Sunday, April 19, 2009

Happiness at home

I have a special place in my home that is just for me. When we decided to build our home, we added a small nook area off the master bedroom. For a while it was a nursery, then it turned into a junk room, but a little over a year ago, I turned it into my own special area. I emptied out the space and bought a large sheet of pegboard (cut to my specifications by the nice people at the Depot). I also purchased some shelves, saved an old desk and chest of drawers from the junk pile and added some inexpensive storage pieces. What was once an unsightly stack of stuff has turned into a fantastic haven for my creativity. I can leave my jewelry designs spread all over the desk or the scrapbook pages half completed. I can leave the fabrics and patterns draped across the drawers until I'm ready to return to them. When my world is stressed by overly busy and hectic schedules, I know I can retreat to my haven and immerse myself in the creative process.

I love making things and my latest venture involves creating handmade items from vintage bottlecaps. My oldest daughter found them in her grandparent's warehouse and it seemed we were destined to do something interested with them. My husband considered the monetary value of the caps and we could have easily sold them in lots to others, but I wanted to consider what else could be done with them. Yeah, sure, I could use the extra money like anyone, but where is the fun in that? Anyway, we digress from the happiness story. We filled a large container with various unused bottlecaps and took a jewelry class. My daughter, who is definitely a creative force, had lists of ideas for the caps. Once we knew what we were going to do and how to put the pieces together, we started our company, Vintage Crown Creations. 'Vintage' because these caps are from the 1960s; and 'crown' because bottlecaps were once known as crowns (an uncrimped bottlecap kind of looks like a little crown from the side). We did several shows last fall and opened our online shop at http://vintagecrowns.etsy.com.

My daughter and I work on our creations in my little craft area. We have plenty of space to experiment with our designs and try out new ideas. I love that this has become one of my happy places especially since I share this retreat with my daughters (the youngest one holds the title of 'junior assistant sparkle painter'), and I hope that one day they'll both look back at our time in my 'happy place' and recall this place as one of their happy places, too.

2 comments:

  1. I love all of the jewelry! Y'all are so creative!
    Keep blogging and I'll keep reading! Thanks for helping me think of happy places and things in my life,
    Cin

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is SO LOVELY, I can't wait till my daughter wants to join in my crafting also, that's heaven. I'm going to buy some of your lovely caps, they are just adorable. watch out for me soon.

    ReplyDelete