Dipping my toe into the Blogging world

Having viewed various blogs I have decided that it is time to test the waters and start one myself.

I suppose I have 'crafted' most of my life, certainly as a fairly young child I was very much 'into' knitting and my idea of fun was to have a small skein of yarn and some needles and to knit until the yarn ran out then to unpick it and start again. I can remember asking for a couple of ounces of wool and some needles for my birthday present when I was about eight or nine years old. We were a very poor family so that would be my only present. I also liked to sew and would sew little scraps of fabric and remember being very neat in my work especially bearing in mind my age.

The first piece of knitting of any real use, unless you count the dishcloth made at school, was a hat which I made when I was just about eleven years old. I didn't have a pattern, just looked at the hats of my friends and worked out how to make one of my own. This involved decreasing in order to fit my head snugly. I wore the hat with pride. At eleven I also remember making a skirt at school and wore it on a regular basis.

As a teenager I was heavily into dressmaking, making many of my clothes. By late my teens I was making tailored suits for work, sewing was something that I really enjoyed doing. I was also still knitting, but only for other people, boyfriends and the likes. I didn't start knitting for myself until much later, then it was almost an obsession, I took my knitting everywhere and would even stand outside my daughter's school with a piece of knitting on circular needles waiting for her to come out of school.

I also enjoyed tapestry and other canvas embroidery. I gave up knitting and tapestry when I had cats, the hassle of trying to keep them off me and for them not to play with my wool was too much effort. The cats have now departed this world and I tried knitting again earlier this year but found that the stroke that I suffered in 2005 had meant that knitting was painful so I have decided to hang up my needles, or more to the point sell off all my yarns at a charity boot sale later in this month.
I entered the world of cardmaking three years ago, having watched cardmaking on QVC I decided to make some myself as I was no longer working (not of choice). My first attempts were, to put it mildly, awful but at the time I thought they were quite good.