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| Grandma's Talent |
This is going to be a long story......
As long as I can remember my grandmother has always busied herself with creative projects. Things such as sewing her own clothes, building puzzles, crocheting, quilting, the list goes on and on.......needless to say my grandmother is very talented crafty person. One of the many projects (and the whole point of this story) was when she took old Barbies that her granddaughters use to play with and crocheted dresses on all of them. Barbies were actually a really important thing to my sister and I because playing with Barbies was a major part of growing up together. For years, my sister and I had a continuing story line with our dolls and always played with the same three characters. I can still remember what we named them, their weddings, their rock concerts (one of our dolls just happened to be a singer) and other situations we made up with these Barbies. It was like our own never ending Soap Opera! Playing with these dolls is what I remember doing the most as a kid and a key part in how my relationship with my sister was built. So around the time it wasn't cool to play with Barbies anymore (which was probably a lot older than I am willing to admit) my grandmother asked to take our old dolls and crochet dresses onto them as one of her creative projects. I remember her crocheting endlessly for a really long time and making so many dresses we couldn't keep up with all the ones she was doing. Sometimes she would let each of us choose what dress we wanted on a certain doll, but most of the time she would decide herself. When she finished each one, she packed them away not to be played with anymore with the intention of giving them to us as a collection when we were adults. Reflecting on this now, it is actually really special that our Barbies have been "preserved" in a way that is unique to my grandmother. Most people lose or give away toys like these over time, but because my grandmother crocheted each one a dress, they become a distinct piece of art. As time has passed and all the girls in the family have grown older these dolls probably haven't been thought of. I will admit up until the day my grandma asked for my help with the dolls, I hadn't either. Not that we had forgotten about them, they were just something we would have one day......
So during my stay at my grandparents, my grandmother asked me to help her organize and pack the collection of Barbies. Since the dolls had been stacked in boxes on several shelves in the house for years, they were very dusty and need to be fixed. Over a couple of days, we took each doll out of its box, fluffed and fixed it up a little. We then separated the dolls in totes that we labeled for each granddaughter. She had even saved all the patterns for most of the dresses and as we packed the dolls we matched them with the original pattern. I really enjoyed spending this time with her, watching her face as we opened each box and listening to her talk about making them was really special. She was like a kid at Christmas and I really cherish getting that time alone with her. It was during those moments that I decided I wanted to do something special for her because of all the work she but into these dolls. What could be better than taking pictures of all the doll and making a catalog of them in a book for her? So I was on a mission to secretly set up a little studio and take pictures of each of these dolls in time to give her this book for Christmas. My turn around time on this needed to be fast so the next few days were rough and exciting! My grandmother doesn't go out that much anymore and when she did it was usually while I was working, what a challenge this was! I had to wait for both my grandparents to leave the house and set up a little studio in their bedroom. I hung up a black sheet, took each doll out, and then posed them as quick as I could. If I remember correctly, I think it took me three different times to photograph about 100 Barbies! I almost had a heart attack once because as I was taking pictures my grandparents came home. I quickly tossed the doll I was shooting in the tote, pulled the sheet down, and tired to act like I was not up to something. I remember that particular doll had red feathers on her hat and somehow I managed to get red feathers everywhere when I had thrown her into the box. I think I was still finding red feathers months later! I was so close to getting caught in the moment it wasn't even funny, but somehow she never knew what I was up to. After I took these photos, I was in a mad rush to edit them to make the book in time. Because I wanted these too look really good, I was editing the background of each photo to make sure it was solid black. It was a very tedious task and because I was working off my lap top my work flow was very very slow. I spent endless hours at my moms house trying to edit them....I don't think I slept much that week. Now comes the tragic part of the story.... after spending hours on these photos I was nearly done and then the unthinkable happens. As I was editing, my mom trips over the cord to my external hard drive and my hard drives goes crashing to the ground. It's easy to predict what happen.... in the tumble it messed up my hard drive making it in readable. This was ONE OF THE WORST MOMENTS OF MY LIFE. Not only did I just lose all the work I had just done, but I ended up losing tons of other picture files. Stupid me hadn't really been going about backing up all my files onto other devices in case a hard drive crash every happened. I lost so much college work that night, it's not even funny. About the only thing I had backed up was my college thesis, which in all actuality was the thing that mattered the most. I also had backed up all the original photos I had taken of the Barbies, but after working so hard editing them, after the hard drive "crash" I just couldn't bring myself to work on them again. My heart was so broken after the whole thing, I even sent my hard drive off to Austin to see if it could be repaired (which would have cost $2,000 to recover the damn thing) but after my hard drive was examined it was determined to be unrecoverable. I had the broken drive sent back to me and I still have it in a box in my closet, in the hope that one day someone will figure out how to recover it. It was one of those moments in my life where I thought "What else bad could happen to me?" 2011 was definitely a really tough year and this was the icing on top of the cake (or so I thought..something almost worse happens much later). Here I was trying to do something so nice for someone and somehow I screwed myself over. But such is life.....2011 was a HUGE year for me to learn just how strong of a person I am and how much I could handle. So I got through it and moved on. I was upset, I cried over it a lot, but there was nothing I could do. I had to think they are just files, there are worse thing that could happen to a person like losing a family member. I have a life time to take more photos, even though those moments wont happen again, I just need to move on.
That which doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger.
So....after that long story, this picture of the day was the very first shot (November 29th) that I took to start this project for my grandmother. I loved how she looks like a fashion model! And what a happy photo for such a terrible story. This photo is meant to highlight the talent of my grandmother.
It has been almost two years now since this happened and I still haven't gone back to edit the Barbie pictures. AND my grandmother never saw these photos or has any knowledge that I tried to do this for her.
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