My journey to sewing

I wish I could say that I’ve been a lifelong lover of sewing and knitting. However, neither hobby really stuck until I was a few years out of uni, and looking for ways to escape my devices. My mum had previously encouraged me to learn how to sew, but for various reasons (general teenage aloofness, and a fear of the sewing machine pedal), it didn’t stick with me for a while.

That all changed in the autumn of 2023, when I finally got the urge to start making my own clothes. I began with a simple case for my Kindle, and then catapulted myself into making a striped jersey top. It’s safe to say I learned a lot in those short few weeks under the careful supervision of my mum.

I’ve always been that way with hobbies though! When I learned how to embroider in 2020, I went from embroidering a basic flower on a top, to embroidering a portrait of my cat in the space of a couple of months. Beginner tutorials tend to feel too limiting to me, and I usually want to get on to the kind of projects that drew me to the hobby in the first place.

My journey to knitting

Knitting has a very similar origin story for me. I remember my mum attempting to teach to in middle school, before I’m sure I promptly returned to watching Disney Channel.

During a week of annual leave in September 2025, I finally decided it was time to give knitting a proper go. Off I went to my local yarn store, where I picked up a random ball of DK weight yarn and some circular needles, and headed home with the plan to make a ribbed beanie. Fast forward to 2026, the ribbed beanie never ended up getting finished, because I jumped straight into the Step By Step Sweater by Florence Miller instead. I will never stop raving about how amazing that pattern is as a beginner resource. Even now that I’m a few projects in, I go back to that tutorial sometimes to remember which way round I need to do things.