Agnieszka Spieszny

Folk Craft As Empowering Job

I hadn’t really paid much attention to an innocuous little activity my grandpa would do until I was a teenager. For years throughout my childhood when I visited him, I would watch him take out his tissue paper, scissors, glue stick, thread, needle, and a little stick in the exact shape of a pencil, just one without lead, that he had whittled down himself. He’d cut palm-sized circles out of the tissue paper, with slits from the outside nearly to the center, then he would spend hours rolling little points from the cut tissue paper. Each disc turned into a beautiful little “star” and as soon as he had about 12 of these, he’d string them all together, pull the string tight, and it would turn into a spikey ball. He called these little balls “jeżyki” in Polish, which translates to “little hedgehogs” in English.