When I went away to college I left my sewing machine at home. I couldn’t sew myself clothes so I became more interested in other ways of making garments. There weren’t many crocheted garments that appealed to me and so I focused on knitting. You can probably guess what happened based on my blog content. My knitting skills improved rapidly and it started to be the only craft I really spent much time on.

I still dabble in sewing and crochet, but my skills have sort of degraded. I’d really like to be equally skillful across all three crafts once again, and I’m making plans to get that to happen. I’ve ordered yarn to crochet myself a sweater, and I’ll be able to reunite with my sewing machine once I settle in to living somewhere more permanently which will hopefully happen this year.

Once upon a time, I used to be a seasonal knitter. I’d knit in the fall and the winter, but when warm weather came around I’d leave my needles to sew. As I became more and more interested in knitting, it started to creep into my spring and summer craft time. I’d work on small portable projects like a hat or a headband in between sewing projects.

And then I started to design and I pretty much stopped sewing. Summer time became design time. While I design and knit my samples during all seasons, I do most of my editing and formatting work in the summer. It feels too much like school work so I tend to put it off until after the end of spring semester.

Despite my craft time becoming work time as summer comes around, I still try to squeeze in the occasional warm weather project. I like being able to wear my knits year round, even if my token knit is just a narrow belt. This summer is going to be my first summer in Washington state and I’m actually going to be able to wear sweaters during the summer. I’m weirdly excited about that.

I had a creative assignment for my Herman Melville class. We had to creatively interpret a scene or theme from Moby Dick. I didn’t have enough time to knit something, but that wasn’t going to stop me from doing something crafty! Inspired by Checkout Girl, I made these companion applique pieces

I chose the scene where Pip gets knocked out of a whaling boat and left behind while the others pursue the whales. There are some academic explanations for why I picked this scene and laid it out on two hoops, but I’ll spare you because I need to write it in essay form later tonight.

Here’s Pip. I did this hoop first so I had a few struggles. Luckily I was working with fairly thick 100% wool felt so I could use some discrete needle felting to touch up on small details like Pip’s thumbs.

I’m really happy with the whaling boat. I drew it out on Illustrator and then printed it to use as a pattern to cut my felt. I embroidered the details. It’s not too shabby for my first real attempts at applique and embroidery