Back in 2019, while I was constantly on research trips, I started watching a lot of youtube. And while I was doing that, I also decided to pick up crocheting. Since I hate reading kitting patterns, I had no earthly idea how to approach a crochet pattern, and so I also started watching crochet pattern videos on youtube. This combination led me to the world of historical costuming videos, or costube. Since I started watching, costube has become a much bigger phenomenon, to the point that last summer the costube community was able to host an entire conference online where individual virtual sessions were attended by thousands of people at a time. Inundating myself with videos of hand sewing and pattern cutting got me to slowly come back to my old sewing hobby. I spent a lot of time as a teenager involved in various sewing ventures, mostly related to the renfaire and my school’s drama department. My friend N and I spent many weekends in high school hand-sewing costumes while watching Disney movies (we were really wild). But I was mostly self-taught and I had a really hard time making wearable clothing, so my hobby fell by the wayside. But since N still sews and started making herself some very cool wearable pieces right around the time I began watching all these youtube videos, I dipped my toes back into sewing at first, and then plunged in.
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