About Me

Hello!  I’m Karron, a former primary school teacher living in County Durham.  I enjoy anything creative and I especially enjoy sewing and working with fabrics. 

During the Covid pandemic, I was one of hundreds of volunteers across the country who collected duvet covers, tablecloths and sheets from neighbours to make drawstring bags, scrubs, headbands, and even hospital gowns for the amazing NHS staff at Darlington and Bishop Auckland Hospitals.   It was a really rewarding time to be part of such a huge community project.  

Since then, working with children to improve their mental health and wellbeing has been a very important part of my teaching career, and crafting has always been the perfect way to encourage relaxation, mindfulness and positivity. Sewing in particular has helped me enormously when I have had to deal with some of life’s bumps in the road. The idea for  ‘Crafty Kitz’ initially came about because I wanted to encourage adults to socialise again in to their local community centres, and to take part in crafts as a way of improving their mental health and wellbeing.  In April 2023, I started two ‘Sew and Craft’ groups and discovered that sewing was the most popular craft.  As it is my favourite craft, I decided to focus on sewing and sharing my skills with others to get more people, of all ages, sewing.  In January 2024, I will be starting two groups for children aged 9-16 years.

Like many children of the sixties, I enjoyed all kinds of crafts – junk modelling, painting and upcycling, sewing, puppet-making, and even writing poetry!  I still have the patchwork bag that I made without a pattern when I was about 10 years old.  My love of making things comes from my parents and has continued throughout my working life, particularly during my time as a teacher.   I have dabbled in all sorts of crafts from floristry, paper crafts, art projects, home furnishings, and dress-making.

Over the last couple of years, I have had more time to design and make some of my own projects, and am really interested in recycling and reusing fabrics and other materials that would normally be thrown away.  With this in mind, I encourage sewers who come along to our ‘Sewcial’ groups, courses and workshops to reuse and recycle fabrics and sewing sundries, and to be frugal in their use of new materials.  We all need to create less waste for the benefit of future generations.