In praise of blogging

I miss writing. I miss sitting down in a café with my notebook and sketching out a few blog post ideas. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this year my blogging game has fallen off a metaphorical cliff.

Obviously, there’s the whole ‘living through a pandemic’ to contend with and the sheer emotional overwhelm which has left me visibly struggling at times. But partly it’s the fact that all the little moments of my week – those 10 minutes interludes here and there where I could grab my notebook or my phone and jot down a few random things have just disappeared.

I don’t particularly have ‘free time between things’ at the minute. With being at home so much, if I’m not working at the kitchen table, or relaxing – knitting – there are a whole host of other domestic mundane jobs that are competing for my attention. My poor notebook rarely gets a look in.

Still, I’m determined to do something about that and to reclaim some of the lost time that I seem to have sunk into trying to keep the Instagram algorithm happy. I’m sure that I’ve written about this before, but it is easy to lose yourself in the world of Instagram – indeed that’s the very thing that the app is designed to do. It’s designed with the express intention of drawing you in, and then crucially, keeping you there.

Instagram doesn’t want you wandering off to check out someone’s blog – or following external links to pastures new. It wants you there, on the app. Spending time, seeing adverts and generally keeping their usage data high.

But, as lovely as the Instagram community is and no matter how inspirational and uplifting I find it, I generally don’t read as many of the captions as I should, and I’m sure that people skim over my content as much as I skim over theirs. Nothing beats a good blog post – ideally read over a cup of coffee during some well-earned downtime – for really connecting with someone and for being drawn into their ideas and their experiences.

So, here we are. Up and blogging again.

All I need now is that cafe, a large vat of coffee and a good spell of people watching to get the words flowing again.

Knitwear in April

Ever keen to extend the knitwear season as long as possible I was thrilled when, after a lovely sunny day or two at the weekend, the temperature plummeted again.

Don’t get me wrong, it was lovely to bask in the (almost) warm sunshine and to contemplate replacing my winter boots, with summer sandals. But when the mercury dipped again and the wind developed a distinct easterly sharpness I was secretly pleased that knitwear was still needed.

Shown here is one of my favourite shawls – the Cornhill shawl by Eden Cottage Yarns in their Carlisle Fingering, as well as my Fuss Free Mitts – a free pattern which is up on my blog. I knit a few pairs of these in various colours and I usually have at least one pair rolled up in most of my walking jackets. The other pockets generally hold masks – but that’s Covid times for you.

In other news I have been dusting off the blog a little and trying to get back into some semblance of a writing routine again. This of course necessitated the purchase of a shiny new notebook, about which I am very excited – more on that later.

For now I have been content with revisiting my blog reading and finding out who out there is still blogging. Much has been written about the death of the blog, but honestly I think that more and more people are finding that they need a break from the pressure and the heated-ness (if that’s a word) of social media. I read this article recently by Tanis Fibre Arts on the subject and I have to say that it really resonated with me.

I tell myself that I don’t have the time to sit down and draft out a blog post or two, but I’ll happily lose half an hour on Instagram – feeding the algorithm gods. So I’m trying to get into good habits by actually reading other peoples blogs and spending a little less time surfing Twitter or Instagram.

I used to use Bloglovin but I’ve never been a huge fan, so I thought it was a good opportunity for a fresh start. I signed up to the free version of Feedly and so far I have to say that I’m really enjoying it. I think there is the option for more features if you pay for a plan but I’m just seeing how I get on with the free version for now.

One thing I was exploring was the old concept of a blogroll – remember those? My old Blogger page used to have a little sidebar widget with a blogroll and I used to love visiting other sites and seeing what blogs they in turn followed. Is that still a thing do you think? I’d love to see that make a comeback.

Anyway, all this to say that hopefully I will be around a little more in the coming weeks as I blow the cobwebs away. And if you have any top blog recommendations please do let me know. I’m always looking for new ones to follow. Maybe I’ll even share them on a blogroll of my very own.

Why I love my email newsletter

I’ve written about this before in an older post - From Me to You - but I recently re-read it as I’ve been sorting through some old files and I was really struck by how relevant it is now. Maybe even more so than when I first wrote it.

For me, sitting down to write an email newsletter still does feel very much like writing to a friend. It feels more personal in a way that a post on Instagram never can, and it’s still one of my favourite things to do in my business.

In a world where social media is increasingly ruled by the Algorithm Gods even your physical presence on a platform can’t be taken for granted. It’s an unpleasant truth but all of us are just a post or two away from losing our accounts. Accounts can be mass reported, frozen, hacked or removed overnight and it can be very hard to come back from that kind of loss. Social media can be a fickle friend - seductive but fickle.

My decision to move away from Ravelry, for example wouldn’t have been possible without my email newsletter list. My network of loyal subscribers who have stuck with me for years now and who I can always rely on to respond with cheerful enthusiasm and energy. For many people the loss of Ravelry was a sudden shock. Faced with the prospect of ill-health for continuing to use the site many had to take the difficult decision to either stop using it or drastically curtail their use of it.

I was fortunate that I wasn’t directly affected by the site changes, but my decision to move my pattern sales from there was made an awful lot easier by the reassurance that I still had a means of communicating with people. If I hadn’t had my email list I don’t think I would have been in a position to do that.

It’s easy to think of email newsletters as just a sales tactic. A way to sell something to someone, and yes it’s certainly true that it does help. But it’s much more than that. It’s personal connection between me and your inbox and I share things in my newsletters that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing on open social media.

