My Sewing Story

Welcome to the official Honeybear Lane blog! My name is Heidi and I am a stay at home mom with one little boy and another boy on the way.

I started sewing when I was a young girl, my mom wanting me to learn the essential skill. She had me take sewing lessons from two different people and I spent many hours working on projects that I didn’t really enjoy. I would make bags, pj bottoms, and jumpers, HATING the pattern following, cutting out, unpicking, etc. What I did enjoy was sewing Barbie clothes, designing them and sewing them. And occasionally I would come up with another idea and work on it until I was happy.

My mom, still hoping to encourage me in this skill, bought me my first sewing machine when I was 23, as a graduation present from college. It sat dusty and unused for about a year, until I finally decided to break it out for a small project–humanitarian teddy bears. Slowly I started to sew more and more, getting the feel for my new machine. It had its share of problems, and I really got to know the machine in my attempts to fix said problems. Additionally, the projects I would attempt would inevitably go awry, and I learned from my mistakes.

Learning from my mistakes has been the best way for me to learn to enjoy sewing. That may sound weird, but getting better at sewing makes the finished project much more rewarding. And I really love to discover things I want to make and then try them out for myself. Sure, following patterns and cutting them out are still the necessary evils, but I just power through them soon enough I will have something I am really proud of making.