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There are 4 main people responsible for my love (or addiction) to crafting. One of them was my step mother. Her name was Lorraine (she passed away about 3 years ago), and her presence in my life was a blessing.

Whenever I would visit she would have some sort of activity for me. One time it was shrinky dinks, another time she let me paint a t-shirt with pictures of cats. On a car trip we took once she showed me how to needlepoint, and I did plastic canvas letters spelling out my name. She always knew the perfect, age-appropriate toy or activity.

One birthday ( I don’t recall my age at the time), she gave me what was the best present EVER. It was a box for one of those plastic rolling carts, and it was filled with craft stuff. It had a bit of every little thing you could imagine. There were wooden beads painted with smiley faces, strips of fabric, pipe cleaners, and a myriad of other things. To anyone else, it might have looked like a box of junk, but to me it was a box of possibilities. It was stuff I could play with and mess with; create with and discover with.

Now, whenever I work on a project, my daughter asks me if she can have the scraps of yarn or fabric to keep. That bit of yarn is too small for me to use, and that thin scrap of fabric isn’t big enough for me to make anything practical. But to her mind, it’s a treasure that can become anything, and I look forward, in a couple of years, to giving her a crafting treasure box of her own.