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?”
