My Treasure Drawer

As a child, at the instigation of my mother, I had something called a "treasure drawer" - a special place to keep all those little trinkets and mementos and drawings that often accumulate. An important feature of the "treasure drawer" was that I was the sole curator of its contents. I knew that anything I put in there, provided it was not perishable, was safe from adult interference or cleaning exuberance. If the drawer started to overflow, then it was my job to sort through the treasures and to decide what should be sacrificed and what should be saved.

Now my husband will assert that this experience has done little to curb my hoarding tendencies. Each time we move house, he marvels at how much "stuff" I have kept for posterity despite supposedly being ruthless from time to time. One glance in a surviving manifestation of my "treasure drawer" reveals why it is no surprise that I have embraced blogging with such in enthusiasm - for housed in a bright orange globag, from my first day at school, I find: diaries from my teenage years; travel journals; newspaper clippings; school magazines and photos from my first attempts at B&W photography as an 8 year old. Elsewhere I have: all the letters that I received from and wrote to my family as an exchange student to Washington State in pre-email 1983; various other letters, journals and travel albums; not to mention mountains of photographs. However, I have managed to discard various high school projects; university assignments; financial records from the 1980s (did I really manage to live so contentedly on less than $5000 a year?!); certain love letters and so on.

These days, I regard my studio as one big "treasure drawer". My own personal domain and creative space. And this is what is sitting on my design wall at present:




I think the unusual dimensions are in keeping with the fishnet theme. And it should fit in quite well on one of the unusual shaped walls in the main house. Now to work out how to quilt it...