Sewed up the last of the 2021 Serendib House calendar tea towels, to ship out with a copy of Feast and some curry powder. I do like these tea towel / cookbook / curry powder packages. I’m hoping to work up a good apron pattern tomorrow — if I get something I’m happy with, then we’ll offer those too.
It feels sort of horrible to talk about there being any kind of good side to a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. If I could roll back time and make COVID not happen, of course, I would do that.
But that said, there are strange, unexpected good things about this year. Because we had such a dire need for even cloth masks for healthcare workers in the spring, I taught myself how to sew them, and then cranked out so many of them that I got much more comfortable sewing than I’d ever been before.
I discovered that I love the feel of good fabric under my fingers, and the way the machine almost magically takes cloth and turns it into useful things. I like knitting and crochet and hand-sewing too, but the sheer speed of machine sewing is really wonderful to me.
I was always more of a production knitter than a process knitter, so this isn’t really surprising. I like making things. I really like FINISHING making things. 
And drawing and sewing are things I can do while listening to podcasts and watching TV, so they satisfy the multitasker in me.
And all that sewing and finding cool and geeky fabrics to sew from on Spoonflower led to me playing around with their design contests, which led to my learning that I really do like (maybe love?) surface pattern design, and I think I might want to do a lot more of it in the coming years. That is wholly unexpected. In January 2020, would I have been expecting to be sewing aprons at the end of the year? No, I would not, and yet, here we are.
No real conclusions. Just, in the midst of all the horribleness of this year, I can be grateful for a few small good things. Maybe this is the year I finally stop putting ‘artist’ in quotation marks when I tell people what I do. I have spent so long saying, “Well, I’m really a writer. I just play around with art sometimes.”
I’m a writer and an artist.
Okay, then.
