By JENNIFER MOONSONG
A knee surgery in 1998 left Shirley Pitcock of Knob Lick disabled, but it hasn’t kept her from staying busy with her hands. When the weather is nice, Shirley and her dog Tinker can be found on her front porch working tediously with a Dremel tool.
“If you see me out there working, I’ll probably be covered in dust,” Shirley said.
Shirley isn’t a woodworker, though. The creative crafter’s unique mediums of choice are nutshells and seeds. She takes the emptied nutshells and large seeds and carefully carves away their centers until she is left with an itty-bitty basket, complete with a miniature handle.
“Now people call me the nut lady,” Shirley laughs. Shirley got the idea for the tiny baskets from her grandfather’s creations.
“When I was a little girl I used to play with a little peach seed basket that my mother used to play with when she was little,” Shirley said. “My grandfather had made them for her when she was a little girl.”
The little peach seed basket made by Shirley’s grandfather over 70 years ago is still one of her favorite possessions.
“I made a lot of mistakes when I first started, but the Lord blessed me with being able to work with my hands,” Shirley said. “I’m thankful for that every day. Staying busy with something helps me to de-stress and it brings me peace.”
Shirley started out with peach seeds and English walnuts. These days she has learned to transform a dozen different shells and seeds. Almonds, hickory nuts, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts and heart nuts are among her favorites. She gets the peach seeds from a Mennonite community during the preserve-making season and the nutshells come from a local fruit market.
“Pecan shells are one of the hardest to work with,” Shirley said. “The shells are so thin you have to peel away layers of the shell or they’ll break.”
Hickory nuts are also delicate and take Shirley about 45 minutes to complete, while she can turn an English Walnut shell into a novelty in only 15 minutes.
Shirley makes hundreds of the miniature wonders every year. She has recently started making birds and dolls out of the hollow shells. “Some of the dolls are so ugly they’re cute,” she added.
“I like being outside best of all,” Shirley commented. However, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t work in the winter.
Even when the weather isn’t nice enough for Shirley to be working on her front porch, she keeps herself occupied. A year or so ago she got the idea of making almost microscopic-sized fruits and vegetables to fill the baskets. Only befitting, since Shirley enjoyed working on the farm before she was no longer able.
Her hand-sculpted eggplants, no bigger than a scribble, fade from purple to white and get topped with a green stem, are a marvel to behold.
“I make the fruits and eggs and vegetables out of clay,” Shirley said. “At first I made them out of play dough but a friend suggested I use clay and it works a lot better. It’s all a learning experience.”
Shirley also keeps her mind busy, thinking up new things to fill the baskets with. “I’m working on lemons and limes at night,” she said.
“I think everyone has a different gift and they should use it,” Shirley said. “You never know what you can do until you try.”
