be teaching a class (the advert I saw said she was “leading” it, which I think is the same thing) in handbuilding at the studio she’s at. Which is very cool of her. I cannot go, because a) I do not have money for the trip or the class. b) she lives four reasonably large states away from me. c) I think she and her husband are still living the nomadic life, which involves a small though not tiny trailer they pull around with a huge truck. It would be a case where three was not company.
(Growing up, we had to share a room. It was not a fun time.)
The one thing I ever made out of clay was a duck. A poor knobbly duck I was not supposed to make. I don’t know why. The teacher’s only apparent restriction was ‘no cigarette trays or dishes,’ not, ‘no cigarettes, dishes or waterfowl. The Teacher didn’t think it would survive the kiln. It did, though again, it was a sad, misshapen thing. And I didn’t even get the colors right for “Mallard duck.” (That said, I really REALLY wish I could both take this class and afford it.
Maybe I could make a Mallard duck with fewer lumps, and the right coloring.
(1Yes I know, most of my childhood/past stories involving my family have “and then my parents started screaming about it” at some point in the story. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, maybe think about normalization of abuse and why you feel so uncomfortable before telling me any variation of “they meant well” or “you shouldn’t dwell on it.” It’s not “dwelling” it’s “this is my frame of reference,” genius.)
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