In this photo I'm reading the Sears Catalog to my dolls. Which has nothing to do with this web site, but gives you some idea of my current age and ability to entertain myself.
I have no artistic training, formal or otherwise, and have learned everything I know by doing it poorly until practice led to some improvement. In high school I made lots of my own clothes, such as miniskirts the size of potholders that could be whipped up in an afternoon. I also made macramé wall hangings because that's what we did in the 1970s. Later, as an adult with a teenage son, I took up knitting. ("Mom, that looks like something that someone could actually wear! Don't make me anything, OK?") A few years after that it was needlepoint on canvas, then crochet, and finally basic quilting proved to be the gateway drug that led to my current addiction.
Today I do mostly textile collages constructed as fusible-web art quilts. These often combine different media in various ways so they require order-of-operations planning and rarely go smoothly from concept to finish. Nearly every piece includes something I haven't tried before and therefore a technical problem to solve. My notes show that there is no magic to this process. Once in awhile an experiment works perfectly. This is unusual.
Art is said to be meditative, and sometimes it is, but there are plenty of moments when I think, "Well, that didn't work! Now what do I do?" That's when the fun begins.