I think I get it from my mom's side of the family. My grandmother paints. She makes beautiful oil paintings of the New Mexico landscape. My mother sews. She's obsessed with quilting, sewing and knitting. And tatting. My mom does a lot of fiber arts. Also scrapbooking. And cooking, that's her new favorite thing. And...Ukranian Eggs. She is the one who taught me to sew and knit.
This is the quilt my mom made for me when I was a tiny. This was her first ever quilt and she decided to do applique. For those of you who don't know, applique is one of the most difficult things to do when quilting. The usual thing one starts with is a nine square, which is just sewing squares of fabric together into strips...
She also made me some clothes and, recently, tons of knitted socks.
So that's where I started. Mom taught me how to sew and the first thing I made was a black broomstick skirt. And that was awful and I hated it. It took tooooons of gathering because it was a full circle skirt. And she made me do all the gathers equally. Forever. Something weird, though...is now I like gathering and tedious stuff like that.
Since I didn't like that, I stopped sewing and started crocheting. I picked that because I thought you could make more with it than knitting. I made some hats and some wrist warmers, etc. But then I saw a pattern in Vogue knitting for a bomber style hat and I wanted to make it...but it was knitted. So that was my first real project. I, like my mother, picked the more difficult, interesting thing rather than a boring old scarf. Because it was a hat, it had shaping and I learned that knitting was versatile too. So I quit crochet (it also made my wrist hurt with all the repetitive motions).
I've been knitting ever since then. I knit all through high school. This keeps me focused in boring classes. If I don't knit, I fall asleep or lose interest and stop paying attention. I've knit mostly hats and arm warmer things. I knit one afghan entirely out of Lion Brand fun fur (it's twin size...and still not quite finished). My roommates and I call it the LSD Monster (because it looks like a bad trip) and my mom calls it the Amazing Technicolor dream blanket (because she doesn't like our drug reference). I knitted it in squares of all different colors and got all obsessive about the order of the colors. I made a chart so that none of the same color is in the same row or column or diagonally touching.
I've only ever made one garment, a shirt, with knitting. I get super impatient and bored of knitting if the project takes too long, so I've just done simple things. Those rainbow gloves I made took forever...and I only have one glove because it's in timeout.
AND NOW to the sewing! I started a quilt on my mom's machine when I was a senior in high school. And again, true to my nature, I picked a more difficult pattern. I'm making a tumbling block quilt out of batik fabrics that goes from greens to purples in dark to light. I, again, made a chart on where to put each fabric, so it is perfectly planned out. I'm mostly finished with it. One row needs to be taken off and re sewn because it curves a bit, but then all it needs is a border and a backing and quilting.
Mom got me a sewing machine for Christmas a year ago, and I absolutely love the thing. I made myself a few dresses and made a tshirt into a superman dress and then discovered Threadbanger. I gobbled that up as much as possible and made a bunch of the shirt to culottes by Ryan Moore. And then I found Burda Style and that brings us just about to now.
I sew on knits so much that I needed a serger, so I bought one from a couple I found on craigslist and I couldn't be happier. It is sooooo fast! It makes sewing knits super amazingly awesome. I love it. A lot.
And that's mostly the background for now. I'll post some of the things I've made as I come across the pictures.
Cheers!
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