My name is Tera, I am coming from the Czech Republic, I am 24 years old, married, and autistic. I like to talk about myself as a “knitting geographer”. I am a physical geographer who studies recent changes in soils, focusing on microplastics pollution. You can learn more about my research here.
I am very enthusiastic about nature and our planet, and it impacts also my knitting and sewing. I try to use environmentally friendly yarns and fabrics (although it's much harder for me than with the yarns), I try to avoid superwash yarns and yarns containing plastics, as well as synthetic fabrics where they are not needed.
In my free time, I also like hiking, writing short stories or coding websites like this one, with a kind help of my husband. My favourite animal is an elephant, my favourite bird is a puffin, my favourite colour is yellow, my favourite flower is cornflower, my favourite tree is hornbeam, and my favourite soil is podzol!
I learned how to knit in school when I was only six years old. We had to knit a case for our flutes. I wasn't the best, the result was kind of awful, but I still like it and use it. I hadn't improved even with my second knitting project, which was a horse. It didn't look like one. I decided it was Max, our French bulldog.
However, I still really loved knitting. In school, I also learned crochet, embroidery or woodcarving, but knitting remained my favourite. The problem was I didn't know what to knit. I knitted squares and scarves or maybe some hats, but I wasn't brave enough to try a sweater. My grandma promised to teach me, but she unfortunately died…
When I was younger, I had a blog, and I was reading a lot of blogs as well. Many years later, one blogger decided to learn how to knit, and she shared Vlněné sestry, my LYS. I started following them on social media, and I loved their colourful photos of yarns. Before that, I used only cheap acrylic yarn and didn't know of anything better. With Vlněné sestry, I also discovered Ravelry, and a whole new adventure began!
From a knitter who wants to knit but doesn't know what to knit, I became a passionate knitter with needles always in my hands! Since then, I have knitted sooo many things, and it is definitely my biggest hobby ever.
Because I always want to do something new and I enjoy brain challenges, I tried to write a pattern only a few months later. That's how it happened. That's how the seed of Terranean Stitch was planted. Three years later, I decided to stop designing because my life had got too complicated and it was very overwhelming. But I still knit a lot! Maybe even more! And all of my patterns are now for free on Ravelry.
When I was a little girl, I was often ill. I spent these tonsillitides and pneumonia with my grandparents, who took care of me so my mum could go to work. When I was feeling better, we played canasta, and one day, my grandma taught me how to sew.
My first project ever was a stuffed elephant made (upcycled, really!) from an old dish towel. It wasn't a 3D toy, it was more similar to a small pillow. I made one for me and one for my younger sister. I was like 10 years old.
Not much time later, I came to my grandma with a wish to learn how to sew real clothing. So we went through her stash and found a never-used IKEA curtain, white with black contours of houses. I liked that fabric, and we sewed my first skirt!
Since then, I had wanted more and more! My grandma used to take me to fabric stores to choose some woven cotton fabrics to sew more skirts. I loved these shops so much that I even had a job in fabric store years later, but she was already dead. I know she would be proud of me, and we would share all of our sewing and knitting projects!
I used to sew at my grandma's home using her sewing machine – Zetina 6323 (in the photo). When I started sewing more than she was, she gave me the sewing machine, and I was very grateful for that gift. I sewed something from time to time, but got tangled just this year (2022). I would sew almost all the time, although knitting is still a bigger hobby. Also, I no longer use the old grandma's sewing machine (actually, my husband used it when I was teaching him how to sew a tote bag!). Now I own Brother Innov-is 15, much more jersey-friendly.