Coming to terms with book murder.

I would like to say that no books were harmed in the making of this blog post, but that wouldn't be quite true. To defend myself, I can say that no bright young spry books were harmed. Let's just say an old book had a surgical procedure to make it young again.

I have always been drawn to printed words, even before I knew how to read them. One of my earliest memories is sitting in church, looking at the bulletin filled with hymns and psalms, verses and dense paragraphs. To me, the words were just blocks. I knew they held meaning, but I didn't know how to decipher it. My mother had given me a pencil and I drew lines between the maze of words. My goal was to start at the top of the paper end draw a line downward until I hit a word, then trace along the top of the word until I got to the space at the end, then drop down to the next line and repeat the process. If I got to the bottom of the paper before reaching the side of the page, then I won! It was very exciting. This was my usual Sunday morning activity and it kept me quiet week after week.

One day when I was either nearly or newly five, while my mother was reading a story to me, I told her that she was doing it wrong. "Mommy, I don't like the way you read, and I don't like how you always get the voices wrong."

"Well," she told me, "if you don't like my reading, then maybe you should read it yourself."

I wanted to, but I didn't know how. So I asked her to show me. She explained, "You look at the word and you sound out the letters, like this. The 'M' says mmm, the "O' says ah and then another 'M'. M-m-m-o-m-m." I clearly remember the epiphany I had at that point. It was all so easy! Why hadn't anyone told me that before? I could have stopped listening to my mom's annoying character voices long ago. Here I had thought that reading was about memorizing some difficult magic code, but it wasn't. It was just putting the letters together the way they sounded. (I am fully aware that for a lot of kiddos, reading does not come this easy. But for me, one day I couldn't read and then suddenly I could. I remember the whole print world coming into focus, my reading light-switch flipped on in a single conversation.) 

The next week in church, I looked at the bulletin and sounded out words. There was a list with a tidy stack of 'the's making their way down the left side of the paper. There were short words that I could sound out and long ones that I couldn't. I used my pencil to divide the long words into chunks and then those words came clear too.

Maybe it is the early association with reading and church. Maybe it is just the intense way I have always loved books. Or the stories I remember reading about the Gutenberg Press. But for whatever reason, I have always balked at the thought of altered book art. My children, their friends, and even the kids at school know me for saying, "Books are our friends. We treat them with respect." Artist trading cards made from loose pages, and small gifts wrapped in print seem at once sacred and sacrilegious.

But then a couple of weeks ago, a large Atlas appeared in the "Getting Rid Of It Pile". (We have a designated spot for the kids to put things that they no longer want. I go through it every few weeks and pass things on to friends who can use the items, or give them to Goodwill.) Unfortunately, the book was so heavy that the binding had cracked and failed with use. There was no one I could imagine that would use the book, and even Goodwill was likely to toss it. For all intents and purposes, the poor book was dead. Then I thought of all the cool homemade envelopes I've seen.

I took an envelope out of my stationery box and carefully pulled it apart at the seams. Then I used the open envelope as a template to trace onto a page torn from the map book. I cut along the lines, folded in the same places as on the original envelope, and glued the paper together. Lovely! It made me happy to see the dead book coming back to life in a new form.

I still love books, (of course!) but I'm starting to see that they can be altered and still be respected. Now I am on a roll, scooping up the languishing books that have been shedding pages around the house.We have a Calvin and Hobbes book that was losing leaves left and right, so I cut out one relevant strip and glued it to the front of a blank card. An old Prima Guide for Phantom Hourglass has been falling apart, so I used some pages to cover a box I was sending out to a Zelda fan. I've had to keep reminding myself that these were not made on a Gutenberg Press. The books I am using are not one in a million.  My son joined me in the envelope process and produced one cute, somewhat wonky envelope. That envelope he made? The smile he gave me? Those were one in a million.

Upcycling--trendy word or old school philosophy?

Upcycled bracelet

The upcycling trend is intriguing. I love the idea of taking something old and discarded, then turning it into something new--something that might be even nicer than the old thing was when it was new. What a great concept. The arts and crafts that are produced with this philosophy are sometimes breathtaking. But we are fooling ourselves if we think upcycling is new. It is a new word (a great word!) for an old idea.

My grandmother was born in the United States as the oldest daughter of Hungarian immigrants. She lived through the depression and helped her parents support the family by working as a courier for a dental supply company. When I was growing up and went to visit her, she would make us what she called "American Chop Suey". She could feed twenty people for the price of two pounds of pasta, a can of tomato sauce and a pound of beef.

