Let’s face it. Life can be stressful. There’s something beautiful about creating something with your own two hands… it gives you a chance to unwind and be in the present moment.
I find the act of being creative very therapeutic. It’s a healthy way to de-stress, or just create something fun!
Why I Knit, Sew, and Make Things
Let me tell you the back story of how I started down this creative path… it was definitely not something I expected to pursue, but it’s the journey of how I got here to creating this website.
I have always been artistic and musical, but like most people, my attention was focused on work, school, and things that “really mattered” in life.
I never considered the arts to be something I could actually pursue as part of a career path, so instead, I went full-force to pursue the sciences and tech.
After working in a demanding tech job, my creative side kept wanting to be expressed, so after months of deliberation, I finally decided to change course.
I quit my job, took a bunch of classes to create a portfolio, then applied to design school, and then business school too.
I had the crazy idea to pursue two masters degrees at the same time. I wanted to make the most of the time I was “not working.” With an incredibly insane schedule and barely any time to sleep, I found myself hospitalized during the middle of finals!
I had overworked myself to a point of extreme exhaustion and got a major case of the flu, pneumonia, and tested TB positive. I spent a week in the hospital and I was placed on extremely strong antibiotics for 6 months, that lasted into my wedding and honeymoon.
Oh, it was crazy times during my 20s.
It was also a big learning lesson that I wasn’t invincible, even though I was young, and that I’d have to take care of my health.
My Journey to Health & Knitting
After I graduated from my masters programs, I moved temporarily to San Francisco from Chicago for an internship. It was there that I knew I had to focus on wellness after the wear and tear on my body over the past 3 years.
I went on an all organic detox diet, started exercising again, and then stumbled upon a knitting store in my neighborhood that made me want to buy all the yarn in that store!
I wanted to take a knitting class at the store, but they didn’t have one that met my schedule, so the shop owner recommended I learn from a book, which I purchased.
I took that book home along with some super chunky yarn and big needles and knit my first scarf that day! It was exciting times.
Learning to knit brought me so much joy and a sense of accomplishment that made me so happy.
I wish I could say that that was the end of my insane life and I found balance and peace and bliss. I had taken great care of myself during that internship in an effort to restore my health, but after that, I decided to take a consulting job that required demanding work and travel. My life ended up being very intense yet again!
If I didn’t learn the first time, I definitely did after the second time of wearing myself out.
After a year and half of intense work for clients, I knew my body couldn’t handle the intense stress I was putting it through. After much negotiation with work, and trying the work-at-home thing, the constant stress didn’t let up, so I finally decided to leave permanently to take care of my health.
It was a good thing because a week after leaving the job, I was hospitalized again for a week. Again, with pneumonia.
It was time to recover… again.
That was not the end of my health journey, though.
Later that year, I had a miscarriage, and I had to go in for surgery. And after coming out of the operating room, in my groggy state, I told my mom and my husband… “I want to knit and sew.”
To this day, I think it was my spirit that was talking when I was not yet fully conscious yet.
I was worn. I was depleted, and I needed to be filled up with something nourishing. In that moment, for me, it was knitting and sewing.
After going home from surgery, my mom taught me how to crochet, and I picked up knitting again during that week of recovery,