A Very Crafty Outlook

Lord help me, I want to learn a new craft.

This is seriously the story of my life, or it feels like it sometimes.  Up to this point, I have taught myself how to knit and how to crochet.  My mom taught me the basics of sewing, and I’ve taught myself a bit more beyond that.  I don’t do much knitting or sewing these days (the knitting because it just isn’t fun for me, and the sewing because I honestly don’t have enough room for it to be at all enjoyable), but I do a fair amount of crocheting.  And recently, I’ve been designing my own wedding invitations.

I am forever compelled to learn new crafts mostly because I have very definite ideas about what I want my home to look like.  And with the sewing, I have fairly definite ideas about what I want my clothes to look like.  The ironic thing about this is that I haven’t made anything for myself in at least a couple of years.  I crocheted a bolero type thing (that apparently nobody actually liked the look of), and that’s the last thing I made that wasn’t intended for someone else.

I suppose the other reason why I like to make things is because it’s an outlet for creativity.  A lot of the things you can make with various craft forms are pretty.  They are often useful as well, but their main use in life is often as decoration.  I’m really a rather miserable artist, and my writing is frequently nothing better than mediocre (not that I do much writing), so crafting things gives me an outlet for some of those creative juices, I suppose.  It fulfills the need to make something, and often to make something that never existed anywhere but my own imagination.

So this is why I want to learn to embroider.  It all started because my siblings and I have these really great Christmas stockings.  My aunt made them to match Christmas stockings that my great grandmother made for my mom and her siblings – theirs are made of red felt with a white cuff, and ours are made of green felt with a white cuff.  All of them have our names and birth years embroidered on the cuff, and have felt appliques of toys and a Christmas tree on the body of the stocking (basically, felt shapes with sequins to add detail).  To top it off, there are three little bells on the toe of the stocking, and a bell at the loop used to hang it up.  Really, they’re great, and made even more so because they all very much match without any of them being exactly the same.

So, since my brother has been married for a couple of years, and I’m going to be married pretty soon, I wanted to make stockings for my sister-in-law and for the fiancé.  Eventually, there will be a new generation of children, and I want to practice making these stockings so that I can eventually make them for my nieces and nephews, and for my own children, once any of them make an appearance.

And since I want these stockings to last for, oh, a good 50 years, I want them to be well-constructed.  So for the appliques, once I get around to making them, I will definitely put in a lot of practice before I sew any to the stocking.  And for the embroidery, I want to practice some basic stitches, as well as following a pattern, on cloth that’s easier to work with than felt.

So I was looking around online, and seriously, embroidery can be like painting with thread.  Or like sketching with thread.  Or like sculpting with thread.  It’s really kind of amazing.  So I want to learn.  I think I’m going to try out one or two very small projects as a way of practicing my stitches, since I really do learn best by doing.  I’m hoping to get myself going before I go to Vermont, actually, because it will probably be a much easier craft to travel with than a half-finished afghan.

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