When the universe has your back

Blanket is the Garter Ripple Squish with 3 strands of sock yarn held together

Do you ever have one of those moments/weeks where you just feel a bit overwhelmed? Pulled in so many different directions at once. So many things whirling around in your head that you don’t know where to start?

There are many parallels that I can draw between knitting and tarot (two of my favourite things to do during quiet moments). That’s a blog post for another day, but sometimes - quite a lot in fact - the daily card that I draw has a habit of being uncannily on the nose.

This was the card I drew the other day - the Seven of Wands - which is all about finding courage and inner strength. It’s also a really great reminder to look to yourself for advice and help - not to rely on others for support. To be your own guiding light as it were.

I took this as a signal from the universe to undertake a mass unsubscribe from a ton of business-y type email lists. Things I’d signed up to, to get free worksheets or PDFs. Things that were filling up my inbox with a metric ton of (often contradictory) advice. The ‘must do’s or even worse ‘must not do’s’ were starting to put me on edge and make me doubt myself.

So I spent a happy hour unsubscribing from lists, as well as muting or unfollowing a bunch of accounts on social media that were just getting to be a bit too much. And boy, do I feel better for it.

A good spring clean was just what I needed to freshen up my socials and to give me lots of new ideas and inspiration to follow.

It made me think about the issue of seasonality and social media. I know that the accounts I follow in autumn/winter are perhaps very different from the ones I want to see more of as spring approaches. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. All things go through seasons - including ourselves - and so to me it makes sense to have that reflected in my social media feeds.

What do you think? Do you like to see the same things all year round or do you find yourself going through ‘seasons’ too?

Social media - what a difference a year makes

This time last year I was in a very different place with regard to social media. Things with Twitter had reached breaking point and called for drastic action. I nuked my account and started again from scratch.

And it proved to be such a great decision. In the space of a year I have rebuilt my account to roughly the same number of followers as I had with my 9 year old account.

The difference being that I ruthlessly curated the content I saw there, and crucially the content that I interacted with. Mindful of the fact that Twitter will share my likes/retweets with others I was careful not to interact with content that others might find triggering - Brexit, Covid and other hot button issues in the UK.

Not that they aren't important, but I knew how fragile my own mental health was feeling coming out of the pandemic and that the only way I could stay on Twitter, and enjoy being there was by being strict about what I allowed into my bubble. Knitting, otters and funny cat memes are the order of the day now, and my day is far better for it.

Please note this is different to putting my head in the sand. I stay informed by reading and from trusted news sources. What I don’t need is to be sand blasted by the hose of other people's opinions and hot takes.

This time last year, my Instagram by contrast felt completely dead in the water. I felt similarly stifled but couldn't bring myself to delete my account, as anyone who has painstakingly inched over the 10k followers threshold will understand.

Instead I cut back the number of accounts I followed to almost zero - and started again. Just following those whose content either uplifted, inspired or entertained me. Drastic yes, but my goodness it was like a breath of fresh air.

Side note though - it did earn me a shadow ban for a few weeks as I deleted more follows per day than the algorithm was happy with, so I’m not sure I can entirely recommend it as a course of action.

As we moved into 2023 though, things started to feel different yet again. The whole twitter atmosphere has undoubtedly changed as a result of the site’s new owner and a lot of people have either left or are interacting far less on their accounts.

Instagram by contrast feels a lot more vibrant - the Reels are obviously here to stay and maybe, who knows I’m actually starting to like them a little bit. It feels as though people are allowing themselves to relax and let go of the quest for Instagram flatlay perfection a little bit, and embrace the fun and more spontaneous side of the platform again. Instagram have also responded (finally) to concerns about account security and have introduced a new system for helping people to recover hacked/locked accounts.

What will this year bring? Who knows quite frankly but change is inevitable, it always is.

Now more than ever it’s important to connect with people on more than one platform, or via email/DMs. Rumours of Twitters imminent collapse are almost certainly exaggerated but it does no harm to make sure that you are subscribed to your favourite folks’ newsletters, just in case something drastic were to happen.

I know there are a few alternatives to Twitter popping up - Mastodon and Hive being the two that I have come across - and created accounts there. But honestly, the thought of starting again from scratch on another social media platform is more than I can bear right now. I want to spend less time on social media in 2023, not more.

