Making is a personal language shaped by childhood: a father who tinkered in his woodshop, a mother who read constantly. Speaker A built a custom keyboard tray for their tiny house instead of buying one, turning an everyday problem into a design project that carries their own story.
That's a very long winded way, I guess, to say that making is so much a part of who I am. It's. It's like a way of being in the world. And at times it feels like a different language. And I forgot the second part of your question.
So remind me, oh, why is this important to you? Or what? Was there maybe a story of how you kind of got into the embodying making?
Yeah, well, I think it's important to me. It's so empowering to make something. I mean, it can be the littlest thing. Like, we just moved into a tiny house and I'm not working as an educator for the first time in many, many years, public school educator. And so trying to save money. And I think of that as like, okay, that's a design challenge. So I need a keyboard tray, but I don't want to buy a keyboard tray. So. Well, I know how to use woodworking tools and I've seen keyboard trays. So let me go look and see if I can figure out how it's made. And to do that, to go through that process and yeah, it'd be so much faster just, you know, go on Amazon and order a keyboard tray. But there's something meaningful about, like, the tray right in front of me is made from a scrap of wood. And I built this and I put it here and it's just where I want it. And it has a story now. And so I think making things feels like making stories and making little things, tangible things that help you connect with different parts in your life and different parts of yourself. So it's incredibly meaningful to me. And I think I've always been around makers of one type or another. So I think growing up in that, it just was a way of being. My dad is an artist and as a kid was always, you know, he was always tinkering around. He wasn't making art when I was young. I think he was trying to make money for the family to eat and all those things. But there was a wood shop in the basement and there was always scraps of wood and there were always little things you could make and play with. And I guess I got a lot of attention when I made stuff too. Like you get out the hammer and nails and like your parents are paying attention, like, what's going on over there and let's work on safety and things like that. But there was a mentorship that would happen immediately. And I think I learned a lot of that from my dad and just being in those spaces and then My mom's a voracious reader, so that sort of reading, being surrounded by volumes and volumes of books, maybe more than I'll ever read in my lifetime, put that, you know, like, I'm interested in something, so this is a way you can learn about things. So I think that was set at a really young age. And then, you know, I had to find my own way through that journey, to find my own. What's my own way of making and being.
