Yup, if these hands aren't working they are transporting Doritos or some other crunchy snack to my mouth!
As a kid arts and crafts was always a favorite past time, using whatever we had at home or whatever my Grandma would buy me for christmas....candle making kits, a microscope and DIY slides, Doodle Art...loved it all!
I also fell in love with photography at a young age and remember the focus I had during a class trip for which my mom lent me her Brownie...I was hooked!
So hooked that I wanted my own 35mm camera so bad it was a big factor in choosing the jornalism course in college....finally I would have the funds to get that camera...oh, and I loved writing so it was a great fit.
Flashforward to my first full time job as a reporter at a daily newspaper. I looooved it, reporting both daily news and longer feature stories about anything and everything, including the arts, in my community.
And I realized you could be artsy and make a living, or at least make it a valued hobby while you worked a "regular" job. I wanted to be artsy too...to create something with my hands outside of working the camera... so I taught myself to knit and crochet.
My mother knew how to knit but I just couldn't learn from her...so I had to teach myself. I remember calling her late one night asking her "how do I stop?"
I leaned to cast off and that was it...I was off!
And i found a whole new world of color....and texture...something I realized later was and is a common theme in my photography!
Raising three boys, dealing with a few serious health issues, and a divorce, I have found that working alone with my hands and needles/hooks has become my meditation and leads me to "talk" things out in my head when things get stressful.
The night before my open heart surgery in 2009 I was crocheting dishcloths for my roommate and a nurse....and knew I was on my way to recovery a month afterwards when I could pick up a set of needles and knit for 5minutes.....
Today I struggle with a brain that tells me "I can make that!"
and actually making all that I add to my ever growing list of ideas.
I rarely use patterns, just eyeballing it....but I have managed to create a pattern that I'm pretty proud of, and with the help of another Etsian who helped me format the instructions, I've sold that pattern to crocheters from the United states to Ireland and over to South Africa.
My goals for 2013 is to learn to knit socks and to write out patterns for more of my crochet designs!