In the Beginning...

I have to tell you how great my childhood was.  We were the last house on Nanton Avenue.  I had a mother who let me experiment with all things creative.  She is an artist, and always had a multitude of craftiness all around.  I broke the old Kenmore sewing machine more than once.  I remember leaving mixed paper mache under my bed until it smelled rotten.  Do you remember the Childcraft Encyclopedia series?  Am I aging myself?  Well, my sweet mom actually would encourage me to do as many projects from book #11 {Make and Do} as I could!  Now that I am a mom, cleaning up the messes, I have to work very hard at being comfortable letting my daughter use markers, let alone mix plaster dipped with various items from the junk drawer!  What a lucky girl to have such an amazing mom!  And, I can almost guarantee that most of those projects are still in her basement!

Further down Nanton Avenue was one of my favorite grown-ups!  Diane was the creative guru I longed to be!  She taught me how to make stamps out of erasers and exacto knives, how to transfer images with irons, how to use a scroll saw, and how to make a basement a Crafting Mecca! She was fearless in her desire to try new things.  I wonder if the denim cow sculptures are still with her.

The things learned on Nanton Avenue have stuck with me for years and, in the end, I may not be very talented, but I love to try!  I am hoping this blog will help inspire me to step up my creativity.  One of my favorite thoughts comes from Uchtdorf...

 "The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before.

Everyone can create. You don’t need money, position, or influence in order to create something of substance or beauty.

Creation brings deep satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take unorganized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty—and I am not talking about the process of cleaning the rooms of your teenage children."

So, here is to upping up the creativity around here! This is going to be fun!