Why I’m Here

One of my earliest memories is of a warm summer day spent sitting with my great-grandmother at a table outside her Florida home, her teaching me to make “beads” from the cartons storebought eggs used to come in. She helped me string the beads into a necklace, one I kept well into adulthood, and every time I look at it I’m reminded of her resourcefulness and ingenuity. My family had a very old fashioned aesthetic of making it, growing it, building it, or fixing it themselves, a tradition which continues to inspire me today.

Life has taken me down some interesting paths since that sunny afternoon. Now I have my own tiny home that my husband and I are slowly renovating, and the beginnings of an urban homestead that I hope will some day sustain us.

My first job was in grade school, designing and sewing dresses for my classmates on my mother’s clunky old Kenmore sewing machine. The desire to create has never left and since then I’ve had jobs as a photographer, a designer, a painter, an artist’s model, and a jeweler.

I’m still designing and sewing, but these days I make more of an effort to use materials that are sustainable and good for the earth. To me, the greenest object is the one that already exists, so I focus on reconstructing and reusing vintage and thrifted finds. I keep an Etsy shop for my creations and occasionally vend at local festivals. I also do custom work and alterations, and am starting a series of classes to teach people the skills Home Ec used to cover. I feel lucky to be able to live this way, to do what I love.

The world we live in can be so overwhelming sometimes, I hope that by blogging about some of the simpler things, I can encourage more people to slow down and get their hands dirty. I think a lot of people long for a greener, quieter, smaller world, and I hope to inspire them to get started on creating their own.