This post is part of the etsybloggers blog carnival, where we are asked to tell the story of how we got into the world of our craft. I practice a lot of different techniques such as carpentry, woodburning and wireworking, so instead of telling the story of how I found each one, I thought I’d tell the story of how I became a maker in the first place.
I’ve never seen a goldmine, but standing on the top step of the mezzanine at the lab for the first time 3 years ago, I thought I had a pretty good idea what it might feel like to be in one. Three rows of grey shelves were divided to my right and the possibilities were endless.
I’ve always had a love affair with mezzanines and I think, ultimately, the presence of one in my youth was the reason I became a maker in spirit. That may require a bit of explaining, but the reasoning is quite simple. The mezzanine was the home of innumerable treasures, collected on a whim, kept for a chance of future usefulness and usually forgotten until my little hands would could rescue it from the anonymity of the grey shelving graveyard. It was my first craft store, with no cash register, and a stock of unique items I would never have thought to seek as a component in a creation if it wasn’t staring right at me on the shelf. I was inspired by the materials available and to this day I still create like that. I horde materials that are interesting or appealing against some chance I may have a project for them, instead of designing the project and then going out to search for the goods.
The Piccadilly Storm Tree – Salvaged Wire
The first Mezzanine was actually the space on top of the bathroom in my parent’s office/workroom as the owners of a Disc Jockey Company. Robert “D”, their associate and surrogate nanny to Tia and I, used to keep large boxes and a goldmine of other bits around the back room and up there to repair speaker casings and electrical components. I remember Robert D helping Tia and I cut open giant boxes and affixing nuts and bolts and hinges and handles to make suitcases and robot costumes out of the cardboard to show to Mom and Dad, who were appropriately impressed with every new creation. He had a library of hardware fittings in little square Tupperware containers and an endless store of patience for little girls with grubby finders mixing up all his #2 nuts with the #15 washers.
Scented Oil & Candle Holder – Found Cutlery
The next home for the company also held a mezzanine and though I had grown much older, a trip to the office always meant a trip to the mezzanine to stare at the collected wealth. I was forever coming down and asking Dad if he still needed these brass hinges or that broken record player. He was quite accustomed to me asking to take apart old equipment just to “see if there is anything I could use in there,” and, quite often, there was.
Recycled Hardrive Wall Clock – from a retired PC in the Mezzanine
And now it comes to my love affair with the most recent mezzanine, this one at my own place of work, at a small analytical lab here in Toronto. My retired colleague, Varouj, was a man after my own heart and I almost stopped breathing as he showed me the mezzanine on my first tour of the lab. Within two arms length I could already see two dot matrix computer printers, a broken antique centrifuge and a box of discarded 8×8 glass plates for thin-layer chromatography (which we no longer do) just crying out to be etched. Like the mezzanine at the office, this mezzanine was stuffed with broken or obsolete treasures.
The mezzanine is, of course, not the only driving force that helped me become the maker I am, but having a personal gold mine at my fingertips sure helped. Once the spark was ignited, my parents were fantastically supportive, cooing over each new creation, and their reaction when given a homemade gift was one of the reasons I was always learning new techniques, so I could present new items for them to fawn over. The disciplines I follow in art I have mainly taught myself, but the confidence to do so came from playing up in the mezzanine, making art from the magical treasures kept hidden up there for me until I was ready to find them.
