Lacie Tewes had never written a song. But she had written poetry.

So that’s where she began, putting down words, explaining why she — a soon-to-be 16-year-old crafty girl from Nebraska — should win a new Janome sewing machine from Threadbangers.com, her favorite crafty Web site.

She started with a rhyme.

Well, I sewed and sewed and sewed all day, it turned out as bad as Donald Trump’s toupee…

Then she wrote some more.

You taught me how to sew a purse and a bikini….so neaty

Then she came up with a tune, sitting with her Yamaha keyboard in a house in the woods north of town where she lives with her parents and her three-legged dog, Selena.

“Do you know ‘Heart and Soul?’” Lacie asks Friday, dark hair in a messy ponytail, in a bedroom messy with books and knitting and drums and half-finished origami.

“Well, I changed the tune a little but, yeah, it’s pretty much ‘Heart and Soul.’”

Lacie sang the old Hoagy Carmichael tune in a lilting voice for the Web cam on her computer.

And the Malcolm High School junior added clips of herself posing with her sewing projects.

Lacie in a long gray tube top.

Lacie in a strapless black dress.

Lacie with a Big Bird fabric purse, sewn by hand.

Lacie learned to sew at her grandma’s house. Her first project was a yellow pillow.

But she didn’t have a sewing machine of her own until a few months ago, when she traded dog-sitting for the neighbors for an old Singer.

It worked, but she couldn’t do fancy stitches with it.

Threadbangers you are my homies. Yeah. If you could, send, send a Janome.

Her mom was the one who told her about Threadbangers’ sewing-how-to videos.

“She’s addicted to YouTube,” Lacie explains.

And after Lacie watched her first Threadbangers fun, informative clips, she was addicted to the sewing site.

A place she could learn to make a rain poncho out of a shower curtain or a pair of boxers out of old pillowcases.

Because every week I sit and watch your blips, and I’m listening for those great new tips…

After Lacie finished her video entry, her mom (who posts her own videos on YouTube, naturally) told her to cut the first two minutes — too much talking, not enough action.

Then the whole family, dad and mom and older brother, critiqued the final version.

“We knew it was a winner,” said Peg Tewes.

The Janome arrived just after Lacie’s 16th birthday last week.

She loves that new sewing machine.

Already she’s made two messenger bags from old sheets and holey jeans.

Saturday, Lacie left for her second post-Katrina cleanup in Mississippi.

Her friends don’t know she won the sewing machine.

They don’t know she wrote a song or made a YouTube video.

They don’t even know she sews.

They know she goes line dancing at the Pla Mor and plays drums and was a girl wrestler and loves to read and is shy when you first meet her and then, well, she’s pretty loud.

Which is why they probably wouldn’t be surprised to see the Lacie they know on a video, staring into the Web cam.

Looking crafty and cool.

A real threadhead, snarling into the camera.

Freeze what you’re doing, and stop dead.

Salute your thimbles rock out and bang your head…

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com