  One of the questions investigated in deformation theory is to determine to
which algebras can a given associative algebra be deformed. In this paper we
investigate a different but related question, namely: for a given associative
finite-dimensional C-algebra A, find algebras N which can be deformed to A. We
develop a simple method which produces associative and flat deformations to
investigate this question. As an application of this method we answer a
question of Michael Wemyss about deformations of contraction algebras.
