I've been crocheting, sewing, and embroidering as long as I can remember. I used to cross-stitch baby bibs to welcome new wee ones to the family. In high school, I made long fashion scarves for my friends.

I learned the drop-pull method of dyeing eggs when I was 4 or 5 years old. I used coloured crayons melted down for my wax so I could make embossed eggs. When I got older, I was allowed to switch to wax-resist dyeing and so use many rounds of wax, dye, wax, dye, before removing the wax at the end (the part that my family considered dangerous).

My grandma and her sister taught me these crafts, but when I was about 10 I decided to go further than they'd taught me. I switched from embroidery on printed patterns to counted cross-stitch, and I taught myself the Ukrainian way of dyeing eggs (pysanky), using a kitska instead of the tool I grew up with (a pencil with a straight pin). Later, in high school, I learned to read a crochet pattern and started making doilies. My grandmother only taught me to reverse engineer crocheting.

At the end of December 2010, I learned to knit Continental-style, and in April 2011 I decided to expand my skills in the fibre arts to include spinning my own yarn.

In the spring of 2011, I read the book Through the Eye of a Needle. It's a book about handmaking, locally-made clothing, locally-sourced raw materials, and all sorts of things like that. One very neat thing I learned from the book is that the reason you always see Gandhi spinning thread in photos from interviews is that he was encouraging the Indian people to spin and weave their own cotton. The economic advantage England gained from colonizing India was that they could buy cheap cotton from India, spin and weave it in factories, then sell it back to the Indian people at a much higher price. By cutting out the English middleman, Gandhi was hitting the colonialists where it hurt. It worked. That's why India added a spinning wheel to their flag.

Years ago, when Etsy first started, I got an email from them suggesting I sell my pysanky there. At the time, I was into web coding and figured I could setup PayPal myself, and then I never got around to it. Nowadays, I hate the tedium of web coding, so I'm on Etsy.

Etsy shop owners: if you don't live in America/New_York timezone and want your shop stats graphs to give local time, try my Greasemonkey script.

Fiber Status

In Progress

Elizabethan stocking yarn

Recently Finished