Ann Makosinski Quotes

Wallace and Gromit's contraptions are created purely for gags, but we all have the urge to invent - especially children. If they're bored, kids will make something from cardboard boxes, yoghurt pots, tape and elastic bands. Often, those constructions are the best.

My dad used to give me old electrical equipment that didn't work anymore, and I'd put things together. I think that's why I like to mix things that don't belong.

I was always taking garbage from around the house and making my own toys. I wasn't given a Wii or an Xbox or anything.

The funny thing about being creative is that, especially high school people, I kept noticing I'd always go to these certain materials. I'd always be picking up trash and picking up paper and using it.

I see potential in everything. It's about opening your mind to what you can do to the garment: because they're cheap, you can cut them or stitch them, and if you stuff it up, it's fine - it's only two dollars.

I credit my mom with inspiring in me a love of design, matched by her creative problem-solving abilities. This is a woman who could find an old, discarded piece of furniture, bring it home and turn it into something fabulous.

I went to junkyards, abandoned car lots. I asked supermarkets for the big jugs they put pig guts in, to make cabinets for my bass speakers.

One man's trash is another man's treasure, and the by-product from one food can be perfect for making another.

I'm very crafty! One time I made a television set out of a cardboard box - Everybody thought it was a lark! This was the beginning of a love affair with the arts.

I used to unwind the wire tags that labeled the crates of vegetables and took the fine brass and steel wires and braided and twisted them together to make bracelets, rings, and figures.

I took my son to an exhibition about inventing things, and he was so inspired he started collecting toilet rolls and empty bottles for his own 'inventions.'

I always knew I wanted to create. I used to sit in my room for hours drawing and making things. I once got into trouble for cutting up my mother's lampshades to make a dress. I was three.

I love all things crafty. I love to make jewelry. I love to cut up old clothes and turn them into something new. I love projects like transforming a busted table into a shiny new table. I'm really into restoration and little side projects.

Growing up I always used to shop in Oxfam. I'd find things for 50p and then take them home, cut them up and make them into something new.

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

I learned to glitter the pumpkins for Halloween not because I went into it thinking, 'I'm going to glitter some pumpkins!' No. I bought all of these big, cold, slimy, disgusting pumpkins and tried to carve them, and it was gross, so I had to find something else to do with them. Glitter was life-changing.

My training and my inclination is to invent.

I like crafts that come out of poverty or necessity. There used to be hobby shops where you'd get your supplies, and then you'd use your imagination.

Reducing and reusing take nothing more than a rethink on the way we shop, and using our imagination with the things that we might once have considered junk.

From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.

I always find myself stopping to write down ideas of things I'd like to make from computer hardware items to things new moms need - inventions to share with others to make their lives more fun or interesting or easy.

As a child, I always enjoyed building forts by stringing up bed sheets and clothes. I continue to be inspired by makeshift structures, including my own kids' forts and temporary architecture of all sorts.

Invention is the mother of necessity.

Imagination and invention go hand in hand. Remember how lack of resources was never a problem in childhood games? Shift a few pieces of furniture around the living room, and you have yourself a fort.

I'm a leftover junkie.