Maggie Oman Shannon - Crafting Love: Sharing Our Hearts through the Work of Our Hands

crafting

love

crafting

love

sharing our hearts

through the work

of our hands

MAGGIE OMAN SHANNON

Copyright 2018 by Maggie Oman Shannon.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in the United States by Viva Editions, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, Thirty-Seventh Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

Printed in the United States.

Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink

Cover photograph: istock

Text design: Frank Wiedemann

Illustrations: Jill Turney

First Edition.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-63228-041-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63228-050-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Lovingly dedicated to those in the world, known and unknown to me,
who build connection and craft beauty through their creative acts of love

Table of Contents

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

VOLTAIRE

Love doesnt just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

In our life, there is a single color, as on an artists palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

MARC CHAGALL

Introduction

WHEN I WROTE THIS BOOK, I FOUND MYSELF THINKING ABOUT my mother, whose child I was; and my child, whose mother I am. I turned in this manuscript in May, after the first Mothers Day I celebrated without my mother, and as I wrote, I reflected on her for a number of reasons, including her relationship to crafting. When we think of someone who has crafted something for us as an expression of love, most often we probably think of our mothers and our children.

My mother was highly intelligent and held two masters degrees, but was not exactly what you would call crafty. Still, I sift back through the years and remember all the things she tried her hand at: the decoupaged metal index-card boxes she made for Christmas one year (one of which I still have, adorned with a picture of Benjamin Bunny); the tiny trousseau of Barbie clothes she made for my dollBarbie was born in 1957, just six months before meincluding a little green-wool coat festooned with emerald rick-rack (which I dont still have, and would give anything for); the parade of decorative pillows she made for meout of Kate Greenaway illustrated fabric and ribbonwhen I was in high school; needlepoint projects backed in velvet, often Asian designs, that were both kept and given away to friends. She gardened and she cooked, and she was even the teacher for the Girl Scouts in my troop who wanted to earn their sewing badge (which we all did, after sewing an indigo jumper with drawstring collar, the firstand lastthing I ever sewed). Thinking back through this history, I admire her efforts, especially since I sense that they were perhaps more dutiful activities than devotional ones; my mother was not one of us who passionately love creating. Her favorite way of losing herselfor finding herselfwas through reading books, and listening to classical music.

My daughter, on the other hand, has a wild creativity that both amuses me and inspires me. She makes origami stars, duct-tape wallets, display signs for her store (objects from her room she tries to sell back to her parents to raise a little cash). She knits scarves, designs original outfits out of unused fabric, constructs zip lines for her stuffed animals using her jump rope and an empty paper-towel tube bent into a triangle. For her, creating is fun and a natural extension of living. Anything is fair game as a material and as a subject. She is the person who gave me the most imaginative, and treasured, compliment Ive ever received: at the bottom of a piece of paper on which shed used crayons to color a yellow-orange sun, an aqua sky, and a pink, many-petaled bloom, she wrote: You are my flower.

Both my mother, and my child, have crafted lovehave made things and given them to me as an expression of their love for me. It is an exchange that is as old as time, the making of something for another, though in the last centurywith all the advances of modern manufacturingit appeared on its way out. Store-bought presents replaced handicrafts in many social circles, though that is a trend that is shifting yet again. In a fascinating, and evidently ground-breaking, study published in 2015 in the American Marketing Associations Journal of Marketing, titled The Handmade Effect: Whats Love Got to Do with It?, the authors found that handmade products are considered more desirable because they are perceived as being made with love, and thus literally infused with lovein other words: handmade products are seen as literally containing love.

Its an interesting yardstick to measure our art and crafts byand love plays an intriguing role on a number of different levels: the love the craftsperson has for the craft, the love of the materials the craftsperson uses, the love the craftsperson has for the recipient (if knownbut as youll read in the Love of Others section, crafters can feel a love for the person receiving their crafts even if that person is completely unknown to them). Its hard to think of art, or a craft, being successfully rendered if the creator does not feel a love for somethingactivity, elements, or audience.

Five years ago, when I wrote Crafting Calm: Projects and Practices for Creativity and Contemplation, I did not set out to write a trilogy, but that is what the book launched. The publication of Crafting Gratitude: Creating and Celebrating Our Blessings with Hands and Heart is just one year ago, and this book, Crafting Love, follows. In some ways, this progression mirrors the experience of crafting. As we begin working with our hands, we feel a sense of peace, of calm; we feel grateful that we have a craft form we can lose ourselves in and express ourselves through. And, above all, we feel the love that is both the beginning and the end of our crafting efforts: love of our materials, love of our process, and love of those who will enjoy our work, whether known or unknown to us. Though the craft projects Ive covered in these three books could be seen, respectively, as being more oriented to creating calm or expressing gratitude or demonstrating love, in fact every craft Ive ever written about could be said to be doing all three of those things.

In a format similar to the previous two books, I have organized this one into seven sections with five different crafts in each. And, as with the previous two books, the crafts Ive featured often dont have a lot of how to instruction. Theres an important reason for that. Step-by-step, technique-laden tomes abound; it is my assumption that if a particular art form appeals to you, you will search out other books or resources that will help you to hone your ability to practice that craft. My purpose here is, and has always been, to inspire and launch your explorationto give you a sampler plate of delicious ideas that can propel you into a deeper experience of whatever medium or meditation has inspired you. This is not meant to be a technical book that gives you detailed instruction; it is an inspirational idea book meant to get those wheels spinning! It is meant for all those who are creative in the way that spiritual teacher Osho described: To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.