Craft Polygamy - it's everything you could wish for

My real love is quilting and has been a constant for more than a quarter of a century,  since I discovered the first issue of Popular Patchwork at the supermarket in 1993. The cover had a sampler quilt in brown. I was in love.  (well maybe not with the brown).  I went for blue and yellow which was the colour of my bedroom at the time (good old Laura Ashley). Each little triangle on this tree of life was sewn individually - I think there was nearly one hundred pieces in this 12" block.

 The Strawberry was my introduction to curved piecing.

 And this rose design ignited an interest in Amish Quilting and then, naturally Durham Quilting.

All hand stitched from the piecing and quilting to the binding. Not a machine in sight. I was mindful that the quilting should look the same on the back as it did on the front. It was mostly cut with scissors and homemade templates.

I was having trouble getting points to match and my mother suggested going to a quilting shop she'd seen whilst in Newcastle. This was new to me as fabric had to be bought from Laura Ashley or other haberdashery shops, it was the first specialist quilting shop in the area.

I took the trip and it was the best thing that ever happened in my creative career.  The lady, called Pearl, had a massive supply of 100% cotton - about sixty bolts! Unheard of luxury. Now of course shops stock hundreds and even thousands of bolts. She showed me how to mark the fabric and match up the points; how to sew the little quilting stitches and what to put in the 'sandwich'.  I'd made clothes for me and for my dollies, lots of cross stitch and knitting but nothing like this. I was totally beguiled.  Over the months that followed I got a ruler, rotary cutter and mat. I loved the rhythmic nature of the stitching which somehow must have been in my blood. My paternal grandmother and her twin sister had been seamstresses at Harrod's, making bespoke silk underwear.  They used to knit and crochet beautiful fine jumpers and shawls too.

I've loved craft painting too, and had a wonderful teacher in Sandra from the Crafts House (now very sadly retired from her teaching). I saw some of her work at a quilt shop nearby and called in to see about learning her craft. It was magical. She is a talented and creative artist and a patient teacher. (Not to mention a very lovely person). Her husband would cut any shape you wanted from wood. Now I have to get them laser cut which produces exact shapes, but they don't have that organic nature which only hand-cutting can produce. I particularly loved the way you could create painted fabrics. This has led me to dabbling in fabric design which is something I will definitely pursue when time allows - it is a much longer and more complicated process than I ever imagined. That and I have had to learn how to use design software at the same time, although it often starts as a watercolour.

I know many people are monogamous to their passion but I'm a bit of a tart when it comes to creativity. I've loved knitting since I was a young teenager but when cross-stitch came along my knitting needles fell silent for a while.

Knitting was briefly re-ignited when the boys were willing to wear hand knits (and machine knits when my father decided to buy me a knitting machine and then a spinning wheel).  I didn't keep up with the machine knitting - it didn't have the same fascination as the slower, mesmeric counting that goes with hand knitting and crochet.  I still have the spinning wheel and intend to dust it off when I retire.  When I first got it, sourcing fleece was more difficult. I lived on a farm at the time and had some sheep of my own,  but with two young children and a little farm shop to run, preparing fleece was low down on the agenda. Now you can buy a huge variety of fleece in different stages of preparedness and more particularly, lots of different blends.

Latterly crochet has taken a big chunk of my crafting time and I have loved discovering the gorgeous yarns - the choice is incredible. Thanks to Barbara at Ring-a-Rosie in Whitley Bay I have access to an incredible range of yarns.  Visiting Yarndale in Skipton and UnRavel in Farnham means I have a super collection of Indie-Dyed Yarns. It also spurned a love of smaller items like wrist warmers and cowls which are much quicker to knit up and don't depend on getting the right tension. This is good considering the vast array of different yarn weights which don't translate like they used to do when I was first knitting. 4 ply, double knitting, aran and shetland lace yarn were the only weights then - you could use any manufacturer for any pattern.

The fascination with the hand-dyed yarns made me want to try that, which I finally did with Alex a couple of weeks ago.  We're booked on another workshop at the beginning of February to learn how to use natural ingredients to dye the yarn.  Coming home with a skein of hand-dyed yarn re-ignited my knitting mojo - back after a couple of decades or so.  I've sat up late at night and knitted early in the mornings.

The thing that I'm pleased about the most is that I haven't really given up on any of these crafts. There's nothing really stored "under the bed" (apart from my embarrassingly large stash of fabric). There are quite a few things that I don't use so much now like my Sizzix Cutter but I do use them occasionally.

I think all these handcrafts I enjoy have been kept alive by the blogs and podcasts of other people as much as my real-life crafting friends. It's a whole new community that you can give you answers to any problem, including how to make a Sew Demented Zippered Bag which would have gone in the bin long ago if it hadn't been for YouTube. They give inspiration and share their passion which is very infectious.

One of the bloggers  - Posie Gets Cozy - has recently been making Hand Lotion Bars. As a quilter and knitter I use a lot of hand lotion and was pleased to see the solid bars which of course don't need plastic bottles.  Alex's friend, Sally, is up from Lancashire next weekend and we are squirrelling supplies to make our own hand lotion bars.

People often ask me what my favourite colours are. The truth is I don't have a favourite colour, I love them all. Colour is the the magic that binds all these crafts together. When it comes to colour I'm just as much of a tart with that too and, at my time of life, it's the only tartage I can get.