I think part of the appeal is that I feel like I’m getting away with something very bad.

In fact, the more appropriate word would be naughty. And then I wonder. Does anyone actually say naughty anymore, unless they’re advertising in the back section of the newspaper and there are lots of X’s involved?

But today, when I had that oh-so-naughty feeling, I remembered that the first time I felt that way was when I was creating an altered book. I had found a great hardcover kids book at the thrift store. As I was gluing some of the pages together to make the pages thicker & thereby easier to collage, I felt like I was being SO bad by deliberately wrecking a book.

When I was growing up, books, both in school and at home, were to be treated with the utmost respect; something to be treasured and cared for, and yet, here I was gluing and cutting and generally making a mess of the most holy of holies…and oh my, it felt great!

I don’t think you have to scratch too many Mennonites (or at least this one) too deeply to find a Rebel Rule Breaker. I revelled in all that destruction.

All in the name of art, of course.  

Which is why I think I’m having so much fun on my latest projects. I started with this idea of felting old sweaters to make fingerless gloves, but then I started looking at the rest of the sweater. So, today as I cut through the 100% felted cashmere sweater and then the 100% Merino Wool sweater (gasp!), I looked at the resulting truncated torso, stitched the two tubes together and voila, I had created a funky new sweater all while simultaneously having a glorious rush of doing something really wrong because there I was, cutting up “perfectly good” clothing. Oh the sin!

To be fair, it wasn’t quite perfectly good any more, not since I’d washed it all three times and cooked it up into felty pieces of cloth. But still, my mother’s voice was coming in on the Heavenly headset…loud and clear…”Colleen. How many times have I told you? You need to take care of your things!”

And I think this is why I love writing and editing.

While I was doing this sewing project, I was also working on a short travel piece. The deadline is coming up and so I pulled up a long piece I’d done on the topic, copied and pasted it into a new document and ruthlessly cut and chopped and moved text around, adding and deleting until I was down to my requisite 400 words. In between paragraphs, I went downstairs and scissored and sewed and moved bits of wool and buttons around.

And by the time I left the house for another trip to the Sally Ann for more sweaters, I had fashioned a new top, a pair of gloves were in the works, my four-hundred word story was waiting for a final reading and I had gone up and down the stairs about a million times, proving yet again that a gym and Stairmasters are unnecessary.

All in all? In my world. This was a red-letter groovy day. I think even my mom would have approved.