Piuma Mitts by Heather Zoppetti
Hello! How have you all been during this difficult year? What have you been knitting lately? I have really missed you readers and our chats about knitting style. Knitting has been such a wonderful source of joy for me and my family and I spent much of the pandemic knitting scores of teeny tiny gnomes and unicorns I could give away to family and friends as a bright spot in a dark time. I particularly enjoyed sewing matching bow ties, skirts and knitting tops for my nieces and nephews for our family reunion this year! It felt like such an amazing gift for us to see each other in person at last that I wanted to celebrate as much as possible!
A-line Skirt from Sew Sweet Handmade Clothes for Girls
Spring Garden Tee by Alana Dakos
A-line Skirt from Sew Sweet Handmade Clothes for Girls
Hollyburn Skirt Pattern (adult)
https://www.instructables.com/
Well, it’s been a while since my last post. In specific, I last blogged at the end of September of 2020! It’s not that I stopped knitting or sewing during the pandemic. But it didn’t feel right for me to blog about a personal crafting journey when the news was full of such overwhelmingly serious problems. I suppose, like many, I fell back on a coping mechanism, which in my case was focusing on what I could do to make things better for the people in my life day-to-day. Due to the new online format of school, life became difficult for many of the families that I support as students struggled to learn on their own while teachers had to juggle their classroom commitments along with helping their own children learn at home. So, I doubled my work hours as an academic tutor and experienced the joys of Zoom Fatigue first hand. In spite of all the challenges, through our strong teamwork and dedication, my students made it through online school. However, this teaching 1:1 involved sometimes as much as seven hours a day and the brain drain from this workload was enormous. As a result, I focused on knitting small projects mostly that I could make in short periods of time.
Looking back, however, I realize it was the knitting podcasts and Instagram photos and blogs I read the last year that really kept me hoping for better things day to day. And if knitting emotionally supported me so much, I realized I shouldn’t undervalue my own crafty ramblings as unimportant. Let’s face it, my quest to assemble knitted + sewn clothes into great outfits has seemed pretty unimportant in the grander scheme of things. But the courage and hope I gained from creating gifts for my whole family as well as some garments made by hand allowed me to face everything else that was difficult in life, so perhaps it is somehow worth mentioning. I will try to post a few retrospectives on key crafty gains from last year over the next month.
I would love to hear from you about what crafting or other activities kept you inspired and sane this past year!