Mad Craft Skills

When you enter my house, you know you have entered the domain of people who craft.

There is embroidery on the walls, and home made pillows on the couch. If it is winter, my children are likely to walk by you in home made pullover and hoodie sweaters. Year round there is a crochet afghan on the back of all the living room seating.

From bits of yarn fluff and embroidery floss clinging to a t-shirt, to the glint from the beads that rolled under the sofa and were never retrieved, to the scissors labeled in large letters "PAPER" and "Fabric" there are a million little signs that someone here is making things.

You could say I am a fiber arts tourist. When I was 9 or 10 my mother had a sewing circle that came over once a month, and I wanted to join in. So she took me to Leewards and let me pick out an embroidery kit. It was a sail boat that I thought looked just like my uncles sail boat. And I proudly sat in that group of women and stitched my little heart out, probably stifling conversations that they wanted to have but could not in front of little ears. I am guessing that based on my own experience with sewing and knitting groups and what we discuss.

That purchase started a life long obsession that has led to a large selection of embroidery floss, boxes of fabric and a collection of very bright colors of very soft yarn, that I seem to take out, pet and admire more than I knit.

Home Economics in middle school started me down the path of more traditional sewing, where my first project was pillow that looked like a giant mouse.

And that launched an obsession with stuffed toys. Every little girl and boy I knew got either a doll or a stuffed animal (usually a dinosaur). For a while I only did them with closed eyes as that was much easier to embroider, but then they started to get eyes in every color under the rainbow, usually not eye colors seen in nature. I am sure some of those dolls looked more creepy than cute.

Since then my children have had dresses, skirts and pants, all made by their loving mother. I have made some very nice cross stitch Christmas Stockings. And some hats scarves and sweaters for the people that I love, which were received with various degrees of enthusiasm.

Middle school was also when I discovered magazine subscriptions were available for cross stitch. Even weave cloth blossomed with flowers. Pillows with angels, and old fashioned saying abounded.

Over the years, I have learned you can ease fabric together to join a larger piece to a smaller piece in clothing, but you can not do that in a quilt. That all embroidery floss are not equal. And that there is a reason more expensive materials are more expensive.

But let's go back to the sail boat embroidery that started it all. I never finished it. Which also seems to have set a lifelong pattern, as I have two sweaters in various stages of construction, a pair of pants partially assembled, a unicorn partially embroidered, and my second ever double knit project that may never get finished.

One sweater stalled out when I ran out of yarn, and by the time I had gotten more, I had started the second sweater, progress on both has slowed to a snails crawl as I keep switching between them. I don't think the pants will fit when finished, I gained some weight, and I don't want to finish them and find that out for sure. The unicorn embroidery is huge. Yes, I knew that when I started it, but it seems huger now than it did in the beginning, frankly, I am intimidated by the size of the project, but it is still getting work done. That double knit shawl takes more than 90 minutes a row, I rarely have that much time to sit down and knit uninterrupted, and the pattern is complex enough, and the technique new enough, I need that time to be uninterrupted.

But I am not that different from others I know with similar hobbies. We all seem to have unfinished projects around. Often for years.

One could say my crafts are a bit of an obsession. I don't know how people wait for a doctors appointment without something to do. Ok, now they look at their phones. But before the cell phone was everywhere, I always had a bit of knitting or embroidery I could take with me. While other people just sat and waited.

Perhaps I am an oddball, it certainly seems that the rest of the world gets by just fine without doin any knitting or sewing. But I can not imagine a life without my creative pursuits.