Beneath Strange Stars

I have loved creating art since I could pick up a pencil. Crafting came later, but it quickly became another passion. It filled the gap when I suffered a serious injury to my right hand and gave up drawing and painting. After nearly 20 years, I discovered that I had healed enough that I could go back to drawing. I spent years retraining and relearning the skills I lost while unable to create art. I am finally able to draw again like I once did, particularly as technology advanced to the point that I can draw digitally. The times my joints do lock up or my hand goes into spasm, I can correct the errors easily. It’s a joy to have it back. I am even starting to be able to work with actual physical media as well as digitally.

I have not stopped crafting even though I’ve gotten my artwork back. Most often I crochet, but I also do various paper crafts, beading, embroidery, and am currently teaching myself to tat.

I began with a cheap Instamatic camera and the kind of snapshots you’d expect from a seven year old: blurry, bad composition, and often with parts of the subject cut off, mostly pictures of family, friends, or pets. When it became clear that I was starting to move beyond that, thinking about how to compose a photo for best effect, my maternal grandmother let me try out her 35mm camera. She gave me the barest of bare-bones instruction on focusing, f-stops, and other basics in working the camera, provided me a few rolls of film, and then let me figure it out for myself from there. It was one of the very few bonding moments we had, and I’ll always be grateful that she let her preteen granddaughter mess around with her expensive camera. I’ve had a love of photography ever since.