The Velvet Alchemist

All right, strap in, this story’s gonna be a long’n.

When I was a kid, I had an Auntie Ree. Auntie Ree (Marie)was an elder sister to my maternal grandpa, and lived in town in this beautiful yellow house with a detached garage. I loved visiting her as she always kept a closet of games and toys, and she had this absolutely gorgeous polished hunk of petoskey stone that her husband had found and hand-polished every night until it shone like glass.

As humans do, one day she and her family decided that it was time to downsize and move into a care facility up north. This meant her kids going through her house and deciding what she’d take with her, what they’d divvy up amongst themselves, and what would be put into a yard sale. My grandparents and I assisted with this, and I got to run the cash table.

There’s a whole story about me having a moment where my brain borked and I forgot how to operate a calculator and give change and almost spiraled out but that’s a tale for another day…

Auntie Ree was a crafter and had plenty of craft supplies that ended up in this yard sale, including a bunch of yarn and something I’d never come across before. Plastic canvas. For those playing the home game, plastic canvas is a gridded sheet of plastic, stiff or soft, clear or colored, where you use a yarn needle and some basic yarn like Red Heart to stitch designs through the holes. You can make flat designs, or you can do 3D items. Simple things like Kleenex box covers, or complex things like the Barbie doll house I saw at the county fair in the 4H building.

I expressed interest in the bundle, and was immediately met with one of Auntie Ree’s adult children sneering at me and snarking they weren’t giving it to me for free. Even as a little kid I was taken aback by their attitude. Did I demand it for free? Did I expect it free? Eesh. I’m unsure which of my grandparents ponied up the cash for me to have this bundle of craft supplies to appease the uppity offspring, but I ended up spending down-time at the cash table flipping through the booklets and learning how to make things out of plastic canvas.

Fast forward a few years, and I discover a new little craft store in my hometown. The Lamb’s Loft, half craft store half trinket trove. She carried basic yarn, knitting needles and crochet hooks, plastic canvas, yarn needles, basic Darice jewelry findings and beads, pattern books, DMC floss… all the basic items for simple granny crafts. It was about a mile from my house, so I was allowed to ride my bike there when I had pocket money. One afternoon I picked up a pattern book to make a doll travel case out of plastic canvas. The case itself is Barbie pink with “travel stickers” on the sides. When you open it up, a carpet and a vanity table unfold from the center. There are mirrors, little drawers, two secret compartments behind the mirrors, 2 closet spaces, and accessories such as a chaise lounge with matching pillow, vanity bench that opens up for storage, and a folding screen for changing. I immediately wanted to make it.

What followed was many instances of me begging a few bucks off my grandpa so I could go back down to the Loft for yet another couple sheets of canvas or another skein of yarn. I slowly but surely worked on building this case. Unfortunately, grandpa died when I was 14, and I had as-of-yet-undiagnosed ADHD, so he didn’t get to see the finished project. Every so often I’d clean or rearrange my room, find the half-finished case, and knock out a little more. I even worked on it during Saturday detention in high school! No, I didn’t technically earn detentions by misbehaving; our school’s attendance policy meant if you missed more than 3 days you had to make up hours via after school or Saturday detention. To me, detention was FAR preferable to actual class as everyone in detention kept to themselves and it was generally quiet. I could finish my homework after school, and then Saturdays were for reading novels, writing stories, or working on my little yarn projects… well, unless that one teacher was hosting Saturday detention. He was a curmudgeon whose room rule was you could ONLY work on homework and nothing else. I spent several hours with loose leaf paper and a pen free writing and journaling and being bored out of my gourd after he forbid me from working on my stitching.

I still have nightmares that I didn’t make up all my hours and have to go back to school to complete my credits and I end up giving up and signing up to get my GED.

But I digress. As soon as I graduated I applied to a job at JoAnn, and there I stayed for the next quarter century. In those first couple years there I used my discount to get the yarn and canvas needed to finish the case.

By this time I’d been working on it for over a decade. Thing is, plastic canvas doesn’t hold up well in areas that aren’t climate controlled. The constant shift of humidity causes the plastic to dry out and become brittle, plus all the manipulation of the pieces while stitching it all into place caused many pieces to break and crumble. Also… there are a LOT of design flaws. If a girl plays with it on a table top and doesn’t open and close it often, it will last a long time. If a girl tries to tote it around as it looks like you should be able to, it WILL fall apart. Once you’ve got all the pieces tucked inside, plus a doll, plus all her accessories, it’s too heavy for the little handles and buckles.

