Hi there, thanks for popping in.

My name is Sara Strandquist, and my creative life began in 2008 when I picked up knitting needles for the first time.

Since then, I have been on a 16-year journey of PLAY and exploration through many creative art forms. I am “self-taught,” in the sense that I never went to school for art (English Lit, baby!) but that would be a discredit to the hundreds of books, authors, and generous internet content creators and resources I have studied to take up crochet, pattern design, spinning, painting, drawing, art-journaling, bookbinding, macramé, garment sewing, patchwork, quilting, and dyeing fabric and fiber with mixed media art supplies. Seriously. You can learn almost ANYTHING from the library. I have worked in libraries for years too. #librarylove

So I have been WORKING in creative arts since 2011 as a contract pattern designer for magazines, publishers and yarn companies like Coats & Clarks, Malabrigo, and Quince & Co. In 2015, I had the delight of publishing a crochet book! Poetic Crochet: 20 Shawls Inspired by Classic Poems (F+W Media, 2015) led to wonderful work opportunities and was a total blast to design and produce. Dream come true.

Over time, my creative needs and work needs changed and I moved into more intuitive art expression with painting, drawing, and all sorts of making for kids and home, but was constantly picking up new skills in sewing, patchwork, and quilting and wistfully on and off the wagon of attempting to create “real” art in drawing, painting, etc.

Frustrated and judgmental of my self as a wannabe painter (and constantly mooning over the work of others feeling that some kind of legitimacy was forever out of reach), I managed to mix some of my prettiest paint colors while washing out my brushes in the laundry tub.

As those beautiful hues ran down the drain, I thought what if I use this pigment to dye fabric for my patchworks? And began painting quilting cotton, muslin, and flour sack dish towels, pretending they were sheets of paper or canvas. Suddenly I had custom hues of fabric with shadowy tones, interesting color blends and beautifully subtle textures and endless kinds of marks, prints, and patterns. And each fabric came out differently. A new obsession was born. Textile collage in mixed media.

I spent a year creating a new crochet book proposal. Textile and painting had become my passion; I would wake up at 3 am seized by the desire—the need—to paint in a frenzy often crying with relief at whatever it was that was coming out of my soul onto manila file folders, canvas, paper, posterboard or anything I could slap some paint on. Wordless things made of color, texture, and the energy of slapping, smearing and pounding paint onto a surface. It was so FREEING.

But crochet had become my job. It MADE SENSE and I knew how to do it. It was time to try for another contract job in the yarn world. I had LOVED writing Poetic Crochet: the specific scope and focus of a book concept, brainstorming and then engineering the 20 designs, the boutique-quality yarn support, the touches of personality, the mood boards, working on a real manuscript, the editing. I loved every minute—and was hoping for another book as a work project.

My second crochet book concept was themed on colorful, artsy, playful boho crochet designs. I put a year of work into the project, designing, crocheting samples, styling and photographing, researching book comps, and publishers, the publisher I queried loved the book, but because I didn’t have an online following, it was swiftly rejected. Digital downloads and influencers had been on the rise, and craft book publication was going down. Selling a craft book without a following primed to buy the book had become a very bad prospect for publishers. I was lucky to get my chance when I did—and my original publisher (Interweave) went out of business a short time after the book was produced.

OK, I thought. I guesss I need a following now. I got busy on instagram, sharing my projects—but I went totally in the direction of textile art collage and painting. Eventually I published articles, created online classes, and ran a shop to sell finished pieces creating lots of work in this medium related to art quilting, textile collage, and bookbinding. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

And then I decided to try doing it full time.

DUNH. DUNH. DUNNNNNNNNNHHH.

I fell apart. I hated everything. I put too much pressure on my self. I had to learn what seemed to be 50 million new skills, all with a serious learning curve. I had to show up and perform, be some certain THING that feedback from my classes and students had LOVED. I rebelled. I got disorganized. I kept starting over. I kept doing any new thing.

IT WAS HORRIBLE. What’s worse is that I realized the attempt to professionalize, to monetize, and to “legitimize” the work I absolutely loved had once again changed my relationship to it, and my ability to create it.

Just going to keep starting over. And do what I love.