Exploring my Creative Childhood

My mind, this month has been filled with ideas that I want to use for the Sew Along with Lori  DeJarnatt. The theme this month is "Something from your Child hood".
I was lucky to live next door to a couple of girls  Sarena and Mallie. With them I could  imagine and create things from simple things. I remember seeing a dress on one of their dolls that was not bought from the store. It had uneven stitches but the girls made it by THEMSELVES. I wanted to learn how so very much I was about 5.. I was curious about scissors too. I even discovered I could cut my own hair.

  I even had a doll that I could make her hair grow. Crissy doll, she had huge hands and feet I remember holding her on my hip like a real baby.

I don't remember if I was allowed to use a needle. But I was very fascinated. I played with Barbies and made furniture and accessories from things the family would throw out.  So I added some Barbie Fabric. I drafted the Paper Pieced scissor block and primitively wrote cut.

My parents realized early that the toys I would play with the most were creative ones, not premade ones. I discovered after his death that My Father kept the crayons I had in Kindergarten. I remember him arguing with  the Teacher that he did not want to limit my creativity with just 8 colors. So my crayon box had 64.

As a child of the 70's I remember tie-die clothes and  psycadelic prints, peace and love. I had some of these prints in my stash and added it to the border.

I also remember collecting frogs after the rain. Where we lived the tiny frogs would come out of their hiding spots.I would carry a bucket to collect them to see how many I could get. My record was 20.

My Dad also shared his love of Ladybugs with me, so I added a piece of fabric with ladybugs.
To signify my love of fabric from an early age I decided to design the square in
a square block.Then I designed the scissor Paper pieced block and the needle and thread block.

My friend Lisa from Preschool taught me the Cat's cradle string game and we played it often. It was a great game that did not take up any room to carry a string. I found this as a drawing on Pinterest and then created the Embroidery.

The most fascinating thing that has happened is that after 40 years,  I have finally been able to reconnect with both sets of childhood friends. What a treasure they are and the Memories too.
Here is the completed "Memories" Border

Until next time,

Tanya