Art and About
Engaging with the creative force in everyday life

As Thanksgiving weekend draws to a close and the December holiday season is on the horizon, thoughts turn to gift giving and, sorry to be crass, gift receiving. I get my holiday shopping done before Halloween as a rule, so I sail through the gift giving. What I tend to fixate on is the gift receiving. I’m not a goods hungry greed monster. In fact, I tell loved ones I don’t need any gifts (which doesn’t work, by the way). Instead, I obsess about finding the time and creativity to write thank-you notes.

I have written before about making the art for my own thank-you cards (“Art is in the Cards”). And I have written about how my kids design their own stationery for thank-you notes (“Teach Kids an Artistic Way to Say Thank You”) I’m a fanatic about thank-you notes year round, but especially at holiday time. My kids have participated in thanking folks themselves for gifts since they could speak only a few words to dictate a basic “thank you.” They always provide the artwork for unique cards, and every year they have been able to write more and more of the message themselves. It has become a tradition in our family, on December 26, to sit around the dining room table and do our thank-you notes. To make it festive, we each get to eat a Christmas cookie every time we finish a note. It’s the only day of the year I let the kids (or myself) gorge, and it makes the job fun.

You can imagine my delight when I learned of a local non-profit organization, Creek Kids Care, which uses children’s art to make stationery to sell and raise money for worthy causes. When I first saw the product, I bought three packs immediately, which we are rapidly depleting as the whole family uses them to write thank-you notes and letters to friends and family. It a tremendous feeling to support the arts, children’s creativity, charity and the importance of gratitude all with one note card.

Creek Kids Care began in Walnut Creek, CA as a way for kids to use their creativity and time to make a difference in the world. It started because two children were concerned about the wellbeing of one local homeless man. Since its inception in 2004, Creek Kids Care has grown to over 150 families, generating more than $12,000 in donations for Fresh Start Walnut Creek, JF Kapnek Trust and Tsunami Relief. All the stationery is assembled by kids using the artwork of other kids. Recently, Creek Kids Care has started to use the artwork to make and sell clear glass magnets called Touchstones. Their Web site gives more details about the organizations they support.

The Creek Kids Care mission statement says all you need to know about this organization:

“Creek Kids Care is a non-profit organization made up of concerned and hopeful Walnut Creek children and teens who believe their time, creativity and effort can make a difference in the world. Using the donated proceeds from their artistic creations, CKC raises funds that help improve the well being of children, adults and families in need, both locally and internationally. Every product is created by the kids.”

The Creek Kids Care Web site is worth exploring, especially because you can see their vibrant products and purchase them. The site explains how the stationery is born during periodic Art Parties. Children aged preschool and up participate in mixed media gathering where their creativity is encouraged to run wild to produce the original pieces used for the note cards. The intention is to make something beautiful in order to help make someone else’s life easier. Older children gather to assemble the note cards, pasting the original artwork onto blank cards, gathering them into groups of 10 with envelopes and simply tying raffia around the stack for a visually appealing display.

With the note cards comes a small insert explaining the purpose of Creek Kids Care. Among the ideas I have already mentioned, it says:

“Children show their vitality and their imagination through their artwork. Giving their artwork away to loved ones and seeing their creation appreciated and displayed is a meaningful way for children to share themselves and their love.”

I could not have written that statement any better. I am not at all involved with Creek Kids Care, although it seems like I should be. I wonder why I didn’t come up with the idea myself, actually. This holiday season, my family will be giving away the creativity of Creek Kids Care when we do our thank-you notes. Admittedly, we’re straying a little from our own homemade art approach, but I can’t think of a better way to impart the humanity of the season than by promoting the multifaceted ideals of some caring and clever local children.

Living life as a walking work of art was easy for the first couple of years. After my tutorial from Aunt Joanne in form, composition and the art and science of earring selection, people started noticing that I was wearing earrings again and I began receiving gifts. The people selecting for me had good eyes for composition, or they were members of my family and asked Joanne for help, so pretty much everything I got felt “right” when I put them in my ears. The collection became quite eclectic with so many different folks contributing.

