Sew Grateful Week

I am quietly following the Sew Grateful Week put together by Debi of My Happy Sewing Place. On the schedule for today is a reflection post, so here are my thoughts on for what I am 'sew grateful':

I have a sewing machine, and I have a blog, but both are quite new to me and so I don't really feel that I can call myself a sewing blogger. Yet. In the few weeks that I have started to move away from just knitting towards mastering my sewing machine, I've rattled around the blogosphere and found more than I could possibly imagine. In particular, Did You Make That?, Tilly and the Buttons and Colette Patterns have provided both joy and inspiration, and encouraged me just to sit down at the machine and give it a go: the materials for my first Sorbetto are being assembled.

I am also enormously grateful to my mother. While my siblings and I were growing up, she did not sew as a hobby or to make us clothes per se, but it seemed that the ability to make things was a given in our household, from lace-making and baking to running up costumes for school plays: I remember a bear costume fashioned from a squirrel suit, and a shift dress and shorts for a production of The Boy Friend.

There has always been a sewing box at home, now a tea caddy of coloured threads, a felt pincushion decorated with a sun-shaped button that I made at school and another in silk with Chinese men holding hands around it. The tape measure with which my sister and I would measure our waists.

My mother has supported my new enthusiasm for sewing in a material way: a sewing machine as a birthday present, then books for Christmas and the promise of her spare pinking shears. The other day, she told me that she had some fabric that I 'can have to cut up', just as when I was a child. It made me smile, as I felt like an industrious little girl again - and reminded me that all this is play. Work and skill and hopefully valued results, but play nonetheless. A good thing to remember.