Growing up in a family of 8, there was a time during my childhood where my mom made our clothes. If my memory serves me right, it was from 1st grade until 5th grade. Our house burned down when I was in 6th grade so it wasn’t until 8th and 9th grade that homemade clothes made their appearance again. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I started feeling insecure about my homemade clothes. I remember using money I earned from my job to buy my own clothes from discount stores. But this post isn’t about all that. I wanted to share that information to give you some context as to how long sewing has been a part of my life and why I’m sewing dog bandanas.
Learning to sew
As the youngest of 6, I remember being one of the kids that was ALWAYS helping my mom with all the sewing she did for our family. There were times when I enjoyed it, and other times I was over it. I took my first Home Economics class in junior high where sewing was one of the units. Pretty sure I aced that class. During my junior year of high school my parents divorced and I went to live with my dad. I don’t recall doing any sewing throughout the rest of high school or college.
After college, I’d occasionally dust off my sewing machine to make Halloween costumes or other small projects. But it wasn’t until I was pregnant with my first daughter that I really started sewing. I actually made all the baby stuff for our nursery. We went with a jungle theme because we didn’t find out what if we were having a boy or girl.
Here’s pictures of Kendall’s nursery.
In these pictures I made the curtains, diaper holder, stuffed animal keeper, diaper organizer as well as a blanket (not pictured). I obviously had quite a bit of time on my hands before she arrived because for our second daughter, I bought all of her bedroom stuff.
When both my daughters were little, I decided to open an Etsy shop to try and make some extra money. I had left my corporate Human Resources job when my first was born and wanted to do something. I did ok with that but quickly learned that sewing through a busy holiday season was taking too much time away from my daughters and it made me lose a little bit of the joy that I get from sewing.
As my girls were growing up, I would make them clothes here and there…but there was never a time that I wanted to make ALL their clothes. To me, making clothes is a lot of work. But here’s a couple of the things I made them. I made the long sleeve dress Sydney is wearing in the first picture so the girls would have similar dresses for family pictures. The two of Kendall were little dresses I made for special occasions.
But this one might be my favorite picture of our girls in dresses I made. A little foreshadowing…check out whats on their wrists! They were definitely destined to be The Scrunchie Sisters!
Fast forward to 2019…and THIS happened. Sewing was back into my life but in a totally different way. I was now teaching my youngest daughter to sew. But I still had that itch to stitch and thats when I started making Over the Collar Dog Bandanas!
Why Dog Bandanas?
Honestly, making dog bandanas came about kinda on a whim. Over the years, I’ve made a couple different types of bandanas for our dogs but it wasn’t until I started making the ones that go over the collar that our dogs really kept them on and looked super cute. I decided to make a few for one of the events that the girls and I were going to for scrunchies and people loved them. I have been making them ever since.
Awhile back people started requesting Doggie and Me sets…a dog bandana and scrunchie. At that point we decided to add dog bandanas to the Etsy shop. For now, sewing dog bandanas and helping my girls make scrunchies is curbing my itch to stitch.
Would love for you to check them out!
See you back here tomorrow.
