For as long as I can remember, I was good with crafts. I loved drawing and building things since I was a child, but somehow that skill was not nurtured enough during my teenage years. I never felt my hands become clumsy, but they weren’t so often in trouble disassembling a perfectly functioning radio or covered in glue and paint for building a city on my bedroom floor for my toys. The same thing happened with video games, but this story is not about games.
In my late twenties, I decided to explore my love for animation cinema. I always loved animation and especially stop motion animation. I took a step forward and started to learn how to animate objects on my own. After some video tutorials, I needed to apply everything I was learning. At this point, I started looking for props for my first story. One was a bed. However, I would never find in a store what I imagined inside my head. So, I decided to make a bed myself the way I had thought of it. I bought a board, but I needed to cut it into smaller pieces. I bought a handsaw, but I needed to glue the pieces of wood together. I bought white glue, but I needed to hold everything together while the glue dried. I bought a pair of clips and glued everything together. I ended up never using the object I built, but that moment changed everything. Without realizing it, I had my first tools and with little effort I had built something from scratch. It was the beginning of the workshop (which would later be called Curious Goblin).
In the following years, I conquered a storage space at the family home and filled it with materials and tools. Today I no longer own a pair of small clamps, but dozens of them. I no longer buy white glue in a bottle, but by the bucket. I no longer have a saw, but several saws among many other tools. Some are manual, others are power tools. Most are yellow.
Today, the child inside me couldn’t be more alive. At no time during my adolescence did I stop playing, was less creative or forgot to have fun. None of these things were absent, although I always had the feeling that they used to be more natural and comfortable before. I now understand that playgrounds need to change and evolve as much as we have grown and should not be left behind as an exclusively childish moment.