It's Been a Minute!

Welcome to my messy desk! So much happens here—writing, reading, tutoring, sewing, painting, snacking, coffee guzzling. I thought about cleaning it up for you, but I thought it was best to start out as I mean to go on. This blog is a place for celebrating the mess of creation and the chaotic reality of family life. It is what it is!

Welcome back!

I know I have been MIA for more than a year, and what a year it’s been!

For anyone who’s new around here, I created this blog, originally called The Needle + The Knife, as a sort of online archive of my adventures in making. In the beginning, I imagined that the content would be a roughly-equal balance of food, sewing, home design, gardening, and parenting. In practice, it turned out to be mostly food, probably my pesky children demand to be fed, like, every day.

I didn’t really intend to stop writing the blog, but found that the more time I spent blogging, the less time I had to actually create. As much as I loved connecting with all of you, there was only so much time and energy to go around. Over the past few years, I have been pouring more and more of that time and energy into writing stories for young readers. This has taken me on a journey into the fascinating world of Kidlit, a journey that has been full of bumps and bruises, set backs and small victories. And then, of course, the pandemic hit, and with it a huge sense of overwhelm, and for a long time I simply did not have the bandwidth for anything beyond the basic job of getting myself and my family through the day!

Perhaps it is the natural result of having been stuck at home for almost a year, but lately I have been feeling the urge to return to blogging. Now that the children have settled themselves back into in-person school, I also am finding myself in a position to say ‘yes’ to a few more things I love.

So here I am! Here we are!

This time around you can expect more writing-centric content, along with all the ruminations on parenting and abundance of muffin recipes of the old site. Feel free to drop me a line if there is anything specific you would like me to cover, or even if you just want to say ‘hello!’

The world can be a lonely place— let’s keep each other company!