Hi!  I’m Brandi, and I’m around the internet as PeekabooStitches.  I’ve been sewing on and off for most of my life, but taught myself to quilt in 2011, which is when I started sewing on a regular basis.

Off the internet, I’ve worked in science policy for most of my career and am hoping to get into grad school for criminology soon.  M and I have been together since December 2011 and he proposed in December 2019 in Vienna, Austria outside the St. Stephens Cathedral.  It was a lovely moment for us, and we were able to get married in March 2021 with a super small group because of COVID.  We recently moved to Germany and are taking advantage of the time we’re here.

I’ve been a runner for a while also.  I’ve run two full marathons – Cologne, Germany in 2014, and Richmond, VA with my running BFF in 2018.  I broke up with running in 2019 for a while after a pretty horrific race and I’ve struggled to get back into it.  Since then, I’ve taken almost 500 barre classes (we moved just before my milestone class) and we just bought a Peloton, which is what I’m mostly doing now.  I’m hoping to find my running mojo again eventually, but for now just moving is what’s important.

As far as my quilting and sewing goes, PeekabooStitches is incredibly important to me.  My grandmother tried to teach me to sew when I was little, but I’m sorry to say it didn’t stick.  I never quite got the hang of sewing in a perfectly straight line, no matter how many lined sheets of paper she made me sew.  She also taught me to embroider.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t really super interested in any of these crafts until much later in life.  I have a lot of barely-started cross stitch projects in the bottom of boxes with no instructions and no thread to match either.  Oops.  After I graduated college, I picked up quilting, and I’ve been hooked since.  I’ve also been much more excited about embroidery, and even picked up Wild Olive’s 50 States Stitching Club.

It’s PeekabooStitches because Peekaboo has always been my nickname.  My parents, my grandparents, everyone in my family has called me “Peekaboo” since I was a baby.  Last year, shortly after PeekabooStitches became a reality with cute little tags, it became significantly more real.  My grandmother was rushed to the hospital, and eventually placed in hospice with a diagnosis of Stage IV Leukemia, and given 3-6 months to live.  I knew I had to visit, and I knew that I needed to take something that would help her remember.  My dad told me that the dementia was bad, that she often couldn’t remember that she had been married (my grandfather died when I was about 7) , or that she had four sons.  I ended up making her a quilt from Tula Pink’s FoxField line, and using InColorOrder’s Stellar pattern.  She loved it, and she loved tracing the animals and the patterns in the fabric.  It was an incredibly difficult quilt to make, but I’m glad I did.  She passed away in March 2015, and that quilt should have come home to me.  If you’ve seen this quilt in person, PLEASE REACH OUT.  This quilt is officially a lost quilt and I miss it terribly.  PeekabooStitches is in her honor.