!! Introduction - READ THIS PLEASE !!

Please read the introduction if you have triggers to be concerned about.

If there’s something in a resource page that needs a warning, the warning will be up at the top before the break. If I make a mistake and miss a warning you need, please contact me on Mastodon. Let me know the page address and which warning I missed and I’ll fix it as soon as I can.


I’m not an expert in any of this stuff but the links I’ve provided were helpful to me. So maybe they’ll help you.

In some cases, I’m giving you instructions I wrote myself because no one else bothered (one of my life’s biggest frustrations). Sorry in advance. If you’re trying to do the exact thing I was trying to do then it’s at least more information than you had.

Right now this list doesn’t have much in it. I have a years of links to go through and this is a work in progress. If you look through this and go “Oh my god are you serious this is a lot of stuff” … I am so serious. The amount of unsorted resources I have is at least 100x times what’s in here right now.

If you have suggestions, corrections, or requests, please contact me on Mastodon.

It's not always so bad being a beginner

Or Eve gets a sewing machine

There’s a concept I learned from meditation called Beginner’s Mind. In a way, it’s about seeing things with fresh eyes but it’s also about approaching whatever you’re doing as if you were a beginner. Even when you’re an expert or you’re at an advanced level in that topic.

I’ve been putting off making something I’ve wanted for a long time because I didn’t have a sewing machine and didn’t have any experience using one. After lots of research and watching videos, I finally got my sewing machine this week. I used the Quick Guide to set it up, cut a piece of scrap, and sewed a 2.5 inch long seam. It mostly went great.

Beginner’s Luck, it turned out.

Knitting

Youtube is really the best way to learn how to knit if you can’t learn from family, friends, or people in a knitting circle. Find videos of people knitting with absurdly large needles and super bulky (or bigger!) yarn to learn the specific techniques. For my first project, I started each swap between knits and purls by watching a video on the one I was about to do. That sounds like a lot but if you don’t have someone who can teach you in person, it’s the best you can get without leaving the house.