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Shear Joy!

Cutting to the heart of creativity

By RJ PagePublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Snickerty-Snack!

I am a sewer. Nope, no -- that's not how you pronounce it. So-er. A person who sews. I'm also a baker. Oh, and I teach! That's my real job. I'm certain I've cut out at least eleventy million letters and images over the last few decades. I like to whack enormous, expensive expanses of paper into neat quadrilaterals, too. I garden. I spend far too much time wrapping gifts and creating cards and painting in my journal...enough!

I am a CREATIVE. There. I've said it. I spend nearly all my moments making beautiful things. My happiness is in direct correlation to the amount of time I spend creating.

I love the busy hum of a sewing room as I flit from the cutting table to the machine to the ironing board. I love the feel of rolling a sharp blade through crisp layers of colorful cotton as much as I enjoy the razor-like precision of scissors gliding through silky rayon. Sharp pins glint in the low winter light as I slip them through the weave. My snips dangle from a ribbon on my neck, endlessly removing threads and easing seam allowances to create a beautiful finish. The feel of the fabric as I guide it through the machine grounds me, and the heady lavender steam when I press seams transports me. I delight in all the fiddly bits at the end: buttons, and hems, and bindings, and little motifs embroidered on with love. My housework may be a never-ending battle, but in the sewing room I can finish my dreams!

Teaching! Ah, there's a lifetime of happy challenges and heartache. I spend endless unpaid hours dreaming up ways to encourage, entice, and reward our students. I assemble models of planets and cells and craft dioramas of important moments in history. I plaster the walls of my classroom with color and wisdom in hopes that a student who's attention is drifting will still learn something while aboard their dream ship. Elaborate reward systems and behavior charts created in the wee hours adorn my prized spaces. If I can reach a single mind--change a single life--I am rewarded a thousand-fold for my efforts.

During the warmer months my attention turns to my gardens. Fresh flowers are cut daily for my home, and their cheery faces brighten the cool dim rooms as I tidy through. My ambitious bushes and trees are kept in form with a quick nip of the pruners on foggy mornings. My veg garden provides many hours of timeless flow. Happiness will glow around the table months from now. I cut open bags of fertilizer and seed, trim the suckers from my tomatoes, and harvest delicate fruits with a single motion from my trusty garden scissors. The same sharp shears slice through twine and mesh and net to help guide and protect my young plants, too. What brings you joy on a bluebird day in July? For me, nothing compares to popping a warm golden cherry tomato into my mouth as I harvest the food I've tended for months into my basket. The seasons turn, and preservation requires enormous amounts of effort during the scorching dog days of summer. Each fruit, root, or stem must be chopped into uniform pieces and dried, frozen, or canned. That labor will be richly rewarded during chilly autumn days and January blizzards. The Dutch have a saying: "... if you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden.”

So what brings me happiness? Sewing. Gardening. Creating a new bulletin board. Baking bread. Wrapping a gift in brown paper and garnishing it with a sheer silver-speckled ribbon and tiny pine cones. Binding a new journal with thick buttery-smooth paper for my painting hours. In short, working with my heart and hands.

Want to know a secret? Creatives are obsessed with tools and supplies. I carefully curate my kits and cupboards for each hobby. I blather about my gear with other creatives and scrutinize an endless stream of YouTube videos searching for new ideas. I treasure my tools like a dragon on its hoard. Seriously. Most family members fear the danger of using mom's "good scissors" and suffering verbal incineration for their vandalism.

Let's peek inside the stash. Now, a soldier prizes his weapons, and a scholar collects books, but a creative? Creatives need blades. Tiny fingertip blades. Great big pruning blades. Rolling blades. Spring-loaded snippers and scalloped clippers. Slicing and scraping and swishing blades. Whether I pull a blade with my thumb to create the delicate spiral of a gift ribbon or surgically remove an oak branch I need blades! Creation requires cutting.

My life -- the creative life -- depends on well-crafted cutting tools. Tiny perfectly-aligned scissors maintain my nails. I chop herbs and cut pizza with my trusty kitchen scissors. I transform bolts of fabric into curtains, pillows, skirts, and quilts with a wickedly sharp pair of orange-handled shears. I cut sheets of wrapping and watercolor paper down to size, and then use a fingertip blade to scrape, score, and curl. Pieces for cards are sliced from paper stock and deckled. My garden needs constant pruning, as do my bangs. (Errm...different tool. I don't usually lop off my hair with pruning shears.) Can you imagine functioning as a creative without precision scissors? I can't!

And that realization brings me to my inevitable conclusion. Scissors, and their assorted siblings and cousins, are beautiful and coveted pieces of kit. I experience joy simply from owning them. But their true beauty is their function. The creative life -- a life filled with contentment and happiness -- depends on an exquisitely sharp set of blades.

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