First Post!

It all started when my sister Emily (pictured below!) travelled all the way from the middle of nowhere, Missouri to the middle of nowhere, Toronto suburbs to visit me.

My craft guru, looking cute in a grocery store!

Emily and I had previously decided to make a collaborative craft project for our sister Kirsta's birthday--a decorative pillow that I had been embroidered by me and sewn by Emily. While she was here, we went to a fabric store to get materials for Kirsta's birthday pillow. I started embroidering again for the first time in months and discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that I hadn't lost the touch--the project went quickly and smoothly and the final product looked the way Emily and I had imagined it. (Although that was my first craft project, it's not pictured here in order to prevent Kirsta from seeing it and spoiling the surprise)

I enjoyed working on Kirsta's present and resolved to start crafting on a more regular basis. Crafting is in many ways an ideal hobby--it's a form of creative expression, it's cheap (tutorials are free on the internet, and I get more supplies than I could possibly use at the dollar store down the road), it's time flexible, and best of all, it sometimes has the added bonus of producing things that are beautiful, useful or both.

This blog is modeled after Emily's craft blog (http://craftthepainaway.blogspot.ca/) and the basic idea is that I will use it to document my craft progress and motivate myself to keep crafting.