My hobby is collecting hobbies.
It started with friendship bracelets when I was a pre-teen. Then, I took that DMC floss that I was using and started cross stitching.
In college, I was a little overweight, so I took up knitting to do something with my hands instead of eating. Spoiler alert: It didn’t help. But I got pretty good at following patterns and even designed something of my own once.
Then I learned about GOOD yarn, which led me to fiber festivals. Then I bought a spinning wheel and learned to use it. Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a distaff, not a spindle.
One skein of yarn that I got was beautiful, but I didn’t think it was going to look as good knitted. But woven…that would look great paired with a solid color in a kind of houndstooth plaid! So I bought a loom.
Then, I found some beautiful fabric that would make a great knitting bag…so I learned to sew. My grandmother also used to sew, so I knew the basics. But then instead of bags, I found some cute clothing patterns, but they were made from stretchy fabric, which my basic machine didn’t like – so I also got a serger.
Then the vinyl cutting craze hit, so of course I had to get one of those, too! And the regular iron didn’t work great to attach this to shirts since it wasn’t even pressure, so I got a heat press as a Christmas gift.
And we also found a really cheap 3D printer and thought “What the hell!” That one didn’t last long (the motherboard went to crap), but we found a step up from that. We use it to make random things, like a lock for the shower door so the cat can’t open it. We mostly use other people’s opensource files, but I did manage to design a few cool things on my own.
I continue to dabble in all the things, sometimes even making progress and finishing a project, so I thought I might do a bi-monthly series on my productive time wasting adventures and share works in progress and maybe some older completed projects.
FIRST UP
I signed up to do a murder mystery quilt this year. We get one block pattern a month and a chapter of a murder mystery. The pattern helps solve the case and correct guesses are entered for a chance at a prize – but you also get a quilt out of it, assuming you do all the steps.
I’ve never quilted before, but have a bunch of old tee shirts that I want to make into a quilt someday, and I’ve always appreciated the work, so here are my January blocks (4 of the same) – completed 2 days before I get the February pattern! I have no idea what the finished item will look like. We got fabric color suggestions when we signed up, but I thought this would be a great way to break up a big project into manageable pieces to learn! So far, so good!
Now I just need to read that first chapter…