FREDERICTON – A past time once reserved for kids is now catching on with adults.
Fredericton’s Teressa Betts says adult colouring books are becoming all the rage. She has found peace of mind through a coloured pencil.
“I can sit down and colour something and don’t think about anything,” said Betts who took up colouring earlier this year while undergoing chemotherapy treatments for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“Now when I go and have my chemo I take my little book and my pencil crayons and all the nurses are like, ‘What are you colouring today?'”
Betts is now in remission and is almost done of her treatments. But she says her passion will carry on far beyond her hospital room.
She and her friend Shelly Smith recently joined a social media adult colouring group started in Fredericton called “Just Add Colour.”
“If you have had a tough day and or you are just tired it just kind of soothes you and relaxes you and you lose track of time so easy,” said Smith.
The Facebook group is already almost 500 members strong and growing.
“It’s an amazing way to just go out of your mind just releasing all of whatever is going on in there and just colour,” said Kathy Corey from Endeavours Art in Fredericton.
Right now Betts and Smith are focusing their efforts on one very special book.
“We also have traveling colouring books we have two books that are actually traveling around the Maritimes. One person colours a page and they sign and date it and then send it on to the next person,” said Smith.
The traveling colouring book has already made its way through parts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and P.E.I and it may soon even go global.
People from as far away as the U.K. have recently joined the “Just Add Colour” Facebook page.
Betts says tracking the books’ path and appreciating other’s art has helped take her mind off of being sick.
She says colouring for her truly has been therapeutic and maybe even a little addictive.
“I have stayed up till three o’clock in the morning colouring before and I have 80 colouring books.”
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