High Points From a Decade of Sewing

Hard to believe it's coming up 2023...

I'm sitting/standing here during the American Thanksgiving long weekend, slightly panicked at the fact that most years, I would have already written a decent draft of my final post for the year.

On this occasion, I've got random notes at best. (As I piece this all together, forgive me if the result turns out to be less than cohesive!)

Usually, as the calendar is about to change over, I'll give myself permission to deviate from the subject of sewing and pontificate on major issues of the moment. This year, those issues have just been so wearying that I am frankly quite happy not to mention them. The world is a mess and the loudest voices are making it messier. Having never been one to put my head in the sand — figuratively speaking — I find myself increasingly envious of ostriches these days.

So I opt to focus on my sewing journey and where it's taken me. As I complete year ten of my renewed passion for sewing, what does the road travelled look like?

Part of a decade's worth of
handmade bags...

Not quite yellow brick road, but pretty darn close.

Not only that, the blogging part of this adventure has returned more back to me than I ever imagined it would. The process has yielded unexpected lessons and rewards both big and small.

I have a vivid memory of the decision to start this little endeavour. Knowing — or maybe not knowing — the failure/success rate of new blogs, it was a bit of a scary commitment. On the other hand, there was also the distinct possibility that no one would even be aware of my blog in the first year or so to miss it if it didn't succeed. (Failure in isolation; I could handle that.)

But the desire to share the sewing adventure that I had already embarked upon in the year previous — i.e, 2012, ten years ago — convinced me to go for it. Not only had I reconnected with a hobby that used to be an important part of my life, it had already led me to a surprising level of creativity.

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I like to call it being creative outside of the box, and it was something that I really wanted to convey to fellow sewers. It first happened to me in the summer of 2013, several months before this blog was born.

Three of the test bags behind the Make it Yours Bag...

I ended up designing a pattern and writing up a tutorial for a simple yet versatile purse, which ultimately became my Make it Yours Bag. By that time, I had already sewn up several bags and — tapping into my skills as a tech writer and documentation designer — found that it was a natural progression for me to develop a pattern of my own. Needless to say, when I started sewing again, this was not something that I saw on the horizon.

So a secondary objective for starting the blog was for it to assist with selling that pattern. I knew that the (old) Craftsy marketplace was the ideal place to sell from, but having an online presence to establish an identity for myself was a necessary stepping stone. Because — to reiterate my original focus — my aim wasn't just to sell a pattern; I wanted to document the ongoing journey of my coming back to sewing, sharing lessons along the way and discovering innovative means to put it all into practice.

That's been my motivation for the past decade. Luckily, when I started this blog in late 2013, I already had a year of that journey under my belt, so I wasn't stuck thinking about what to write on a weekly basis.

Here's the project that started it all, the thing that I dropped needle into fabric on October 28, 2012 to do some real sewing for the first time in years: the Professional Tote.

The project that started this adventure: the Professional Tote...

Obviously, this pattern is fairly old, but I still see references to it in 2022, so for a variety of reasons, it remains popular. Personally, I'm thankful for it having been created, because if not, my friend in BC would not have taken a class to make the bag, in which case, I would never have seen it and this blog would literally not exist. (Aren't some cases of cause and effect just so totally mind-blowing??)

In hindsight, I'm also grateful for the lessons learned from making this bag. (Learned them early, too, as described in this post.) How many times have you been drawn to a project that someone has made and instantly say, I must make this for myself! And then you dive right into it without further thought.

It takes patience — and a willingness to delay gratification — to stop and ask oneself, how best can I make this to fit my needs? Let's just say that while I appreciated the making of the Professional Tote at that time in my life (it felt like an accomplishment as it's not exactly an easy pattern with which to slide back into sewing after decades away), the bag itself is not really suited to my needs. After using it once or twice, it's since become a container for my various handmade travel items. (You can see glimpses of my Yahtzee wallet, travel notebook, and sleep mask in the photo above.)

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The major lesson learned was that for most of my future bag projects, I would take the time to think about how to change them to make them fit my preferences. (Or to fit the availability of materials, which was always an ongoing challenge for me because I usually didn't have just the right amount of "whatever" on hand.) Over the years, I've tagged seventeen blog posts with the label "customizing patterns", which speak to the subject of doing just that. I hope to have demonstrated that it's not difficult to do and advantageous to attempt.

My three remaining MyTies hanging around...

And what about when something you want to sew doesn't exist as a pattern at all? Have I inspired any of you to put on your most powerful thinking caps to achieve your own MyTie? I'm not saying to make a similar bag out of a tie, but to come up with a solution when you can't find one anywhere else. When I first saw these little bags (check out posts labelled "the tie project"), no one was selling a pattern to make them. Therefore, I had to come up with my own.

It turned out to be a major win-win, since my desire to make one was universally understood: it was a way to memorialize my late father. Turns out there are a lot of people who think converting a tie into a small purse or clutch is an ideal way to remember the special men in our lives.

Successfully "copying" a desktop organizer...

Ironically, my dad's only remaining neck tie never did get transformed into a mini bag, but the whole of my efforts to develop and release that pattern — which covered a rather intense three month period in 2014 — was in honour of him. (I believe I made six MyTies during that time, the most I've ever made of any one thing.)

I repeated this immensely satisfying process of making something strictly from sight when I sewed up this desktop caddy/organizer in 2017. (I've thought several times about writing it up as a pattern for sale, but I truly think that my interest in developing patterns has waned.)

Looking further along the road travelled upon, a major signpost would have to be the one that marked an unforeseen detour into the world of fabric design.

For someone who wrote in late 2013 (about an experience that happened in 2012), "...three things that I previously didn't know: the existence of Etsy, the fact that fabrics have "designers", and that fabric designs have names", it was a bit of a leap that in April 2015, I would sell my first piece self-designed fabric. Obviously, another example of something that I had no expectation of doing when I restarted sewing.

In terms of rewards, it's an indescribable feeling to see what other people create with my fabrics. (Note that while I've sold other designs, I have not seen what has been made with any of them apart from my P&P fabrics.)

Various projects made with my Pride & Prejudice fabric...

Oh, and in quite a different variant of irony, the pandemic threw me a bit of a generous curve with respect to fabric sales: 2020 was a "very good year" as everyone was busy buying fabric to make masks.

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Although the future is certainly unknown, it's been feeling like it's the right time to wind this up. Readership is down. (Not that I've ever been a numbers person, but I see my stats and they tell a story.) I suspect people are generally engaging less and less with blogs these days, which is unfortunate because it's still my preferred social platform.

After the blogging stops, I won't stop sewing — I do have supplies to use up, after all, and the interest is still there. But I won't be pressured with a regular goal of making something with the point of sharing the result. On that front, it's seriously becoming a challenge to find things that I haven't seen ten times over when I scour the internet looking for inspiration.

More of a decade's worth of handmade bags!

While I came into this journey focused on purses and bags, it's clear from the photo above — and the other photo near the top of this post — that I don't need any more of those. (And that's not even inclusive of all that I've made.) I mainly ignore new bag projects that I come across these days.

A thought that's always been at the back of my mind is that when I run out of sewing related things to write about, it'll mean the end of this blog, for all practical purposes. I'm getting very close to that point.

Do I have enough content to last me to the end of year ten? I truly don't know. But then, I've never known and yet here I am.

'Til next (year)...