Hijacked Topic: Why I Sew.

Yesterday, my wildly talented and all-around-fantastic friend, Laurie, posted about why she quilts....and it got the old cogs turning for me. (She also gave me permission to hijack her post subject..... I don't have it in writing of anything, but she's cool like that.)

My history with sewing is *relatively* consistent--I bought my first sewing machine in 2003....which I drove into the ground in late 2010. (Starter sewing machines are like that, I hear....unsurprisingly, though, Joe seems to have resurrected it somehow....now we have His and Hers versions, which is sort of rad, I think.) For those seven years, I was pretty regular in my projects...but it wasn't more than 3-4 per year. 

It wasn't until soon after Blake was born that I really began to crank things up. I've alluded to my reasoning before, but suffice it to say: going from one child to two was just as difficult was I was warned it would be (by lots and lots of people, come to think of it). I needed something....I needed to be good at something (because, I was clearly not as good at getting a baby to sleep through the night as I'd originally thought. Turns out  it was Ian who was good at getting Ian to sleep through the night...). Blake was (is) a completely different animal than Ian was....which meant the rude awakening of realizing that all of my Mom Tricks didn't work. Not a single one.  It was a steep learning curve, people.

Think: Mount Crumpit (overlooking Whoville). 

...And sewing saved my sanity. 

(Most of it, at least.)

The idea of cutting something to pieces and then putting it back together in an orderly (and beautiful) way was (and still is) incredibly therapeutic to me. Sewing means that I'm essentially destroying something that was once comfortably intact and rearranging it with others to create something that is more beautiful and more useful than it once was on its own.

It's uncannily reflective of life, I think--or at least the changes we experience in life. Sometimes we feel cut to pieces and rearranged and wonder if we'll ever feel put together again. And it's not just about having babies and making the necessary adjustments, either. Any transition requires a bit of re-piecing....anything from moving to changing jobs to transitioning to new Church assignments. To a certain extent, we're all being constantly re-worked, pieced together with others, all to become something more beautiful and more useful.

That's why I sew: because it's the easiest (and most enjoyable) way for me to find meaning in the stress of change; to feel control when so much is out of my control; to feel a sense of accomplishment when other areas of my life seem up in the air or inconclusive. And maybe it's not the healthiest thing to turn  a simple hobby into [almost] daily therapy, but it works for me. It works really well.

...and now I'm off to buy some fabric.