About Sinister Craftiness
Welcome to Sinister Craftiness, GimletBlog‘s craft room, fiber arts studio, girly sanctuary, whatever you’d like to call it. Here’s where I’ll be tracking progress on various embroidery and quilting projects, showing off completed work, chatting about books, stitching toys, and other stash goodies.
My tag cloud should give a pretty good idea of my favorite designers and types of projects I’m most likely to be stitching. Some of my favorite “big project” designers are Châtelaine Designs, Theresa Wentzler, and Victoria Sampler. Smaller project favorites are Blackbird Designs, The Drawn Thread, Just Nan, and Shepherd’s Bush. I’m always on the lookout for eye-catching designs with attractive colors, hopefully some specialty stitches, and perhaps an interesting finish. On the bookshelf, I collect Norwegian Hardanger books and French embroidery pattern books, mostly antique alphabets and decorative borders.
Why Sinister Craftiness? Gauche or Stitchin’ With Lefty might more accurately describe my craftsmanship. After a long break I’ve returned to cross-stitch and have been learning about other types of needlework. Some of my ancestors lived in the Hardanger region of Norway, so I’m especially interested in Hardanger embroidery. (Here’s my great-grandmother wearing her Hardanger bunad.)
Please note: While I can usually provide information about where to purchase a chart or kit featured on the blog (and am happy to do so), I do not make copies of charts, so please don’t ask.
About me
I’ve lived in Seattle, Washington all my life, leaving only long enough to earn a B.A. in Classical Studies from Brigham Young University. My husband (a.k.a. The Gimlet) likes to say I made him move to Seattle (like that’s a bad thing). We’ve been here since 1991 and have two sons (Thing One and Thing Two) and two Ragdoll cats (Nanaimo and Chinook). With a house full of boys, I need my own space, so Solitary Elegance and Sinister Craftiness were born.
After Thing Two was born I was able to quit my job and take care of him, and am loving the stay-at-home-mom life … or if it has driven me crazy, I’m blissfully unaware of it. I do find that working on my web site/blogs and embroidery projects does a lot to lift my spirits and keep my mind active when it seems like much of the day is filled with an endless cycle of laundry, dishes, and cleaning up messes. It’s very fulfilling to work on projects with definite beginnings and ends, that can challenge my abilities, and produce something beautiful to show for it when it’s done.
More about me and my family can be found on our family blog, GimletBlog, and visit Solitary Elegance for my Jane Austen-related image galleries, including monthly desktop wallpapers based on fashions from Ackermann’s Repository. Thing Two and our cats take an active interest in my projects (especially Nanaimo), so they’ll make appearances on this blog from time to time.
To contact me, leave a comment on the blog or send an email to heather (at) sinister-craftiness (dot) com. (replace italics with characters)
