Category: Sewing

  • Scraps to the rescue

    Scraps to the rescue

    Among the gifts with the most commentary this year, my VERY last minute lavender eye pillows took the prize, which is hilarious after all my bluster about stashbusting. My tendencies to not donate, give away, or throw out any crafting supplies saved me this year!!

  • My fiber-year in review

    My fiber-year in review

    I chose the featured photo (top of page) as it best reflects my thoughts on the past year, or at least the year since January 21st. In many ways, my sewing, knitting, and crocheting have helped me stay sane in a world that seemed to begin to fall apart around that time.

  • Holiday Self-Care

    Holiday Self-Care

    …we cannot give from an empty vessel. For many people, this has meant waiting for OTHERS to fill them. That’s a dicey proposition, and in many ways sets us up to fail. Caring for ourselves, even in small ways, is as close to a sure thing as it gets.

  • Holiday Shopping Madness

    Holiday Shopping Madness

    Wishing everyone a heart-centered, FIBER-ARTS filled, and peaceful holiday season, this year and always.

  • A loss of community

    A loss of community

    Crafters are creative and can transform simple things into works of art. As we continue to process the stages of “grief” around the loss of community that once resided in our neighborhood Joann stores, we can move on into new ways of being in community, finding and/or creating activities and small groups that promise a…

  • New habits, new norms

    New habits, new norms

    I suspect that a decent proportion of my fabric and yarn stashes came from past sessions of “therapy browsing” on Saturday afternoons or evenings at Joann’s, Michaels or in local fabric and yarn shops. While I have created many things over the years from those purchases, I have ALSO purchased a lot of fabric and…

  • In the spooky spirit

    In the spooky spirit

    Tonight I made my (1st) Halloween cross-body bag following the pattern I have used to make several other bags. Since I’ve made multiple variations of it, this bag went together fairly quickly. Here are a few of my earlier iterations: I have also started to add charms to the zipper pulls as some added glitz…

  • Technology: friend or foe?

    Technology: friend or foe?

    To a person, we all have way more fabric/yarn and patterns than we will EVER make in our lifetimes, regardless of how old we are today. If we limit ourselves to only “wanting” patterns that we will actually sit down and make, there’s no reason – ZERO – we can’t afford the handful of dollars…

  • With apologies to my favorite small businesses

    With apologies to my favorite small businesses

    We don’t have to look far to read or hear bad news about the U.S. economy right now. It’s as close as the cost of increasingly smaller bags of groceries, or the mail box where the credit card companies have been sending out notices about increased interest rates since mid-Summer. Consider the data on a…

  • Reflections

    Reflections

    The last time I shopped in a Joann store was more than three months ago, right before their final closures. I said goodbye to the employees I knew, wishing them well, and as I walked across that parking lot one last time, I knew I was saying goodbye to an era in my life. As…