Exciting times ahead

I’m genuinely thrilled that so many people have enthusiastically embraced the Facebook-free experience of the new Everyday Knitter home and are happily finding their way around as we embark on a second week there.

It is different to Facebook - not least because your home feed is chronological (whoop!) and you get to customise what you see - but partly because we are so used to the Facebook way of doing things it naturally takes time to adjust.

As I’ve been spending a lot less time on Facebook recently I have started to notice how I automatically tense when I pop back in to check on things. I find being there incredibly stressful and I’m sure it must be the same for others, we just don’t notice it when we are immersed in it. I guess it’s a bit like the analogy about the frog in slowly heating water - you only notice how hot it was when you get out.

Anyway - mixed metaphors aside - it is with relief and a sense of mounting excitement as I approach the 7th August. This is the date that the Facebook group will be permanently archived and all Everyday Knitter activity will happen on the Mighty Networks platform.

We will be kicking off with a settling in KAL starting on Monday 10th August and hopefully that will give people a chance to participate and try out some of the group’s features for themselves - especially if they always felt a bit reluctant to post or get involved in the larger Facebook group.

If you haven’t joined yet, why not come over and take a look? I’d love to get the chance to show you around.

If Knitters Ruled the World

A casual conversation online the other day sparked the idea for this blog post. We were casually chatting about politics, and putting the world to rights in general and one of us commented that "If knitters ruled the world they would make a much better job of it".

That thought has been buzzing around in my head for several days now and I can't help but think that there are many things we take for granted in the knitting community, that if they were routinely practiced in the everyday world, would make it a much better place to be.

For example, with tongue ever so slightly in cheek and in no particular order I give you

1. Posting a picture online of something you had accomplished or were proud of (analogous to posting an FO picture) would elicit supportive comments and genuine praise from those around you. It would be generally accepted by the community you were part of that if they couldn't say anything nice about something, then they would simply refrain from comment. There would be no snarkiness, no attempts to outdo your post with something fabulous they had done and no suggestions about how they would have done it better.
2. The accepted response to someone being in difficulties, depressed or generally feeling down would be to give them a hug, a cup of tea and some cake. Yarn would also be nice. There would be no attempts to solve their problems for them, to tell them how to 'pull themselves together' or to make them feel worse about their situation. There would be tea, sympathy and no judging.
3. It would be perfectly acceptable, indeed positively expected for you to whip out your needles and knit at every available opportunity. There would be no assumptions that simply because your hands were moderately occupied your ears, eyes and brain were not capable of being fully focussed on the task or conversation in hand. This type of multi-skilling would merely be recognised for the efficient use of time that it is.
4. All telephones would automatically have a hands-free option and saucepans would be self-stirring. It would really help if cars were self steering too but having seen some of the news coverage of driverless cars I'm reserving judgement on this.
5. Ice cream vans would be replaced by Yarn on Wheels. Little mobile LYS's on wheels who would regularly rock up in your neighbourhood and have a permanent and inexhaustable supply of needle tips, buttons, tape measures and stitch markers - all the things that you seem to run out of on a regular basis. They could keep the jaunty jingle though.

In general I think that more cake, more tea and more yarn is the solution to more problems that we admit. If we just extended the tolerance, support and friendship of our online community into the wider world I am firmly convinced that knitters really could make the world a better place.