About Love Me Sew

2012 — Crafternoons in Yorkshire

Love Me Sew was started in 2012 by Emily Carlill and Sam Lowe as a crafty events business based in Yorkshire. The headline product was "Crafternoons": afternoon craft sessions run for hen parties, baby showers, and workplaces. Most of the events happened in Leeds and the surrounding towns. A few went further north into Yorkshire and the North East.

Alongside the workshops, we hand-packed "Make-Your-Own" craft packs (Christmas stockings, clutch bags, advent calendars, wedding garlands) and sold a small range of hand-picked fabric and haberdashery online.

2015. The shop shifts

The workshops slowed down through the mid-2010s. Some of that was personal: Emily and Sam moved on to other projects. Some of it was the broader shift away from in-person craft events. The online shop kept ticking along for another year or so. By the end, the energy had clearly moved elsewhere.

2017 onward. The blog

What stayed was the blog. The how-tos Emily had originally written to support the workshops were getting steady search traffic. The comments asked the same questions we used to answer in class: what machine should I buy? Why is my stitch puckering? Can I sew embroidery on a normal machine?

Kayleigh Hart picked up the writing in 2017. We leaned into what was working: beginner-friendly explainers, machine and overlocker reviews, the occasional buyer's guide. The Q&A pieces ("Can sewing machines do embroidery?", "How have sewing machines changed over time?", "Can sewing-machine needles be sharpened?") turned out to rank well for the questions home sewers actually type into Google.

Where we are now

Love Me Sew today is a quiet sewing blog. Two or three posts a month, mostly reviews and tutorials, with the occasional historical piece. The history of the home sewing machine is genuinely fun to write about; the rest is reps.

Buying guides on the blog use affiliate links. The small commissions help us keep buying the next machine to review. Picks aren't sponsored, and we won't review anything we haven't sewn on for at least a fortnight.

Get in touch

Got a machine you'd like us to look at, a tutorial you wish we'd write, or a correction on something we got wrong? Email [email protected]. We read everything; we just don't always reply quickly.