Do Something Useful

I’ve spent a lot of time with my Grandfather throughout my life. He passed away last week at the age of 92, although he was as healthy and independent as a 60-year-old still driving cross-country by himself. After my Grandmother passed he would spend his summers living with my mom. A few summers ago I also moved back home with my mom to refigure out my life.

We were roommates. I would spend my time in the room next to him making and creating whatever oddities excited me while he would watch baseball on the “Boob Tube,” which were the best seats to watch the game. After the game he would shuffle his way to bed, but always stop to see what I was making. One night I was making a bunch of hand knit cupcake toys. He picked it up and was completely perplexed as to what it did. I believe he said something like, “What do you do with it? What is the point? It can’t keep you warm? Why don’t you make something useful?” He threw his hands up in the air and went to bed.

I go through fits of creative mania where I have to make something large, be it a quilt in a week or a hundred multiples of little things. It serves as therapy in way, to take that energy, put it to use and have something to show for it. The day he died, I decided I had to make 100 paper hearts with wild flower seeds embedded inside to keep his memory alive. Somehow it blended the worlds of a quirky oddity and something useful.