Friday, February 23, 2007

Candie


My friend Candie is artistic, creative, full of energy, funny, and a wonderful friend with a true heart. She loves to scrapbook and loves to play with paper and embellishments. She works at Treasury of Memories enough to support her scrapbook habit with enough free time to play in her studio and have family time.

She taught scrapbooking for a MOPS program through church for four years and I convinced her (it didn’t take much) to teach scrapbooking to the girls at GRADS.

Candie came in the first day and introduced herself to the girls and told them a little bit about herself. In addition to their monthly scrapbook pages she brought bonus pages they could take home on work on. The girls previously had paid $3.00 a month for supplies to do their pages and while that may seem like peanuts to a lot of people who think nothing of buying the best paper and embellishments, these girls struggle with budgets that do not include frivolous expenditures when they are teenage mothers raising babies. Candie is supplying the paper and embellishments with a little help from her friends at Treasury of Memories and other scrapbookers who donate supplies. The Ladies of Harley which we both belong to have also agreed to a small budget for supplies.

Candie is teaching the girls to journal and try new techniques. Tearing paper, using sandpaper, and ink pads might seem second hand to most scrapbookers, but these girls are just learning. The world of scrapbook and altered art is crossing over and techniques are interchangeable for either art form. So with Candie’s patient coaxing, and my pushing the limits with altered art projects, I am sure the girls will grow in their art. Hopefully, some of them will continue after they leave school to record their lives and their baby’s life in pictures and words.

Shopping for scrapbooking or mixed media art projects finds us both wandering the aisles of Value Village, Goodwill, Salvation Army, and an array of local thrift stores. I’m introducing Candie to the hardware store and I’m sure her husband, Sky, will soon have to hide his toolbox or Candie will wipe it out. Dollar bins, holiday closeouts, everything has possibilities.

We sort of look for things we can surprise the other with as little gifts to use in our art. I gave her oversized fake money and Candie is determined to teach me to scrapbook so she gave me a Harley scrapbook.

Candie taught an altered paint can class to a group of women at her church last Saturday. What she really taught them was that there are no rules and then she put mounds of supplies in front of them, showed them the can she was working on, and then they all played. Candie told them, “I’m not trying to stretch the boundaries; I’m trying to kick the fence over.”

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