Here We Go!

Today marks the launch of my new blog entitled “Everything Is Homemade.” I decided to start this blog simply because I like to make stuff and I think it would be fun to write about. I also hope my posts will be informative and helpful to anyone who has asked themselves, “I wonder if I could make that…?”

A little bit about me: My name is Amy and I live in the Midwest in a suburb of Kansas City. I’ve been a crafty person ever since I was a kid, but I’ve especially increased my craftiness in the last 5 years. I find it fascinating that you can take pieces of nothing and put them together into something useful. Take knitting for example. A knit scarf starts out as nothing more than one long piece of yarn. Put that yarn together with two pointy sticks and voila! You have a warm, useful scarf. It’s amazing when you think about it!

When I think about making stuff, most of the time it is to save money. By day I am an accountant so I am a very financially minded person. However saving money is not always my motivation behind making stuff. For anyone who has ever knit a sweater from good quality yarn, you know that it would have been way cheaper to just buy a sweater at the store! And less time-consuming as well. Sometimes it is just fun to see if it can be done and if it is worthwhile for me to do so.

With this blog I plan to experiment with making “stuff” at home. Stuff can be anything – food, clothing, furniture, household items, you name it. I also plan to experiment with making my own “services”, ie. doing stuff myself that I might ordinarily pay someone to do instead. For “stuff” that I absolutely cannot make at my house (ie. milk, because there is no way I am going to put a dairy cow in my backyard) I plan to write about a local company that provides the “stuff”.

My first few blogs will likely be about making stuff in areas that I am already familiar with, such as cooking, knitting and baking. But I am going to stretch myself in areas I am not familiar with such as building furniture and changing my own oil (eeeep!). I also plan to undertake a long-term project a few times a year and post regular updates on how that is going, for example, making your own beer which I know takes several weeks to complete.

Know that I am just a regular person. I do not have any special MacGyver-esque training. As a regular person I will research and carry out the project and then report back on how it turned out and if it was worth it.

I hope I have peaked your interest! Check back for my first project!