I started sewing in high school when t-shirts weren’t fitting me the way I wanted them to because I was blessed with curves. I luckily found a community on a website that I think no one uses anymore – livejournal. This community was called t-shirt surgery and you could only post if you made something out of a tee shirt. I LOVED it. I started resizing shirts and I learned a lot from that community because people would create tutorials so you could learn what they did! I also loved re-purposing a shirt and making it fit right. One of my hopes and goals of this website is to create a new space where I can share simple tutorials that anyone can follow and hopefully inspire people to be creative!
I started knitting in high school too – the whole reason I got into it seems silly now. I had bought a pair of kitten mittens from a website and I wanted a matching hat and scarf. I was trying to be fancy and have a fully matching set. I went to the store and bought some neon pink homespun yarn and proceeded to knit a scarf that definitely didn’t match the gloves and eventually over a very long course of time made a whole matching set. I still have the scarf! It’s a great scarf, just a basic garter stitch but it’s a beast when it comes to the cold winters we still sometimes have here in Cincinnati, OH!
My projects back in high school were mostly made out of necessity. I wanted to be unique but I didn’t have a lot of money to buy special things so I learned to make my own one of a kind special things. I loved making unique bags. Some of my first bags were just simple drawstring bags, I’d make them out of remnants from the fabric store and use yarn that was braided to make my straps! I also loved going to the thrift store to get materials to upcycle, give a new life. I’d look for fun t-shirts mostly but one time I decided to make a rain resistant purse and voila! I upcycled a raincoat into a purse! I loved solving a problem so any purse design I came up with always had a unique twist to it.
In my early twenties I found another community on LiveJournal that was devoted to knitting and I slowly got into knitting more than the simple things I had already made and that community is where I heard about the startup of a new website – Ravelry. I did as other people did and got onto the waiting list for this new website that was going to be a place where knitters, crocheters, and spinners all could come together! I’m so thankful for getting into Ravelry and the community there because I learned SO MUCH and it really helped harness my love of knitting.
I was always able to look at items and figure out how to piece them together to sew but I hadn’t quite figured that out for knitting. Until one afternoon, before we had smartphones I was waiting on someone, bored, but had my knitting needles and some yarn. I managed in my boredom to figure out how to make a can cozy! It was truly the start of something amazing!
Over the next 5-10 years I sharpened my knitting skills, learned crochet and even learned to follow sewing patterns! Because of this I learned to sew pockets into skirts. My upcycling and reusing spirit still quite alive and I started using vintage bedsheets to make unique skirts for myself! I got compliments on my skirts (and various other crafts) all the time and after the millionth person told me to start selling my stuff I finally decided it was time!
So March 2019 I opened up my etsy store. It has been so thrilling and I’m beyond grateful of all the things I’ve learned so far being a business owner. I knew just making and selling skirts, tote bags, lip gloss cozies etc wouldn’t be enough for me at the end of the day as I want to see this business grow and prosper to it’s fullest potential! A website was the next step so here we are!
xoxo
-Robin