anna bananna

While I get the background to this blog up and running, here’s a little info on what I’m about.

I love making things. I love the serenity that comes from taking a piece of paper, a scrap of fabric, or an ingredient and imagining what it could become. I love watching as it becomes something else and more than ever, I love being the one who is making the transformation.

I don’t always love what I end up with, but it invariably spurs me on to do something else. There are so many products available for crafters/wannabe artists (and the real deal) nowadays that the possibilities are infinite. Large warehouse stores offer everything a crafter could want and a million materials they didn’t know existed. While part of me is toe-tinglingly excited about all of this, another part shrinks: is this not just a warehouse full of a lot of stuff that is there only for us to, well, make a lot of stuff from? Furthermore, while food miles seem to get a lot of press, the fact that most of what is on sale in these warehouses comes from distant shores, is glossed over. Just because it has the word ‘hand’ in it, does not mean that our handmade ’stuff’ is environmentally friendly.

So, in a bid that the fruits of my labour do not add useless clutter to our world, my aim with this site is to make items that have if not an environmentally sound background, then at least socially useful (even if that is just putting money in the hands of a local shop keeper).

We’ll see how this goes. I am not claiming to be an eco-warrier, I just want to minimise the social and environmental impact of what I enjoy.