General News
30 November, 2025
Creating a memorable experience
THERE’S something comforting about feeling like everything is familiar and predictable living in a country town but it also means that sometimes we underestimate just how great something is when a new idea comes along. A handful of times I had peered across Main Street from The Stawell Times-News office at Create It Studios and made my own assumptions, imagining they either sold art supplies or that it was home base for an artist while they worked on their next masterpieces.
Whatever they did in that eclectic-looking mystery in the main drag, I had absolutely formed an opinion that there likely wasn’t anything there for me or a lot of other people.
I couldn’t have been more wrong!
Create It Studios owner Loretta Healy dropped into the Times-News and introduced herself last week, hoping we’d take an interest in what’s on offer only half a drop punt away from our doorstep, because quite frankly, business isn’t exactly booming for her.
When I finally found the time this week to sit down with Loretta to learn about her business, I instantly realised how far off the mark I’d been with all my assumptions
Loretta told me about an activity Create It has hosted over the weekend where a group of friends had spent a few hours at the studio for what she calls Create ’n’ Sip, where the group gathers around a table to socialise and bond with an art activity in front of them, while enjoying a couple of drinks and snacks.
It’s not an exercise in striving for artistic excellence, instead it’s an opportunity to find new ways to connect with people, and with yourself, through a wholesome and unpretentious medium.
“On the weekend, I had Danielle sit here and she said she doesn’t have an artistic bone in her body,” said Loretta about the weekend workshop, which included decorating plaster casts.
“She was so hesitant, obviously they started off as white, and she’s looking at it wondering how we’re going to get them to have a concrete look, and I could just feel the hesitance resonating from her, she didn’t even want to pick up a brush.
“I just touched her on the shoulder and said ‘I’m here for you’ and the girls started laughing, she started laughing, and by the end of it she loved it.”
Create It Studios is set up to tailor all kinds of creative workshop experiences for groups of adults and children from age seven and up, from team building exercised or fun catch up friends, through to memorable kid’s birthday party activities.
Loretta has several decades of experience conducting artistic workshops all over Australia, including a successful decade operating a studio called Have a Look in Montmorency, which specialised in creative workshops for kids.
Art studios had gone onto the back burner when she returned home to Stawell to look after her parents, Laurie and Rita, in their twilight years following an accident on the family’s Black Range property.
“In 2014 my first grandchild was due to be born, I was up on the Gold Coast and Dad had an accident on the farm,” Loretta said.
“He was flown to the Alfred Hospital in a coma, I flew back the next day from the Gold Coast, and my life changed instantly.
“I became a full-time carer, as an only child, I’d promised both my parents I’d look after them.”
Laurie passed in 2017 and Rita’s health declined slowly following a fall in 2018, eventually passing away in 2022.
For Loretta, there was a lot she had bottled up and sacrificed for so many years as she dedicated her time to caring for her parents, and establishing a creative space in Stawell has given her the opportunity to reconnect with things that are joyful and meaningful to her.
“There’s sheer joy in people creating something,” she said, “The healing side if this is getting back to being who I used to be.”
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