Fussy Cutting

As a very young child I was introduced to fussy cutting by my Paternal Grandmother. In her youth she worked as a dressmaker, often being teased, primarily by her five brothers and 2 sisters because she wasn't very interested in boys! Her retort was that one day she would bring home the rag man. This rag man went around on his early model one ton flat tray truck to dressmaking establishments collecting the material off-cuts to make into flock for mattresses.

In hindsight, there must have been a little flirting between them because she did eventually bring him home, married him and gave birth to two children, a girl and then a boy. Sadly he died a few years later from tuberculosis. Thus began her widowed life of thriftiness using her dressmaking skills to recycle anything that came her way. People gave her anything that was too worn to wear.

Men's trousers were unpicked and the strong pieces of fabric were selected to make boy's shorts. Old petticoats were likewise processed to make girl's bloomers. One of her brothers was a fabric salesman who had albums of fabric samples all with pinking shear zig-zag edges. When the fabrics were discontinued, she took them out of the albums and made patchwork quilts. I am proud that both my paternal grandparents were recyclers before the current generation "invented" it!

By the time I was a child, she had an old age pension so was not as needy as her child raising days and indulged in craftier pursuits such as paper mache and cane weaving. People still gave her things, and in those times, gave her their old greeting cards. I was the youngest child so I had the job, using a pair of hardly sharp kindergarten scissors, of cutting the image off the card in a wide circle. It then moved along the large wooden table production line to my older sister who cut it a little closer to the image and so on until it finally reached Grandma who, with her (dangerous) sharp pointed scissors, finished off the fussy cut. Of course, we didn't call it fussy cutting in those days!

When I had two small children, I was divorced and like her had to work hard to provide for them but my world was industrialized. One job I had was putting vinyl on card tables. Very hot in summer and freezing cold in winter. Every night I would cover my pile of foam sheets with large plastic tarpaulins. Overnight the stray cats would make their way inside the factory to sleep and sometimes urinate on my plastic sheets so I never knew when I might get showered with cat urine first thing in the morning!

No wonder I decided to go to university for an education to get a proper job. I was thirty at the time and it was this change of life direction that eventually led me to discover my own creativity. After many years of academic study and writing I became a lecturer in English as a Second Language. I flourished! I discovered that most of the time, off-the-shelf written language often didn't have the grammatical structure that our curriculum required. This commenced many years of writing learning materials for my students.

I wrote about the real world. My town, my weekend outings, reports about where to shop, cost of goods comparisons. I used junk mail, bank deposit and withdrawal forms, newspaper articles and job advertisements. Technology crept in and I created quizzes, PowerPoint presentations, QR codes to listen to stories and much, much more. I felt like my creativity was alive and thriving but I also had a creeping feeling that I was on my way to retirement and nothing creative to do outside of work. I began a journey to discover a new creativity that eventually led to my beginning.

I had always been a total failure at sewing. I did make my daughter a gorgeous strawberry shortcake dress once upon a time but that was once upon a time! I was not too bad at knitting. Once I knitted myself a long sleeved, knee length mohair dress but it is too hot to wear in any building that is air-conditioned in winter. Based on that, I joined a meet-up knitting group. They were almost professionals and I didn't understand their vocabulary such as "pinning". Gee, I just pressed and sewed.

I tried decoupage for a while and loved it. My pride and joy were some kindy chairs for the grand daughter that I was expecting. I painted them antique white and decorated them with pictures of clowns, cakes and sweets. Then I sealed them and paid my instructor to coat the seat with resin. I wrapped them up in plastic ready for her first birthday. When I finally unwrapped them, the resin on the seats had gone yellow and looked terrible. I never gave them to her, but they are still at my place collecting dust and serve as a sad reminder of what might have been.

Then it happened! I went to a calligraphy class and over six weeks, learned to write in Foundational Hand. Thin, thick, black, red, green; I was on fire! I practiced for several hours every day. When I wrote on the whiteboard at work I imagined it coming out in Foundational Hand. I wrote new handwriting lessons for the students. We had some lessons using calligraphy felt pens to make thick and thin strokes. The problem was what to do with it? I was never going to be able to sell calligraphy so I started making cards.

Now there was a new problem. The calligraphy was too good for my cardmaking skills. Then I saw a Facebook advertisement for a card making workshop, made contact and waited for the date to arrive. Little did I know that Emma Lou Harris was of the famous Heartfelt Scrapbooking supplier from the USA so this was more than your average card making lesson. In particular I learned to make flowers, distress edges, use layering etcetera. Anyone who has used heartfelt kits would appreciate that the cards turn out with professional hand made appearance. I even surprised myself!

New lessons happened for my students. Learn to follow instructions! I wrote instructions on how to make twist and fold cards, shape paper flowers, blend distress oxides, make notebooks and re-purpose note books. I spoke instructions on coloring stamped images, score and make envelopes, choose the right glue to use and use a color wheel. I even put a basket of my handmade cards in the staff room and sold them for $4.00 each.

Over the years my workplace had become more and more bureaucratized with increasingly bizarre requirements from politicians, auditors, accountants and managers; none of whom were educators demanding that educators undertake more and more up-skilling of educator education while imposing impossible standards for accountability and profit returns. My day off every Friday became devoted to card making lessons and the weekends to practicing what I'd learnt. I moved from the kitchen table into the spare room.

I bought paper with flowers so I could fussy cut them and layer them into 3D flowers. I joined Pintrest and built an album called "Cards made by me". I bought storage drawers, a desk, some shelving units. I gave away all my academic text books to make more space. I became addicted to YouTube to learn new techniques. I even used YouTube videos in class for the students to follow instructions! Yes, I was addicted!

Then came the final straw at work. Yet another upgrade to the qualifications. I resisted putting my name down. People who had done it were saying how horrible it was. They were talking about hours and hours of project work that made no sense. I hesitated even more. The day before our turn, my manager said that he noticed my name was not on the list and if I didn't do the training, he wouldn't be able to give me work the following term. I just couldn't do it! The crunch had come!

I walked out of the office that day and applied for sick leave. That was when I discovered that the spare room, by now very firmly called the craft room, had the most wonderful winter sun streaming through the north facing windows and I quickly learned the healing vibe of fussy cutting in the warm winter sun and knew that my new addiction had led the way to a happy retirement full of creativity and happiness. I now have a large selection of those dangerous pointy scissors each with their own purpose and use! Love you Grandma!