I was about 20 when I finished it. My sisters were 15 and 10, and they both enjoyed the fruit of my labors. I may have been an adult, but I still loved making Barbie items. Hell, I’m 44 now and I still want to make doll things! I’ve got a ton of patterns for doll clothes, and I save my decent sized scraps for when I get frisky to make tiny things. I used to make wiggle dresses out of old socks, cutting the foot off, adding lace to the bottom and ribbon straps to the top. My sisters LOVED what I made.

Alas…

Let me take you back, well before I was born. One of my mom’s biggest gripes about grandma was how frequently grandma would go through mom’s clothes and toys and collect bags and boxes of things to donate to charity. Grandma wouldn’t ask permission or consult with her children; she’d just decide they were done playing with certain items and that was that. It drove my mom NUTS. Items of great sentimental value, items that had been taken care of, items that today are worth a tidy sum… gone.

You’d think a woman who grew up in such a way would raise her children differently, yes? YOU’D BE WRONG. For my mother is a Boomer, and Boomers talk a good game about how they would never raise their children the same way but continuing the same old cycles.

When I was little I did get to play with what toys mom was able to hang on to. Inflatable Barbie furniture, vintage clothes and accessories, Legos, board games (Hello Kerplunk and Knip Knop), and other things lost to memory. Her only rule was that I dismantle anything I build and put it away when I was done. If I didn’t, I wasn’t allowed to play with it any more. I learned to be careful with and take care of things. I took that threat to heart. Then came my siblings. Games lost pieces and cards, Barbies ended up half naked and without their shoes, stuffies got ridiculously filthy, things ended up broken… I once found half a deck of Sesame Street flash cards stuffed into the slot of an old videodisk player. Both siblings were also fond of getting into my things and stealing, which mom always said, “Write me a list and I’ll replace it.”

Nothing was replaced.

Anyway, they got the same rule I did. Put it away or lose it forever. They didn’t take it seriously, so many of our old toys and things ended up in a garbage sack and straight to the Goodwill donation bin. She also waited until we were all out of the house to do purges of clothes and the toy bins on the porch, so we’d come back from school or a friend’s house to find things suddenly missing. This wasn’t just items, it was pets too. We always ended up taking on stray cats who never got fixed, have a litter, and inevitably mom would wait until I was away for the weekend with a friend to give the entire litter away. I’d come home and immediately run to the porch or the barn to play with the kittens and… gone. No goodbye, no closure, just “stop being a baby.”

I’m sure I should be unpacking this with a therapist, but I don’t have therapist money, so here we are.

I’m still salty that mom donated my favorite bunny stuffy to Goodwill. I got it for Easter as a wee child; a 2′ giant monstrosity that was bigger than my baby sister when she was a baby. Mom was absolutely flabbergasted that I’d be upset at its disappearance. “You never play with it,” she said.

“Ma! I used it in class when we needed to cobble together a mock Energizer Bunny for a parody video in 6^th grade! I’ve had it all my life! Just because I don’t drag it around like I’m a kid doesn’t mean I didn’t want to keep it.”

That next Easter I had a new stuffy on the table with the baskets, but it was a poor replacement for my giant, faded, dirty, fatass bunny with the crooked ears.

So, I told you that story to tell you THIS story. Picture it, Sicily… wait, no. Christmas Eve, and I’m… 22. Ish. Mom and my sisters (teen & tween at this point) are getting ready to leave grandma’s, and she mentions that she donated some of our old doll stuff to her then boyfriend’s friend’s daughter. Say what? Yup, she did it again. She decided we were all too old for toys and did a clean sweep, this time gathering up almost all the Barbie stuff she could find, and gave it away to a girl none of us never met. The jeeps, the horses, the boat, the furniture, the clothes and accessories… AND THE PLASTIC CANVAS TRUNK.

Are. You. Effing. Kidding. Me. Right. Now.

Again, mom was confused at our reactions. Why are we acting so angry? We’re too old for Barbies, why do we care? BECAUSE THEY’RE OUR THINGS! Why not say hey, there’s a little girl who won’t get a lot of presents, why don’t you go through your doll stuff and decide what to give her. Give US the choice to pare down our collection, not just take it and tell us to “stop being babies” about it.

