Crafting meme

Libby, at A Simple Girl, was tagged for a craft meme, and open-tagged anyone else. As this one caught my fancy, I'm going to play along.

1. When did you start to make and create crafts?
I remember making dresses from scraps of cloth for my Toni doll when I was about 8 years old, and I once furnished a little "house" for my Cracker Jacks plastic sailor boy using bits and pieces of items. Other than that, I'm not sure I really made anything else until I was in my 20's. Oh, I took Home Ec about 4 years total between 7th and 12th grades, but didn't do too well. I remember still making simple skirts in senior year while the other girls were making coats. My mom bought me a sewing machine for high school graduation and I made a few dresses in nursing school and when I first got married, but they weren't that great, and J-Man kind of discouraged that hobby.

2. Why did you start creating? Darned if I know. I loved reading, stank at sports, and was always a solitary child. I guess this was a natural segue into Things To Do When You're Alone.

3. Why do you create? Maybe it fulfills a long ago need to have something all my own, something that belongs to me. After all, I was the oldest of 4 kids, daughter to a steel worker, and money was tight. Rooms were shared, clothes were homemade or hand-me-downs, and privacy was at a premium. Then again, maybe it's
an attempt by an ordinary person to explore her unique-ness. But always, it's satisfying. Sometimes I feel like the little kid's voice at the end of the credits for The X-Files: " I made that."

4. What do you create? I still make things with bits of fabric: Quilts! Table runners, table toppers, wall-hangings, lap quilts, and bed quilts. I'm still a novice, but I can look at my early projects and see how I've improved. Then, of course, I look at other quilters' works and see how much I NEED to improve.

5. Has this changed since you began crafting? Ohh, yeah. First I started sewing simple skirts, shorts, and later, scrubs. Then a fellow nurse taught me to crochet and I did that for a while. Tried macrame, but that bored me. Needlepoint--also boring. Latch-hooking, ditto. Crewel--nice and did several pieces, then came cross-stitch. Cross-stitching was a lot of fun, but was a strain on my eyesight.


Michael's was offering calligraphy classes, so I signed up for that.

J-Man even gave me one of those small tilt tables and I did some certificates for my daughter's elementary school, but moved on to other crafts. I recently gave my pens and inks and supplies to a fellow nurse who started playing around with calligraphy. He was thrilled, because they were better pens and tips than he, as a single father, had bought for himself.

I took a few beading classes, and I still love to work with beads. I have done one project that incorporated beads and plan to do more. Then I got into rubber stamping, though not scrapbooking, and made my own Christmas cards and other projects for a few years. I miss that, and plan to make more time for that next year, once I'm no longer a group co-leader in my guild. I still have bins of paper, and an old medicine cart with little drawers all filled with stamps, scissor, inks, glitter and all kinds of goodies.


I took my first quilting class at a community education program back in the 70's, before, or maybe just as, quilting began to catch on. I'd decided my first quilt would be a Double Wedding Ring for my sister's wedding, all done by hand. (Yes, I hear the laughter echoing through blogging halls!) We'll save that story for another post.
Didn't do anything more with quilting until 1995 or 96, when J-Man's Christmas gift to me was the money for a quilting class at my local shop. It was a much better class, and I made a sampler lap quilt for my daughter, hand pieced and hand quilted. I was hooked, for life.

Okay, that's the end of that meme. Anyone else out there want to play?