How about you? Have you used one of the Twitter alts, and if so what do you think of it? Do drop me a comment and let me know.

And if you’d like to make sure you stay abreast of what I’m up to please do subscribe to my weekly email. I try to share snippets from the online world that have caught my eye, what’s on my needles and general random thoughts that I might not get around to sharing anywhere else.

And my other online hangouts are:

Twitter - as EverydayKnitter

Instagram - as LouiseTilbrookDesigns

Why are we here?

A slightly more existential question than you usually find on a knitting blog, so please bear with.

The thoughts behind this blog post arose from a chance conversation on Instagram with @ofsimplicity, who was asking a simple question of her Instagram followers - “Why are you here?” And some of the responses were just so moving it prompted me to think a little bit more deeply about Instagram and how perhaps our use of the platform has changed over the years.

I joined Instagram years ago, back in the day when it was all about the filters, vignettes and fancy borders. Your feed was chronological and you could happily scroll through in a morning looking at what everyone else in your time zone was up to.

A far cry from the heavily curated feed we see today. Filters are still very much there (although much more subtle) but still images have been crowded out by video/Reels and a lot more content competing for attention. It feels like a much noisier place than it did, ‘back in the day’.

However, I’m still there.

For me (and I suspect, many others) Instagram isn't just a platform and I have way more invested in it, emotionally than I do with maybe Twitter or Facebook. Twitter is a fun place to hang out for a bit but, to be honest I often go there to have a moan about something - and being around lots of other people also venting in a similar manner can deplete my energy reserves pretty quickly.

In contrast, Instagram is home to some wonderful supportive friendships. People that I have connected with there and remain good ‘insta pals’ to this day. Human connection is ultimately why we use the app, and why, Reels notwithstanding, I don’t think that Instagram is going anywhere although the way we use it might change a little.

Without Instagram for example, I probably wouldn’t be taking part in Blogtober - and writing this post in the first place. I wouldn’t have set myself a challenge to read 50 books this year without being inspired by the various Bookstagram accounts that I follow. And I don’t think I would be as inspired to create some fabulous new autumn designs if it weren’t for the daily dose of gorgeous hand dyed yarn content that I see served to me alongside my morning coffee.

For all of my dislike of the present format, starting my day without at least a little scroll through Instagram is unthinkable. It's part of my routine along with coffee and cat cuddles.

How about you - are you still there and how do you see your use of the platform changing? Drop me a line in the comments or come and say hi over on Instagram - @LouiseTilbrookDesigns

A June roundup

Find me on Instagram at www.instagram.com/LouiseTilbrookDesigns

Statistics and past experience show that monthly grid summaries like this always do particularly poorly on Instagram. Probably because they are too small for people to see the individual images and it doesn't stop the scrolling thumb in the way that a single image does.

But they give me great joy to create, and so I do them at the end of each month, a little review of my camera roll and what I have been up to and I really enjoy the process. 

It's easy to get swept up in the day to day, particularly right now when, let's face it, whatever country you are in, events seem like a bit of a bin fire.

So it makes for a nice, relaxing half an hour to sit down with my phone and a coffee and go through my selected highlights for the month.

I usually don't share them on Instagram because, as I said they don't tend to get much engagement. But if Instagram is teaching us anything right now it's that you should just post what the hell you want to. It's the online equivalent of dance like no one is watching - because they really aren't.

And so I'll be sharing it over on Instagram later, just because I want to. No other reason.

If you have a particularly beady eye you might spot a finished object nestling in among the images (bottom centre). My Paris is Always a Good Idea shawl turned out to be a particularly speedy knit. I'll do a blog post about it later, but at less than a week from cast on to cast off I rather surprised myself with how quickly this one flew off the needles.

If you are interested in knitting the 'Paris' shawl for my upcoming Summer of Books and Yarn do make sure to sign up to get an exclusive 50% discount off any of my shawl patterns.

On Instagram and borrowed audiences

It’s no secret that life on Instagram is pretty tough at the minute. Tried and tested posting strategies just aren’t working as they used to. And even when you do jump through all the hoops that Instagram seemingly requires of you - hello Reels - you still are left with engagement stats that make a ghost town looks positively vibrant.

There’s no doubt that Instagram is going through a midlife crisis and seems to have forgotten what it wants to be. In it’s quest to be like the other cool platforms it has ended up like someones Dad at a hipster party, slightly awkward and out of place. Desperate to be relevant in a room full of indifference.

