Ann Makosinski Quotes

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'd take garbage, and I'd glue them together and create inventions.

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.

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.

You can do great things with low-tech stuff.

We didn't have money for toys, so I made my own.

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 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.

An artist looks at a juice bottle, an egg carton, or a newspaper and sees something valuable in them.

Our idea of fun wasn't going to Disney World. It was, you want to play basketball, go outside, and make a goal. You want to play baseball? Take the old broom, take the handle off, take a tennis ball that we found somewhere, and go play baseball. We were forced to create things.

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.

My mother could make something out of nothing - and everything started from scratch.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

People never knew we were poor, but out of that poverty came the most incredible inventions - board games, recipes... we never stopped inventing.

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.

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.

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.

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 mean, give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string, I wouldn't get bored anywhere.

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 needed a capo - a clamp to hold down the strings - so my daddy made me one out of a corn on the cob and a rubber band.

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.'

Creativity was born out of necessity because I didn't have many things to play with.