Happy Friday!
Yesterday, I was talking with one of my best friends. Some of you may recognize her from social media; she helped me at the Dallas wholesale market this past January. But yesterday, we weren’t talking about Intertwined at all. We were talking about her parents.
She grew up on a family farm in Iowa, where life meant a lot of hard work, and where income could depend on the season, the weather, and plenty of things no one could control.
Her parents are older now, and my friend was telling her brother that they really need to start getting rid of some things. For example: there is apparently an old sink being stored in the basement.
A sink. She could not understand why anyone needed to keep an extra sink in the basement.
But her brother, who still lives in Iowa and does mechanical work connected to the farming community, understood completely. He told her, essentially, “What if someday they need a sink and they can’t afford to buy one? At least they’ll have it.”
And suddenly, that old sink looked a little different. It isn't clutter. It’s security. It represents a lifetime of knowing that you may not always be able to simply go buy another one.
I immediately thought about our trip to Guatemala last month.
Lorenzo, who makes our huipil bags and belts, saves every little piece of the beautiful handwoven fabric left over from making our products.
He doesn’t throw it away. He keeps it until we come back, and then we spread everything out and try to figure out what else it might become.
This time, we brought a big pile of those pieces home to Greensboro. And this week, A & Z, our Afghan refugee friends, have been turning them into framed textiles. Little pieces that might easily have been called “scraps” are becoming art and creating another bit of paid work along the way.
All of this also reminded me of something Z’s husband told me a while ago. He is a plumber, and one of the things that amazed him when he came to the United States from Afghanistan was that you can find almost any part you need.
If something breaks, there is a store somewhere with the piece that will fix it. I had never really thought about what an incredible luxury that is. We are extraordinarily fortunate to live in a place where so much is available to us, almost whenever we need it.
But abundance has a downside: when almost anything can be replaced, we stop asking what else something could become. We are a little less careful about what we already have and we don’t have to be quite as creative about saving it.
The sink in Iowa.
The scraps in Lorenzo’s workshop.
A plumbing part in Afghanistan.
All three have made me think about the kind of creativity that comes from looking carefully at what you already have.
There is something beautiful about that kind of resourcefulness.
It’s something I see again and again in the people Intertwined works with: materials are noticed, saved, repaired and transformed because someone can still see value in them.
A vintage huipil becomes a bag.
A corte begins a second life as a blanket.
A small piece of handwoven fabric from Lorenzo’s cutting table travels to Greensboro and becomes art in A & Z’s hands.
And then someone chooses it.
That may be my favorite part of the story.
Because when one of these pieces ends up in your home, you become part of its next chapter. What began in the hands of a weaver in Guatemala, was saved by Lorenzo, carried back to Greensboro, and transformed by A & Z now has a place in your life.
Maybe that’s what I love most about Intertwined products: their story doesn’t end when the maker finishes them. It keeps going with the person who chooses to live with them.
Maybe that’s why I keep thinking about that sink in Iowa. It isn’t really about the sink at all. It’s about believing something can still have value, even when its next purpose isn’t obvious yet.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Ginger
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