Fibre crafts made me do it!

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:41:15 +0000

Almost the first thing my driving instructor asked me, when I got in his car for my first lesson, was why I hadn’t learned to drive at a younger age.

Of course, he was picking me up from my house on the badly-connected outskirts of a badly-connected town, where there are only two places you can reach by bus and only if you want to travel during weekday office hours. So I guess in that context, his question made sense.

But as I explained, most of my adult life was spent in a city, so driving just sort of didn’t come up. It wasn’t needed. We had the Metro for local travel, trains for visiting far away places, and regular buses to fill in the gaps. Bliss!

As you’ll know if you’ve been following the saga, I am finding learning to be very stressful. As I write this it was only my fourth lesson yesterday, and I think it’s maybe starting to improve a bit, maybe? But I’m woefully lacking in some of the core skills and learning in our hilly town is definitely complicating matters. Before yesterday’s lesson I honestly felt sick with nerves and was apparently white as a sheet!

So if it’s so awful, why do it?

Would you be surprised to know it’s mostly craft related? 😄

What if I have a yarn emergency?

See, last year our local craft shop closed down. It was a successful business, mostly focused on quilting fabrics and workshops but with a halfway decent selection of yarns and embroidery supplies that saved me on a few occasions. I even used to co-host a knitting group there back in the day! But the owners wanted to retire, and tried and failed to sell the business to someone who would keep it going, so that was that.

Now the closest yarn shop is a 20 minute drive away, and it’s a nice place with a much better selection than our more general craft shop ever had. But the public transport option? Two buses, an hour and a half, plus waiting time (that’s each way).

So it’s an admittedly specific thing, but I do feel kind of precarious not having access to emergency yarn and this is a big driver (no pun intended) for me learning now.

Crafting events are always in weird places

Who wouldn’t want more of this in their life?

Another thing is that I’d really love to go to more craft events, I managed to get to the North East Yarn Show in 2024 (and made a video about it) as a friend’s partner was kind enough to drive us, but most events are held in very out-of-the-way places that are difficult by public transport. I’d love to go to the Knit + Stitch Show in Harrogate later this year, which is at least accessible by train, but it’s over 4 hours and very expensive to get there versus less than an hour and a half if I could drive. Which of course means I’d have to stay over the night before and quite possibly the night of too, making it cost waaaaay more.

There are plenty of “local” craft groups as well, but taking the bus(es) means I’d basically lose an entire weekday to attend one. And not to mention craft fairs, I’d absolutely love to sell at one of those one day but it’s just not viable without a car!

Collecting streets is fun!

My final reason is extremely niche and quite low stakes in the grand scheme, but we find motivation where we find it. We’ve been attempting to walk every street in our town, using a site called CityStrides to track progress. But it’s built by a USian, and doesn’t work so well in other places, so our “city” on the site is actually our entire county including lots of other small towns and villages and miles upon miles of winding country road.

So right now, Dave is still interested. We’ve been driving out to different places most weekends and getting a few streets here and there, and it’s nice! But he’s not interested in trying to complete every single place, only the ones that are actually nice to walk around, which is fair enough. But guess who can’t easily get to these places without him driving? Yeah.

So to sum up: yarn shop, craft events, and a completely pointless desire to walk every street in our entire county for some reason.

But hey, at least it’s more interesting than “I have to drive for work” 😉

Real Life on Michelle May

Fibre crafts made me do it!

What if I have a yarn emergency?

Crafting events are always in weird places

Collecting streets is fun!