We loved to hear Nagymama tell us stories of her life during the depression. For her entire life, she lived frugally and saved everything. Nowadays we watch shows about hoarders, and that is the image we have of someone who saves everything. But that was not Nagymama.

She had a box of rubber bands, black with ink from the newspapers they arrived with, but the box was tidy and stored in its proper spot. She had stacks of sour cream containers, cleaned and neatly arranged on top of the refrigerator. She used those sour cream containers to store food. She cut them up and used them in projects around the house, and she even made crafts out of them.  She reduced, reused and recycled long before it became a catchphrase.

Nagymama was not the only one who lived this way. Her whole generation was like this. I'm sure that people who are in their nineties today are still like that. It reminds me of a book called Joseph had a Little Overcoat. My son owned this gorgeous picture book with a wonderful story about  a man whose overcoat wore out, so he made a jacket. And when the jacket wore out, he made a vest. The vest turned into a scarf, then a hankie and so on until all that remained of the original overcoat was a single button. It is an illustration of a way of life most of us hardly remember.

This week I honored thrifty grandmothers and joined trendy upcyclers by making this gorgeous and comfy wool bracelet. Here's what I did. I visited the local thrift store, where I found an old wool sweater for $.99. I brought the sweater home and washed it in hot water and soap. (In order not to waste, I put it in with jeans. The copious amounts of lint that the sweater shed in the wash came right off the jeans when they went into the drier.) After several loads, the sweater had felted. Then I cut a long strip from the sweater, tapering the strip from about 2.5" at one side to about 1.5" on the other side. I washed the strip a final time. Now I had the form for the bracelet.

I raided my oldest daughter's craft stash for some wool roving scraps and Czech glass beads left over from her projects. I took the scraps of wool roving and rolled 'snakes' with them, then needle felted the snakes onto the base in random spirals. I knew I wanted the bracelet to be 7.5", so I marked that distance and hammered in a snap closure on each end. My youngest daughter had an old turquoise shirt that she had outgrown, and which was really too worn out to pass on to anyone else. I cut the t-shirt into strips and rolled the strips into roses, then sewed the roses onto the bracelet. I hid the snaps under the roses. Finally, I used beads to bring out some more detail. The final result? An awesome, upcylcled bracelet that cost me about one dollar to make.

I hope Joseph and Nagymama would be proud. I think they would.



Who, me?

Tweed Owl Purse

Whenever I see that Anne Frank quotation, you know, the one that says,  "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart," I wonder at the mind that can be exposed to the worst in humankind and still see only the best.

We decide to believe, or doubt, every time we talk to someone. I tend to believe in everyone. Someone cuts in line, and looks to be in a hurry. I cut them some slack. Someone tells me that they are sick, or lost their job, or have a sick kid or a bad marriage so they can't do something that was promised. I always believe them. Someone is driving erratically. I say, "They must be taking their wife to the hospital to deliver a baby." My husband says, "There is no hospital around here."

In order to participate in swapping, I think you need to have some version of my Pollyanna world view. If you assume the worst, you won't want to trade with others for fear of receiving worse than what you got. But I have been trading books online for about two years and recently started trading a few crafts. I enjoy sending things to people. I like to imagine them opening the package and being surprised with the condition of the book or the quality of the craft. When I saw this owl purse on Craftster, I knew that it would be perfect for my partner in a crafting swap I had joined. My daughter and I stopped at a thrift store to pick up a wool jacket, then I washed it with lots of soap, in HOT water. I made a pattern for myself based on the original pictures, then I cut out the pieces and got to work sewing it together. I used a super stiff interfacing and was pleased with the results. But because the purse was so stiff, after the turning process I found that the lining had stretched, leaving extra material to deal with during the final top stitch. Once the project was completed, there was some bunching along the inside edge of the lining, so I included a little apology with the package.

When my partner received the purse, she sent me a generous response and said that she hadn't even seen the flaws. She thought that the bunching was on purpose. A sort of pleat, I suppose.

I choose to believe in people. It is a conscious choice; I am not stupid enough to believe that every crazy driver is on their way to become a new parent. But I always give people the benefit of the doubt. In my life, this kind of way of looking at life has led me to make new friends. It has helped me to stay optimistic during hard times. But it has also led me to trust people who perhaps do not deserve my trust. It has led me to forgive and forget things that would be best left remembered. And it has landed me in a tough situation or two. But here I am, nearly forty, fighting the prospect of becoming jaded. Seeking light is a worldview worth striving for; I want to be the kind of person who looks at bunched up top stitching and sees pleats instead of flaws.