Senior News November, 2001 Vol. 20. No.  11

 

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Greeting cards, sewing-Eighty years of art keeps revealing new forms

InfoVan: Information moves out into county

Emergency preparedness is a high priority

Del Norte Historical Society celebrates 50

World Senior Games

Electronic Highway- E-mail netiquette

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Greeting cards, sewing-Eighty years of art keeps revealing new forms
by Barbara Clark

Connie Cline holds the latest Barbie she dressed in a mid-1800s pattern she recently finished. Photo by Barbara Clark

When you meet Connie Cline, often playing her keyboard at a local nursing home or motoring around Henderson Center on her Rascal electric scooter, you don't expect the diminutive silver-haired lady to be hiding so many secret talents-but she is.
One room in Connie's Eureka home is completely devoted to her Barbie collection, more than 350 Barbie, Ken and similar dolls are standing on shelves lining three walls. In the closets and storage units are more dolls she found at garage sales that need dressing, boxes of patterns, abandoned crocheted projects and bags of ribbon. Most of her dolls are wearing clothes she made for them-evening dresses, shorts, pant suits, crocheted wedding dresses. She makes the outfits and enjoys adding each new refurbished doll and outfit to her shelves. She also packages outfits to sell at craft shows and yard sales.

A native of Santa Rosa, Connie has been a craft artist since childhood when her grandmother sat her on her lap and taught her tatting. Today her sewing machine is nestled into one corner of her bedroom, while her scanner, copy machine, computer, digital camera and color printer are on a work station in another part.

Connie loves tiny art forms and spent many a year since the 1950s decorating eggs and creating cue-tip dolls, many of them used for the tiny scenes inside the eggs. She began quilling with paper strips wrapped around the smallest dowels. "You can do so many things with quilling: earrings, flowers, little scenes." She brought her quilling projects along when she and her husband would travel because they were small and easy to carry. People would see her creating her tiny artworks and buy them from her in quantity. It helped fund her crafting habit.

"I was busy for years," Connie said. "I had to keep my fingers going. I went to an egg seminar and sold cue tip dolls. They ordered them for years after that."
That was before her love of music found its current expression. "I wanted to play the trumpet at age 16, but my father - the school band teacher - wouldn't let me play in the band. He made me go play out in the pasture with the cows. It was really funny-their ears would go up and down when I played. But it hurt my feelings that he wouldn't let me play in his band." She didn't let that stop her, however. She went on to play in a trumpet quartet and dance band in high school.

In Eureka she took an organ class at Maxims, then branched off with other ladies for organ and later keyboard parties. One group of women met for years to play music together, and then four of them would play in rest homes.

Connie celebrated her 80th birthday in October, and during a recent a prolonged recovery from knee surgery, she began a new art form for greeting cards-embroidering multi-dimensional patterns and flowers onto cards. The embroidery calls for fine needles of different sizes, a pad to punch against, a hard surface so she can work on her lap in the comfy corner of her living room. And the Christmas cards stack up-different colors, different patterns. She's taken the patterns from a book, The Basics of Embroidery on Paper by Erica Fortgens-now it is a ready activity to keep her hands busy during Thanksgiving weekend at her daughter's.

Connie has more tools for her greeting cards around her work place-one wall in her hallway contains a floor-to-ceiling rack loaded with rubber stamps. She says she needs another one for the rest of her collection. Above her computer table is a row of greeting card software. And behind the door to her bedroom which she shares with her computer and sewing machine, is a tall canvas and plastic hanging container that holds a couple dozen paper punches and decorative edge trimming scissors.

As a budding paper craft artist, I was enthralled with her collection of craft tools, wishing I could stay there and play.

Barbara Clark is editor of Senior News. Her e-mail is srnews@northcoast.com.