From Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of an ugly cygnet’s transformation from unattractive and awkward into a beautiful swan, it’s one of our metaphors for transformation.
Transformation is always exciting and always life enhancing. It’s the way that things are extended or put together that creates a beautiful thing, so working on homes and furnishings is to see and be involved with continuous and continual transformation – a roll of fabric into a beautiful pair of curtains, a piece of holiday batik into bed cushions, a pile of bricks and wood into a garden room. The ugly duckling into beautiful swan.
The business of transformation is to enter the realm of possibility, to re-think what is into what can be. We think something really beautiful and useful can be made out of anything, however awful.
Another metaphor, perhaps more often applied to creating is “make a silk purse out of a sows ear.”