The Art of Doing-It-Yourself
I come from a practical family who made things. My father was a bricklayer/carpenter and my mother continually sewed. I don’t think there is a sewing craft she hasn’t tackled - from traditional pillow lace and knitting to replacing a zip in trousers. Doing-it-yourself was taken for granted in our house so it only occurs to me to get a proper man in if every other avenue of DIY has been exhausted. As a toddler I could often be found in the dog basket with the family Labrador, so I guess that you could say that my affinity for animals developed at an early age. I have never grown out of it (well apart from the sleeping in the dog bed bit) and a Labrador feels like a brother or sister to me. I can’t remember exactly when my fascination with horses began but I remember reading and dreaming over the pictures of horses in a book called the Encyclopaedia of Horses & Riding by Betty Skelton. I guess a horse book had been on my Santa list one year. I didn’t get to actually ride a pony until I was about 12 or 13. I was lucky enough to attend several Saturday morning children’s classes in oil painting run by a local artist. More importantly, one of the other girls had a pony and I managed to get invited over to her house to play with the po