Most of the time on social media you are just on broadcast mode - putting stuff out there into the world and hoping that someone sees it. With an email newsletter it’s different.

It’s a personal invitation into someone’s inbox. It’s a gift and one that I never take for granted.

If you’d like to sign up to my regular email newsletter to find out what I’m on about just click the link below

Three reasons to air your stash

I’ve never really subscribed to the notion of spring cleaning – or any kind of regular cleaning routine come to that. Apart from when it comes to my stash. Not necessarily linked to spring, or any other time of year, I will quite often get the urge to have a good rootle through my stash. 

Not that I’m looking for anything in particular, you understand. It’s more akin to visiting with old friends. A chance to check in with skeins both young and old. Frequent purchases nestling alongside never-to-be-knit classics. 

This year I have had to move some storage boxes around (thanks to the current situation and the never ending chaos of 2 adults and 2 near-grown adults all living and working under one roof). I took the opportunity to have a good rummage, clear out some old WIPs that were never destined to become finished objects and pick out a few items that could go to other homes. 

There are any number of advantages to doing this on a semi-regular basis, but three solid reasons (should you need them) are: 

1. A chance to check for unwelcome visitors. I’m not going to say the M word out loud but we all know how attractive our stored skeins can be for little beasties. I’m keeping my fingers firmly crossed when I say that I haven’t yet been troubled by this, but obvious signs to look for are little papery cases attached to your yarn, areas of breaks or weaknesses in the yarn or fine sandy grains in and around where the yarn is stored. This article is very informative – if slightly terrifying. 

1. A chance to reconnect with forgotten items. Despite my best efforts I often forget exactly what I have stored away, especially as it is currently stored in multiple places. I try to keep track with an Airtable spreadsheet but there’s no substitute for actually getting my paws on the yarn to remind myself what I actually have in my possession.  

1. A chance to rehome some yarn. Let’s face it, I have way more yarn than I can knit in the next few years and it’s all potential moth food. Quite often when I go through my stash I’ll find something that no longer appeals to me, or I never quite ended up using. I can often pick out a few items to either use as prizes or giveaways, or to donate either to charity shops or other organisations. I often like to donate to Knit for Peace as they will accept either full or partial skeins as long as it is clearly labelled. 

Lost yarn and other tales

A lost year - how can a simple ball of yarn bring up so many feelings?

Almost a year ago I had to quickly pack up the contents of our spare room - turning it into what we laughably thought was a temporary home office.

I hastily grabbed a load of project bags and yarn and packed them away into a large tub, and that was the last I saw of them until this week, when I had to go looking for some important tax papers.

There were quite a few long forgotten WIPs and yarn that I'd clearly set aside when I was naively putting together a rough 'to knit' list for the year.

This yarn, for example was clearly going to be a Christmas knit as I'd put it in my special @kalokshekellen project bag but I couldn't even remember the yarn, never mind what I intended to knit with it. (I now know that it's @edencottageyarns Brimham High Twist in Festive Fun).

If ever there was an analogy for our present situation. So much has been put on hold. I started to list all the tings that we, and more particularly, my boys have missed out on. But I deleted them as it's unhelpful at this stage to dwell on it too much.

It just makes me sad.

Luckily there were considerable upsides to unearthing my forgotten stash - more needles than I ever remember for having - for a start.

And I also took the opportunity for an impromptu 'finish or frog it' session.

So it's not all doom and gloom. And now I get to decide to what to knit with this lovely yarn, as it's certainly not going to disappear back into my stash again.

Pink stripes and brown mittens

I appear to have inadvertently created my favourite sweetie - Liquorice Allsorts in sock form - by adding in some candy pink stripes to these DIY self stripe socks.

In part I think I was motivated to "go pink" with these DIY self stripe socks as an antidote to an endless sea of brown mittens.

I made the mistake of checking Ravelry's hot right now page the other day only to see so many versions of brown mittens - and even a sweater version (untested, unknit - just a colour chart slapped onto an existing pattern -by a designer who has never made a peep about anything remotely political or controversial before. But I digress)

I counted 11 separate Bernie inspired patterns!

Seriously, when did knitters lose their sense of creativity? Why the rush to make a pattern (and presumably make the mitts) that everyone else is also doing?

The original mitts weren't even hand-knit. They were upcycled from a sweater. If you wanted to pay homage to the original intention and upcycle something yourself I could see the point. But indulging in a commercial activity as some sort of tribute to something that was originally about the opposite of consumerism seems very odd to me indeed. I even saw specific “Bernie inspired colourways” for heavens sake.

I know that knitting has always had it's wildly popular patterns. The ones that suddenly everyone seems to be knitting. But this is something else.

So many people rushing to capitalise on something that wasn't even hand-knit in the first place.

And yes a free pattern is still gathering social currency (if not actual currency), otherwise Caitlin Hunter wouldn't have bothered to go to all the trouble of colouring in a chart for it.

A quick glance at the Ravelry front page was enough to make me feel as though I was in a parallel universe - one where I don't really give a flying flamingo about brown mitts - or the old white man wearing them.

I'm far more excited by the historic firsts of that particular day for women, and women of colour. The amazing purples and jewel tones. The wonderful, inspirational address by Amanda Gorman. So many firsts and so many sources of joy and inspiration that knitters could have focused on instead of brown mittens.

And if you are intrigued by the thought of designing your own self-stripe socks but the thought of all those ends puts you off, you might like to take a look at the Clasped Weft Join - no fuss, no weaving in of ends, just pure self-stripe enjoyment.