I’ve sewn my whole life — or as long as I can remember. My mom definitely taught me when I was a kid, beginning with hand-stitching tasks and working up to the machine. I remember her showing me how to thread her old machine, and advising me to always run a row of stitches on scrap fabric to check my stitch length and tension before sewing on my garment. And I vividly remember 8th grade sewing class. Even though I’d only sewn sporadically over the years, I felt like that background in sewing was a definite asset to me when I learned to knit a few years ago, even if in a somewhat abstract way. It came as a surprise to me at first that there wasn’t a lot of overlap — on the web, there were sewers and there were knitters, and finding people who did both was a bit of a rarity. Or at least so it seemed. I’m definitely seeing more and more knitters lately declaring that they’re learning to sew, and vice versa, but I suspect I also just wasn’t looking in the right corners of the internet, because there are definitely heaploads of people who do both.
Knitting brought me back to sewing in a big way — I take it much more seriously now than I ever had before. I don’t quite enjoy the act of sewing the way I do knitting — I find it tedious at times and rather isolating — but I love love love being able to cook up garments that work together to form a wardrobe. So that’s my Q for You today: Do you sew as well as knit? Did one lead you to the other? And which do you enjoy most?
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