The Beginning of it all...

At the start of every journey there is a catalyst. For me, the roots of my journey run deep into the past, stretching far into the childhoods of the women who came before me. I spent my early years learning and growing alongside my grandmother, her motto 'Necessity is the Mother of all invention' paved the way for many innovations and significantly fed my own desire to build, make and create with what was and is readily salvaged and at hand. These are skills that I have valued, honoured and honed throughout my lifetime and they have played an enormous role in not only who I have grown to become as a person, but also as an artist, mother and maker. Building with salvaged wood, saving seeds, sewing clothing & quilts with saved and horded scraps of fabric, creating art out of the everyday and implementing reusing and recycling (before it was hip) were skills that I have found invaluable throughout my journey and they are the values that within, my roots have found their hold, and they are also the catalyst of my creativity. 

My Grandmother was a farmers wife and as such spent much of her life time on and around the land where my grandparents homesteaded. The farms were smaller and closer together then, and many of the women that I knew as a child were her close friends that had also spent much of their lives living on neighbouring farms. 'Gatherings' would actually be work bees in which we would make a hundred wild fruit pies in a laughing, chatting group and then divide them for the freezer to be baked fluffy and golden mid-winter, or quilters circles - finishing the top stitches for one another while catching up on  the latest gossip. I have vivid memories of seeing the needles popping through, up and down, from underneath the quilt frame while I played, listening to the voices and fire crackling in the wood stove. 

To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. ~ Pablo Neruda

As I grew older I developed an absolute passion for all things vintage. I spent hours scouring all of the second hand stores to be found in Manitoba...sometimes road tripping for hours with my sister and my cousin Sherri to get to our destination, some out of the way MCC store in rural village (more info on these amazing little shops to come!) or the ever amazing MCC in downtown Portage La Prairie and of course every Value Village from here to Edmonton...

Over the years my collections have grown to include...vintage clothing, books, dishes, shoes, boots and more recently, my own creations that are slowly being pieced together from a lifetime of curating treasures. In the end...if there is one thing that I know, it is that there is a hidden (and not so hidden) artist in most of us that doesn't often see the light of day. Mine has been no exception. I have spent most of my years being busy. Busy working, busy raising kids, busy homeschooling, busy not riding my horse, busy, busy, busy...creating was something that I did in my very meager spare time and more often than not, those spare minutes were spent having a shower or watching some Netflix at midnight with my husband. But in the last few years I have been feeling a shift as our family grows and changes and I have found that the need to create has out weighed my 'busyness' and I have allowed myself a deeper, more purpose filled time to write, draw, paint and 'make'. I darkened the door of our rarely entered storage area and began to pull out my years long collection of vintage fabrics, clothing, leather jackets & skirts, old and lovely cookie tins, some of which I have held in my possession, held within my secret yearning to turn these items into something new, for more than 20 years. I then dismantled one of our spare rooms and turned it into my studio, and I have to admit I felt a bit terrified, a bit crazy. One of my girlfriends, an amazing woman who also braves the wilds of creating and baring herself to the world, told me recently that 'diving into the wild adventure of creating and selling your art can be fearful and full of the questioning of yourself, but that fear, and that questioning, is also a huge part of the magic'. So this is my first post, my first foray into sharing the story of my creations - and I have to say...it makes me feel...free.

​“To create one’s own world takes courage.” Georgia O’Keeffe
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​Follow me here 👇 to see my creations & vintage finds! www.instagram.com/thesalvageheart
​Looking forward to having you stop by to say hello!