But the fact that she took my trunk. The one I took over a decade to complete. The FINAL project my grandpa bankrolled before he died. Gone. And it was broken! It was falling apart! If she wanted this girl to have one I could have cranked another one out for her birthday. One better structured, in brighter colors, with some supports stitched in to make it more sturdy.

It’s half my life ago, and I’m STILL salty as hell over it.

Fun fact: when my grandma moved from her apartment into hospice last year (she died a year ago as I type this), mom and my baby sister cleaned out her apartment. Mom immediately wanted to donate everything that wasn’t photos straight to Goodwill. Didn’t want to look through a single box. Thankfully my sister had a cooler head and made mom go through each box just in case. Many things we all thought lost or stolen were found. Go fig.

I wasn’t invited to go through any of it to take anything of sentimental value. Yes, I’m salty. I did manage to get the green ceramic mixing bowl that grandpa and I used to make pancakes when I was a little bitty kid.

Sadly, I found out that grandma didn’t save any of the hilarious racy joke items that she and grandpa used to have. The titty mug? Gone. Titty salt-n-pepper shakers? Gone. The Spanish dancer glasses that lost their fishnet undies when filled with cold drinks? Gone. The Peter Meter, the dirty joke greeting cards, the naked lady shot glasses? GONE.

The nude lady playing cards that featured a young BETTY FREAKIN’ WHITE?! Gone. Grandma tossed most of it after grandpa died, and the rest came up missing in the decade after.

I DID manage to salvage a book of dirty jokes published in 1951 called Over Sexteen. So all was not lost.

As for grandma’s other things, the cross-stitch of her and grandpa on their wedding day is on the wall at mom’s house. The memory quilt of Ed’s shirts is on a bed. The buddy pillow, last I saw, was sitting on a stack of chairs. The blankets… no idea. One of her sweatshirts is on a hanger in my sewing room as I was replacing the zipper in front to one more arthritis friendly.

Mom has been told that before she pitches ANYTHING else she’s to call me first. I’m not a hoarder, but a sentimental fool who wants to surround myself in comfort items I knew in my youth. Fight me.

Ok, now we can emerge from that Forest of Woe to return to the Here and Now. Today, I have a Pinterest board with a sub-board dedicated to plastic canvas Barbie shenanigans. I had NO idea there were so many pattern books! On eBay right now there’s a $70 book to make an entire medieval castle! You have NO idea how bad I want to take a crack at that! There’s dining furniture, a washer and dryer, “wicker” furniture, a camper, several boutiques, entire doll houses… All of these booklets and pamphlets are old as Methuselah so people selling them want them for 3-4x what they were originally priced. I keep hoping someone uploaded all the patterns to some dodgy website so I can print them for my own shitz-n-giggles.

I still own the booklet for the carrying case. Two nights ago, I dug out my stash of plastic canvas, tucked away in an old JoAnn shopping bag (old, as in the old forest green JoAnn logo) in my yarn closet, and started building another case. It’s not for anyone in particular; my nieces are 14 and 6, and neither are into Barbies. It’s more for my own satisfaction than anything. I still think the color schemes are dated as all hell, but I’m going to build it to pattern. If I’m still feeling itchy, I’m going to use the base patterns to design an all new case, one that will have “band stickers” instead of travel ones. Black, with hot pink. Make it look like the big cases that rock bands use to roll their equipment around. Find a Barbie that looks like the punk-rock Nana from the manga/anime of the same name. Fill the closet and drawers with tiny Vivienne Westwood-like duds. OR… find a doll I can make into a mini alter-ego me, with Manic Panic dyed hair and the funky tiny wardrobe of my dreams.

My bestie, on a quest to find the 1000 books on this internet list she’s obsessed with, is keeping an eye out for the old Barbie plastic canvas booklets in exchange for helping her with her quest.

Anyway, I’m sure that it won’t take me until I’m 54 to finish this case. I still have ADHD, but it’s plenty medicated and I’m not juggling homework or a retail schedule. I am, however, struggling with a black cat who wants to sleep on my pieces and eat my yarn.

(Mom, if you’re reading this, NO TOUCHEE! MINE! MINE! MINE! GIT! GIT! GIT! GO! GO! GO!)