Hopefully it will sort itself out soon and until then we just keep plodding on, trying to connect with our audience and to catch up with the people that we have come to enjoy hanging out with there.

I have seen a lot of weeping and wailing though from some quite big accounts. Obviously people’s businesses and incomes are taking a huge hit right now, especially those whose businesses centered largely around selling to their Instagram audience. And a lot of comments along the lines of ‘we’ve earned that audience’ or Instagram owes it to us to sort things out’.

And wow, that’s quite the statement to make. Yes, of course we have worked hard to acquire an audience on Instagram and we’ve certainly put the hours in to generate those likes and comments and sales. But, make no mistake, those people are still Instagram’s audience, not ours. At best we have borrowed them for a while.

It is very literally a case of building a platform on someone else’s land. Unless you have moved those people across onto your email list or other platform - that you own - then they aren’t your audience.

As attractive and photogenic as that Instagram basket is, it’s a good idea to move some of your eggs out of it. At least until Instagram gives it’s head a wobble and gets back in the game.

An email list is one way of doing that, another is through the use of Facebook Groups. Yes, I know it’s another Meta-platform and yes, I know that you still don’t own that either. But an active, engaged Facebook Group is still a really good way, right now to connect to your people. Whilst there is undoubtedly a demographic that prefers to be Facebook-free, over 70% of Facebook users say they visit the site at least once a day. An active Facebook Group with dynamic and new content is a great way to be visible and to show up on people’s social media, in a way that Instagram at the minute just can’t do.

I recently dusted off my 20k-strong Facebook Group - the Everyday Knitter group. I archived it in 2020 in a mid-pandemic state of overwhelm, back when everything just felt too much. But I missed it. I missed the daily connection with people, with friends. And I missed that feeling of belonging to a community. So I resurrected it and I’m thrilled with how it has just picked up where it left off. Sure, we lost a few members along the way and I had some dormant accounts to clear out, but of 20k members, 11.5k are classed as active in the group (according to Facebook’s metrics) and we have lots of chatty and engaged members in there on a daily basis.

Facebook Groups are something that I feel really passionate about, I really do think they can help small businesses connect to their customers in a meaningful way and that’s why I have written the Grow With Groups course.

If you have had ‘start a Facebook Group’ on your to-do list for ever, but have always been reluctant to give it a try, or you don’t know where to start then this is the course for you.

Why not take a look and see what you think? We start on Monday 4 July though, so don’t wait too long.

My first Instagram free week

It isn’t something I’ve come across before, for obvious reasons. But when you haven’t logged in to Instagram for a few days it starts sending you little automated emails. Trying to entice you back to see what you might have missed. Trying to trigger that little bit of your brain that deals with dopamine and addiction. Heck, even trying to make you feel guilty about not showing up.

Seriously. If ever I needed a wake up call that the whole app is designed to draw you in, entice you in and then, crucially, keep you there, then these polite, chirpy ‘look what you are missing’ emails are just the thing.

Happily I can report that these pester emails are now directed to reside in my spam folder along with emails from companies that like to tell me about ‘summer beach body deals’ and strange people from foreign climes trying to send me an inheritance.

I quickly logged in to Instagram for a check in last week. Sunday morning over coffee. I had an hours leisurely scroll which was really rather pleasant and then I logged off to spend an hour doing some gardening - my new favourite thing. It’s really nice, especially in the evening to put the phone down and go and do a bit of gentle pottering about. I’ve never been much of a gardener but we recently had some help clearing our overgrown (I prefer the term nature friendly) garden and I was thrilled to find some old peonies that have survived years of neglect, so now I’m trying not to kill them with kindness.

My other plans for my Insta-break have been rather scuppered by the heat wave we are currently experiencing in my part of the UK. I was planning to do some spinning and get to grips with my drop spindle but it’s been so warm that even looking at a pile of fluff brings me out in sweat.

A friend on Twitter gave me this useful tip for working on larger projects in the heat though - using a small folding lap table to keep the bulk of your project off your legs. We had this ugly old table back from when my husband had surgery a few years ago and I’d stored it away. But it turns out that it’s the perfect size to rest my giant granny square blanket on while I work on it. And there’s room for my coffee too - winner!