An Interest in sewing, perhaps...

I used to sew. I mean when my children were small I had to sew because I didn't have the money to buy shop clothes. I used to help with the jumble sales in the village so that I could volunteer to take all the left over rags down to the rag merchant in Newport. This gave me the chance to remove zips and buttons and to save all the shirts and any other fabrics from dresses and stuff. I would then cut clothes for my children - and for me.
When Mr M came into my life my children were all teenagers, their father provided sufficient money to buy them jeans and T-shirts and he did provide shoes - always a huge expense. My sewing skills turned to soft furnishings for a while and then several things happened in a rush.

 We moved to Newport, we discovered role playing games, I opened a games shop with my cousin. We held a games convention, called Dragondaze, and this required several of the people running games to dress up in costumes. "I can sew" I said, and another career was begun. For the next 20 years I made robes for wizards, frock coats for evil geniuses, cloaks for damsels in distress and many other things. I kept a lot of the off cuts and began to make picture quilts

Three years ago I stopped. I gave all my fabric stash away, and I had a whole room of it. I grudgingly sewed the odd button onto a shirt or coat, I made a few bits for Miss Em but my heart wasn't in it. I just couldn't be bothered.
Then I found Urban Threads on FB and fell in love with some of their designs. I have a little embroidery machine and I have the software on the laptop that can let me create designs. This same software allows me to buy a design from Urban Threads, download it to the memory card for the machine and then embroider it. I enjoyed the fiddling and the muttering and the trying to thread the needle with a threader that doesn't work. I enjoyed having to get a magnifying glass to see when I was threading by hand. I realised that I was working on a design for a quilt top as I searched through their Steam Punk designs, and in that moment I realised that I was once again looking forward.

I hadn't even realised that I had stopped looking forward, until I started again. So even though the eyesight is not as good as it was it seems that I am definitely on an upward path. All I need to do now is lose some weight and the world will be my shellfish!