Stitch 'n Dish

Tag: life lessons

  • My fiber-year in review

    My fiber-year in review

    I chose the featured photo (top of page) as it best reflects my thoughts on the past year, or at least the year since January 21st. In many ways, my sewing, knitting, and crocheting have helped me stay sane in a world that seemed to begin to fall apart around that time.

  • Holiday Self-Care

    Holiday Self-Care

    …we cannot give from an empty vessel. For many people, this has meant waiting for OTHERS to fill them. That’s a dicey proposition, and in many ways sets us up to fail. Caring for ourselves, even in small ways, is as close to a sure thing as it gets.

  • Holiday Shopping Madness

    Holiday Shopping Madness

    Wishing everyone a heart-centered, FIBER-ARTS filled, and peaceful holiday season, this year and always.

  • New habits, new norms

    New habits, new norms

    I suspect that a decent proportion of my fabric and yarn stashes came from past sessions of “therapy browsing” on Saturday afternoons or evenings at Joann’s, Michaels or in local fabric and yarn shops. While I have created many things over the years from those purchases, I have ALSO purchased a lot of fabric and…

  • Finishing touches

    Finishing touches

    I started this blog several years back to highlight the positive benefits of fiber arts activities for our emotional, mental and physical health. I continue to be awed by the depths of its healing potential – for myself as well as for others.

  • A mini craft

    A mini craft

    Sometimes being “crafty” can be short, sweet and simple. Tonight I was running a few errands after work and stopped by the local “dollar” store to see if I could find a small bottle for an idea I had earlier in the day: a DIY reed scent diffuser. The reason I chose a DIY option…

  • Technology: friend or foe?

    Technology: friend or foe?

    To a person, we all have way more fabric/yarn and patterns than we will EVER make in our lifetimes, regardless of how old we are today. If we limit ourselves to only “wanting” patterns that we will actually sit down and make, there’s no reason – ZERO – we can’t afford the handful of dollars…

  • With apologies to my favorite small businesses

    With apologies to my favorite small businesses

    We don’t have to look far to read or hear bad news about the U.S. economy right now. It’s as close as the cost of increasingly smaller bags of groceries, or the mail box where the credit card companies have been sending out notices about increased interest rates since mid-Summer. Consider the data on a…

  • Summer odds & ends

    Summer odds & ends

    Change can be a challenge to navigate, and I am always grateful to the examples set by my grandmother and great-grandmothers on how to keep moving forward when life gets messy. I think it was their generations’ version of meditation, which tracks with so much of the research today around how crocheting, knitting and other…

  • Finding joy

    Finding joy

    The truest forms of joy do not come from BIG, EXPENSIVE things. It most often shows up in the faces of those we love, but it also sneaks into our lives in the form of silly little projects that capture our fancy for a moment. I call that “joy finding” – and have come to…