As it turned out, only on one occasion did I choose any earrings for myself. It was an impulse buy on the Internet, and when they arrived, they were far too long for my face. I wore them often, though, because the colors went with my wardrobe. Once while wearing them, I got a comment from a friend on my “interesting” earrings. “Interesting” is not usually a compliment when it comes to art.

I may not have been picking out my own earrings, but I was learning a lot about earring designers through my own research and referrals from friends. I had always intellectually understood that jewelry making was an artform but since I was not a big jewelry-wearing person, I hadn’t understood it at an emotional level. Now that I was searching for earrings that looked and felt like a perfect fit, I was ready to have a relationship with jewelry as art.

While my husband and I were on vacation to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, our home was burglarized. They took all my jewelry, including every earring with the exception of a pair of gold studs that I hadn’t worn since my earring epiphany. By luck, fate or coincidence, I had brought the original beaded earrings from Joanne with me on my trip because their chameleon-like nature meant I could have one pair of earrings to go with every outfit I packed.

As I itemized the loss for our homeowners insurance, I relived the connection I had to each pair, remembering not only the person who gave them to me, but who had made them and how I had felt when I wore them. My initial impulse, once I received the reimbursement check from the insurance, was to use the memories of my lost earrings as a template for the new collection. One shopping trip with that frame of mind proved to be frustrating and pointless. I had gone back to one of the Oakland stores Joanne had introduced me too, but I couldn’t re-create the magic of the earrings I had lost. The lazy part of me thought I should just wait for people to start giving me earrings again. That way, I wouldn’t have to do any work, which felt overwhelming at the time. However, I had become accustomed to being a walking work of art with little bits of emotional investment hanging from my ears everyday. The impatient part of me couldn’t wait to rebuild the collection.

I needed to take a creatively different approach to mentally separate my new earrings from the memory of the old. I turned to one of my favorite Internet sites for art, Novica.com, to see what the international world of jewelry-makers had to offer. Novica, in association with National Geographic, is a fair trade dealer for artisans from around the globe selling all manner of art for the home. It has a huge array of jewelry-makers displaying limitless styles and I started culling from their pages by bookmarking only the earrings that immediately caught my eye — still the first and most important rule I followed when finding earrings for myself. Although I was initially nervous about picking something from a picture, I began to feel more confident the more I looked at those bookmarked selections, seeing a pattern in the length and visual weight of the chosen ones. I hesitated on only one pair, but the colors were so pretty, I pressed the “buy” button anyway. I even threw in a necklace that caught my fancy.

Then the long wait for my seven selections began. The jewelry was being shipped from Brazil, India, Thailand, Bali and Java. Once it was crafted, I would get an email from Novica saying that my order was “beginning its journey across international waters.” I loved the drama of it all.  As the earrings started arriving at my doorstep, I grew more and more relieved to find that my selections not only were beautiful, but they suited me as well, once placed in my ears. Each pair came with a postcard written in the artist’s handwriting, wishing me well. I felt like I had taken a final exam in an art theory class and passed with the extra credit bonus of a direct communication with artists across international waters.

The only failure was the pair I had hesitated on before purchasing. I had chosen with my brain, not with my gut, and failed big time on this pair. The earrings were huge, composed of three large silver squares, which almost touched my shoulders when they were in my ears. They were impractical besides being unsuitable and I felt like an idiot for purchasing them. For some reason, returning them didn’t strike me as an option. Instead, I wondered if I could turn them into three custom pairs of earrings made by me for me.

After buying some basic French hooks, I said a quiet apology to the artist who had made the earrings before using my wire clippers to dissect them. It turned out to be a simple and short procedure with all three new pairs turning out very well. In fact, I now wear these three pairs more than any of my others. Since then, I have altered another pair that I had originally intended to wear for dress-up, but by changing the configuration a little, they became more practical for everyday wear.

My next endeavor is to leave other people’s designs alone and try to make a pair from scratch for myself. I have some very clear visions of what I’d like my custom jewelry to look like. What I never envisioned was that I would be interested in trying my hand at this art. I’m constantly reminding people to keep their eyes and ears open to the arts surrounding them, but even I never dreamed my earlobes would point me toward a hidden jewel of artistic expression.