Handsculpted Mushroom Decorations

This shop, though only an infant, has been gestating inside me for years.
As a child, I was an artist, as well as when I was an adolescent.  That is not the start of this story though. This story starts in the woods. 

Some of my earliest memories are of my father and I, waking up hours before dawn, and hiking through the forest and following the trails that deer had carved into the landscape, to climb a tree and sit and wait. We would do this in all types of weather. The heat of summer, that never relented, where the bugs would be after you all day long, and you would have to fight yourself to keep from loudly smacking them away. The cold days full of snow and ice. The rain that pounded loudly against the leafs next to your ears and sprinkled you with a chilly mist. 

At the time, I was not so grateful. To be so uncomfortable and to have to be so still for so long was hard. But those days of watching the sun open up on the forest and critters jumping around the base of your tree, watching the deer come and go, just watching everything the woods had to offer. To listen to the owls hoot and the coyotes yell. What an honor I was given, to witness these things. 

My young adult years led me to pursue art as a career and I made my way to The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I studied illustration there, but never completed my degree. Whichever came first, the disdain of city life or the lack of compulsion I felt to create art anymore, doesnt matter. They both happened and I left the school. I almost left the city as well, but was given another opportunity to “make something happen”. 

While I never was able to make anything happen back then, I met my future husband after that. It was him that convinced me to start pursuing art again, as I had taken a long break from it after school. And I dabbled here and there, but my love for it wasnt entirely rekindled until later still. We lived in the city for a bit longer, then lived in new york city for a few years. But then, we got pregnant. And life flipped itself upside down. 

After our son was born, we left the city and moved someplace more suburban. And that is when the wind through the trees began to fan the flame that would later become The Tiny Woods. 

I slowly began to rediscover the beauty of being lost in nature, that I used to know so well. I began to take my child to climb the old ruins left by an old factory that has long since grown over. We watch the deer together now and we laugh when the critters jump at our sudden appearance. We study the plants around us and I still try not to yelp when a bug lands on me suddenly. Things are completely different, yet utterly the same as a time long ago. 

Now I like to take my children to the tiny woods we can find by the lake nearby, and while it is a far cry from the adventures I had as a young girl lost in the trees at night, it brings me pride to show them even just the littlest and sometimes greatest wonders of the tiny woods.