fairytales and making things

My sister likes to make things. She always has. She also loves fairytales, and the two often collide. I remember coming home one evening when she was very small to find that she had made a wig from a plastic hotel showercap and yards and yards of yellow yarn. "I'm Rapunzel," she told me.

When I was away from home, she'd send me cards with tiny paper dolls stuck to them, all of them dressed in bits of ribbon and scraps from our mom's sewing pile (my mom occasionally makes costumes, so her sewing scraps tend to be glittery, or shiny, or furry). They bulged through their envelopes, and when I opened them, they appeared in only slightly battered glory: princesses, geishas, characters from ballets, caricatures of people we knew.

I told her she could do something with them. What, I wasn't sure. But she was busy with boarding school (she went off to North Carolina to study dance), and then university.

Now she's making things again. She has pulled out her stacks of fairytale books, examining Arthur Rackham and Kinuko Y. Craft and Edmund Dulac for clues as to what magic might look like. You can find her creations on Etsy now, under the rather mouth twisting name "Glackenschpack."

The mermaid is very sparkly.
My favourites though are the Harlequin and Columbine.

Here is Shannon, making things. Please go take a look at her site. She still gets excited to see the number of times a picture gets clicked on.