Welcome to My World of Sticks and String

I decided to do this because I have some spare time between being a carer, wife, mum teacher and  student.

I am caring for my husband who has complex needs due to ill health and mobility issues.  I’m a mum to three fantastic kids, one has moved out and the other two are getting ready to fly the nest.

We radically home educated all of them at some point in their school careers, which I will admit was a very scary thing.  This was something we did pre-covid for a number of years.  Our youngest two children are in college and doing well, which is awesome and highlights the fact that we might have worried too much about what we were doing.

I originally trained as a care assistant back in the 90’s then was a stay at home mum and carer for a number of years.  When the kids were old enough I went back to college, originally to have time for myself.  During my initial time back in college at the age of 35, I took a computer engineer course as I already had experience building PC’s at home it seemed like a natural thing to do.

While taking the course I supported some of my peers and made the decision to train as a tutor for college.  I followed the path to teaching now have a masters in online and distance education (MA ODE) from the open university.

At various times I have volunteered as a beaver scout leader, founded a school charity group  and drama club.  I worked as a first line IT engineer at the same college I trained in computing at.

Throughout all these changes and times of great ‘stress’, study, work, teaching my kids, and caring I have always found time for my first ever learned needlecraft.

I started knitting during the summer of my tenth birthday.  I was so bored with not having things to do that my mum gave me a book, some knitting needles and some scrap yarn.

Since that time I have started crocheting, Tunisian crocheting, spinning and cross stitch.

Crocheting is a weird one, I picked up a crochet hook and played with some wool to make my sisters little doll a dress.  I didn’t know this was crochet and had never seen anyone doing it.  This was the first and last time I picked up a crochet for many years.  Then I learned to crochet from YouTube videos.  Tunisian crochet was a natural progression and now I am also learning croknit which uses a double ended crochet hook.

Spinning was a way for me to play with fibre originally, I honestly didn’t think I would take to making my own yarn.  After hand spinning my first batch of yarn to make a jumper I decided to upgrade to a spinning wheel in the hope that it will speed up the process.

Felting is something I plan to try soon as I have bought some cheap felting sets from my local home bargains.

Well, I think that is enough waffle for now.

Hope to see you again soon, remember sticks and string.