This month marks ten years since I started my West Coast Crafty blog – originally a monthly column for getcrafty.com about crafty life in my new home of Los Angeles with plenty of Portland in the mix, with interviews, reviews, and articles covering everything I was most excited about. It was a month before my wedding, and a few months before my first book came out, written with Torie, Cathy, & Rachel! I remember that summer so well… it doesn’t seem like so long ago, but everything in my life has changed so much since then.

Pretty soon I realized I wanted to write more often than once a month, so I started cross-posting over on my very own free WordPress blog page (with the somewhat limited, but very serene Pool theme) and uploading lots and lots of photos to my flickr. I built this new writing site and exported eight years of blog posts over here in 2013, keeping my daily posting going on my Instagram.

So, since I started this blog, Andrew and I got married, moved back to Portland and bought a house in a then-quiet neighborhood, and had two kids. I’ve written six more books (with #8 coming next summer), taught classes, volunteered, learned how to garden, fallen in love with modern quilting, and realized just how much I love embroidery. We’ve been lucky to find a lot of happiness and success, and I’ve been tested and humbled too. Publishing and the craft and sewing industry have been changing quickly, and the aspiring writer who was so excited to post every day had a lot more energy and free time than the me of today. But along with the work I feel called to do, and lucky to have, I still treasure having my small corner of creative space that’s just mine, and just for love, with no deadlines, no ads, no pressure. Just for fun.

I have something special to share with y’all this week to celebrate my anniversary, an interview and giveaway I’m really excited about, and will post that in the next couple days. I hope to see you then and can’t wait to see who wins the pretty prize one of my craft heroes has generously offered up! Thank you for reading along all these years, and thank you to everyone else who’s inspired me along the way.