I fell completely in love with the art of wood working and combining it with my crafty background. With each new project my skills and confidence grew. Friends and family planted a seed of thought that I should start selling the things I was making, yet I was not quite convinced of my stuff being worthy enough to ask someone to pay for them. Once the seed was planted however, the idea slowly took root and started to grow. It teased me and lingered every time I finished something. The lure of having my own business just kept pushing me to work harder and learn more. When I worked on something it was always in the dirty, neglected, and abused space that was supposed to be the garage. We never used the garage for our cars and so over the years it became hoarded with things we wanted to ignore. Out of sight is out of mind, at least for a little while. Eventually, all things ignored demand attention. My practice projects grew bigger as did my need for a workspace. One particularly cold day when I was hunkered into the only clear corner of the garage, trying to stain some wood with trembling hands because the bitter winter wind easily cut through crevices of the unsealed garage door the answer to my frustrations finally came to me. It was time to tackle the garage and make it a useful space again. It was destined to be my dream Workshop!
When I told my hubby my idea, he said “That’s going to be quite a challenge!” Well, as the saying goes, CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! I started with the obvious and just cleaned it out. The excitement started to intensify as possibilities streamed through my imagination and pushed my hands to rip out old rotting shelves and scrub the years of neglect away with a vigor and strength, I never would have believed I had. After the cleaning was done, I was left with blank stale room and an overload of ideas.
There was one choice that was an absolute. In the movie “Steel Magnolias” one of the main characters exclaims “PINK in my signature color!” Well, no offense to pink, but PURPLE is mine. So purple walls were a must. The perfect shade ended up being a mixture of lavender purple, grey, and a hint of blue undertones. I wanted my workshop to be filled with images that I could draw inspiration from. Growing up, I was obsessed with reading and imagined myself as the characters in the thousands of pages of the hundreds of books that filled my time. One story I was particularly drawn to was Alice In Wonderland. Whenever I read that story, I am still easily whisked away from the harsh reality of daily life and transported into the imaginative world of Alice. Walking beside her during her adventures and feeling the chaos of this mystical place called Wonderland. Alice’s world and my own often mirrored each other. As soon as I fell into a comfortable place, things changed quickly, and I was forced to adapt. Nothing made any sense to me as I was thrust into foster home after foster home and the array of characters that would make their way into my world. Now, I am thankful for those experiences as it makes me a colorful, strong, and capable woman but at the time, I was a child who bonded with Alice over the nonsense of it all. I identified so much with the story that I even had a dear friend nickname me “The queen of hearts” though I don’t know if that was a compliment or if he was insinuating that I was a bit crazy! In the end, I made my workshop into my own version of a wonderland.
I love my workshop. It’s everything I could have wished for. I know as I work more, I will learn what things need to be changed but for now, my little wonderland is perfect for me. It’s the place where I can totally be me surrounded by the characters and people I loved for years. Alice walking through the flowers, the mad hatter sipping tea and going over the gossip for the day, the Cheshire cat being coy, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum arguing in the corner, and Lewis, my own white rabbit encouraging me to go down the rabbit hole and embrace not only the impossible but my own CARRI-ousity!