Blast from the past

I've been blogging about my sewing stuff for a long time, but they didn't call it blogging back when I started. In November 1997 I joined the Geocities free web-site "community" and started a home page. I posted some pictures and kept a journal (a blog!!) to let friends and family know what we were up to. In those days, people coded pages pretty much by hand. I learned some basic html code and borrowed ideas from other sites by looking at the source for their pages. This was before people coded web pages in Java and before sites got too complicated. Blinking text, color, and tables was about as fancy as it got. Later I used Microsoft Front Page to edit the pages, but the site is pretty much unchanged from when I first made it 8 1/2 years ago. So far Yahoo (who bought out Geocities) hasn't kicked my site off yet. That reminds me that I should archive it before they do...just for nostalgia's sake.

One of my pages chronicled my sewing projects . Although I learned to sew when I was a child and I sewed sporadically in my 20's, I didn't really pick it up again until the summer of 1999, when I bought a very nice sewing machine. I started sewing again by sewing baby clothes for a friend of mine. Here's one of my first projects:



Those shaggy green things are supposed to be grass. Unfortunately this wasn't the last time I cut out the fabric upside down!

It's kind of nice to go back and see what sewed. Did I really make this cute dress?



Fortunately my sewing room has improved over the years. From this set up in the dining room:



To this in a spare bedroom:




Go ahead and peruse the rest of the site if you want. Note that I changed the sewing page to point to this blog, so the link above is the only way to get to it. A lot of the other links are broken and I haven't updated it in a few years, especially now that I have this blog. At one point we even hosted the page on our own server, but we got tired of hearing the computer fan running all the time and the cost to keep the server turned on wasn't worth it. Most of the broken links point to the server.