A fad or an enthusiasm?
Earlier this year, I watched a few online videos about painting with acrylic paints and stupidly thought ‘That looks easy’.
It was but the work of moments to reach the next step in the inevitable process: spending money
I can’t really afford on paint, brushes and canvas, donning an old blue and white spotted smock-top that is three sizes too big for me, and trying my hand
at painting. Honestly, if I still had the red beret I bought when I was seventeen, I'd have worn that too.
I have a history of what my mum would refer to as ‘fads’, but which I prefer to think of as ‘experimental enthusiasms', aka ‘the learning process’. There was the craze for making homemade chocolates, the cake-baking phase, the soup-making whim, the jam-making vogue, the embroidery rage, the greetings-card-making obsession, the quilt-making frenzy…
However, to be fair, many of these things weren’t
just fads, they were all about learning a skill which I’ve continued to use, particularly
the food-based ones. I still make fantastic soup on a regular basis, for
example, and that's because I put in the legwork learning how to do it, trying
things out, until I mastered the art of soup-making and discovered what kind of
soup I particularly enjoy eating and how to make it brilliant. Anyone can do
this, but most people can’t be bothered – or just don’t like soup that much! Similarly with baking – I have always made
cakes and related goods, but I have got much better at it over the years,
particularly in the last few years when I’ve developed enough confidence to try
out my own ideas, and the only reason I don’t bake more often now is that I
have pre-diabetes and can’t eat the fruits of my labour. My baking is good
enough for the young admin assistant where I work to pay me to bake cakes now
and then for her and her boyfriend, and generally people seem to enjoy
my cakes these days. Several people have suggested that I could make money selling my cakes. So they must be ok. They certainly taste good to me. Again, there's no particular skill involved except that which arises naturally from enthusiasm, lots of practice, the right equipment and being a
gluttonous foodie.
On the other hand, some things clearly were fads. The jam-making, for example. It did last several years and I was beginning to see my skill level increasing, but in the end I decided it wasn’t worth the effort and the mess. Good-quality jam is readily available in supermarkets and, to be honest, neither of us eats it much. I like cherry jam, whereas P prefers orange marmalade, but the reality is that a jar of either of these will sit in our fridge for a year until I finally throw the mould-encrusted stuff away. Incidentally, we have very different tastes in food. Tastes I absolutely adore, such as aniseed and almond and coffee and cherries, are things he hates, and tastes I loathe (such as vanilla and tea) are his favourites. We can never share a dessert. We can't even agree on which fruit goes best with chocolate - he loves chocolate-orange (which I hate) and I love chocolate and cherry or raspberry. If compatibility was down to food preferences, we'd never be allowed to get married.
I used to make fruit curds, chutneys, pickles and herb jellies too, but it became a faff rather than a fad. I am, however, using the skills I’ve learned to make blueberry jam to put in miniature jars for the favour bags for guests at the wedding, alongside miniature packets of calendula and marigold seeds from my garden (thank you for that idea, Amanda) and miniature bottles of flavoured alcohol (I’ve made blackberry vodka and sloe gin for around a decade now every Christmas, so does that still count as a ‘fad’?). Foraging is another thing my mum refers to as a 'fad'. A few months after I left my teaching job in a school sixth form some years ago, I met up with some of my ex-A Level students and, when they asked what I'd been doing since I left, I told them I'd started foraging. They thought I meant that I was so hard-up without my teacher's salary that I was being forced to live off wild nuts and berries, like Frankenstein's creature in Mary Shelley's novel! They actually became quite enraged as they already blamed the headteacher at the school for forcing me to leave (which wasn't the case in reality). I think they imagined me, a wizened old woman in rags, staggering about the hederows, plucking rosehips and stealing ears of wheat from the farmer's fields, muttering curses against all headmasters under my breath as I struggled to extricate myself from bramble bushes and burnt my hands on giant hogweed...
I also have fads which come and go. About thirty years ago, I started making a hand-stitched quilt out of P’s old shirts and it’s still half-finished in the cupboard. It’ll probably end up being used as my shroud. Every few years, I get it out and do a bit more. I once read somewhere that Jane Austin used to quilt (a respectable past-time for a young lady) so she could drop the quilt over her current manuscript if visitors arrived (writing being considered rather unladylike). Visiting Chawton once, I saw a quilt made by Jane and her sister, Cassandra, and I remember being impressed by the fact it was hand-stitched and the stitches were so tiny and precise. Whenever I prise my half-sewn quilt from its drawer in the cupboard under the stairs, I think about this.
A friend once asked me why I didn’t just buy an electric sewing machine and sew the patches on that way, but she missed the point. I have a tendency towards OCD. If I decide it will be hand-stitched, it will be hand-stitched – and it will also be finished: the only question is when. Some of those patches make me think about the programmes on TV or the radio I was listening to, or the conversations I was having, or even the things I was thinking about, as I stitched – it’s better than a diary! There is something about sewing by hand that kind of stitches your memories into the fabric. It’s probably because it is slow enough to give your mind time to wander. Very soothing – until the point where it becomes very irritating, of course.
The Covid-lockdowns saw the quilt expand in
size quite substantially. In fact, I even made my mum a quilted cushion as a
Christmas present last year. It was entirely hand-stitched, and was actually a nice object in my view and in
colours that matched both my houseproud mother’s bedroom and her living-room (even
my sister liked it, and she hates everything I do or buy or think!),
Nevertheless, my mum clearly hates it. She’d never say so openly, but it's
obvious to the trained eye. I think the cushion has been thrown in the back of
a wardrobe, or even into the bin. I suspect she thinks it’s unhygienic because
the patches are made from fabric from old shirts – she's a hygiene-freak who
has a panic attack if people share a dip in a restaurant. She would never let
us drink from public water-fountains or use public toilets without first laying
sheets of toilet paper over the seats, when we were children, and she literally
redecorates her house every year just to make sure it is clean. It’s a wonder
she can still get into her rooms as the walls must be so thick with layers of
paint by now. She even gloss-paints the inside of her kitchen cabinets. I
hasten to add that the shirts were thoroughly laundered before I cut them up to
make patches, and they weren’t very old when they were abandoned by P (because
they were ‘too small’ or ‘the cat had ripped the front’ or ‘they were too
fashionable’ or some other lame excuse he came up with to buy a new shirt!).
In my early twenties, I had a craze for
embroidery, particularly cross-stitch, and I made some things which were
incredibly time-consuming. I have always eschewed the sorts of cross-stitch
where you are given a design and you just have to copy it. That feels like the
needlecraft version of painting-by-numbers to me. So everything I stitched had
to be a ‘Wilford original’. This culminated in my creating three designs which
were based on the notion of a sampler – a piece of embroidery that displayed
the different stitches and patterns of the embroiderer. I stuck to cross-stitch
but did abstract designs which entirely covered a rectangular piece of canvas.
I framed them and had them on my walls for years, simply because after all
those hours of work I’d put in I felt they deserved to be displayed, even if they
were rubbish! I used to hang them in the spare room where people hardly
ever went. During Covid, in the middle of my cushion-making fad, I took them
out of their frames and made them into tiny cushions and gave two of the three
away to friends as extra Christmas gifts. I personally think they are lovely
but I expect the friends were secretly disappointed! I mean, what can you
actually do with a cushion the size of a large pencil case? In fact, they would
have made good pencil-cases, now I come to think of it…
Anyway, this gives you the background to my
current ‘fad’, the acrylic painting. The reason I mention it is that I had a
stupid, painting-related, idea for the place-setting name-cards at the wedding,
but I’ll leave that until the next instalment…
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