My Sewing History

Obviously I haven’t been baking much. It’s all about sewing these days, and that doesn’t lend itself well (for me, anyway), to stopping much for photographs. In an effort to try this blogging thing again, I’ve decided to participate in something called Sew Thinky Thursdays, put on by Emily at Mommy’s Nap Time.  She poses a question for the sewing/blogging world, and those interested answer the question in an effort to get to know each other better. I’ll start with that, and then see if something clicks and I can find something to talk about on my own in the weeks ahead.

The first questions Emily posed:

When did you start sewing? Tell us a bit about your sewing history. When did you realize you were really hooked? 

I didn’t start sewing until I was 43.  I did a lot of cross stitch and needlework, various crafts (stained glass mosaic, paper crafts, photography, to name a few), but never sewing. My mom sewed when I was a kid. In fact, she made all my clothes until about third grade. I hated going to the fabric store with her – I had no ability to imagine the clothes in any fabric other than was pictured on those paper envelopes, and it felt like we’d spend hours and hours in the fabric store. BOR-ING.

In high school, when everyone else was taking home ec, I wanted NO part of it. I took typing and other business-related classes (but for the life of me I can’t remember any of them but typing). Somewhere around 2005, my mother-in-law gave me a sewing machine. How nice was that?! But nothing inspired me enough to even take it out of the box.

Fast forward to 2010. I was living in northern Washington state. It was dark and cold, I didn’t have a social life, my creative juices were stagnating, and I got invited to a baby shower. I decided I wanted to make a quilt. No idea where that came from, but I was determined. Since I had just about three weeks, I decided on a rag quilt. I got a lot of help from some friends online and a few YouTube tutorials, and I made this:

I was hooked. HOOKED.  We eventually moved back to Portland, but not for another two years. Sewing pulled me through those dark, lonely days. And it keeps pulling me through my days – I work long hours from home, I can’t get out of the house much, and I don’t know what I’d do without sewing to keep me going. Reading some of the other bloggers that have been participating in this link-up exercise, apparently I'm not the only one that finds sewing a form of therapy.