Silly Short Stories

When I was 12, I stumbled across some moth-eaten cavalry uniforms in my grandfather’s attic. They were buried under layers of dust and cobwebs—almost forgotten. Naturally, my curious 12-year-old self couldn’t resist taking a closer look. What caught my eye were the metal buttons. I thought, "He obviously doesn’t want or need them anymore," so I carefully cut them off, braving the dust and the spiders in the process.

By 19, those buttons had found their way onto a winter coat I had. Over the years, those same buttons have been moved from jacket to jacket, each one a little more worn but full of memories. Today, they’re on my wool coat—a constant reminder of where they’ve been and the story they carry, one that stretches back to the 1940s with my family.

The vintage W. Schaerer buttons you see beside are still waiting for their next chapter. Unused and forgotten in some old cellar until now, they’re about to be woven into something new adding their own history to my work and continuing the cycle of stories.

The legend of the mouse garage

The well was dry. Not just a little low, but completely barren. I was deep in one of those creative slumps where the tools feel heavy and the leather sits untouched.

Frustrated, I turned to my husband—my ever-reliable, occasionally perplexing muse—for help.

“I need an idea,” I sighed, collapsing onto the couch. “Something inspired. Something to get my creative juju flowing again.”

He didn’t even look up from his tablet.

“Mouse garage,” he said. “Build a mouse garage.”

I stared at him. “A what?”

He just chuckled and returned to whatever he was reading, offering only one infuriatingly vague instruction:

“You’ll figure it out.”

The sheer absurdity of the task was exactly what I needed. It broke the spell of trying to design something sensible. This wasn’t about another wallet or bag. It was about solving a completely imaginary problem with my hands.

I started sketching.

The more I thought about a garage for a mouse, the more the idea twisted itself around: what if the garage was a mouse? A small leather structure, rounded, quiet, almost cartoon-like.

So I cut, stitched, and shaped until the little object appeared in front of me. A soft grey form, part sculpture, part joke, entirely born from the moment.

When I finished, I placed it on my husband’s desk.

He looked at the tiny leather mouse, burst out laughing, and glanced up with a triumphant grin.

“Well?” he asked.

“Did you get your mojo back?”

The "mouse garage" is made from chrome tanned reindeer leather and lined in cotton fabric.. I used a baseball glove stitch. The nose is a baroque black south sea pearl, eyes are onyx beads. I stitched this using a 0.8 mm cotton cord.