Welcome to My New Blog Home

This is the official housewarming post for my latest blog. I am prone to startitis* in many areas of my life, but I keep returning to the blog world. I love to write. I love to tinker with websites. There is a particularly rich community of bloggers documenting their adventures in the fiber arts, but also writing their lives, their reading, and their unique perspectives on the world.

I love blogs! I much prefer a blog over any of the other currently available social media, including Facebook. I don't have a Twitter account and I have repurposed my Tumblr into a searchable database for all the links I've collected with useful knitting and crochet technical tips. I use Facebook primarily to share photographs with busy family that are far away. Ravelry is limited to the knitting and crochet crowd. On the other hand, the blogosphere is the beautiful place where I can read online. There is no word or character limit. There can be as many supplemental pictures as one wishes. And there is the glorious, magical webby nature of the Internet that lets you begin with one blog and end up falling through a rabbit hole to appear in a totally different place of mind with another totally different blog moments or hours later.

There are several creative bloggers that recently came together (unknowingly) to sway me back into blogging:

• Stephanie Pearl-McFee (aka the Yarn Harlot) marked her tenth year of blogging with a January 23, 2014 post and explained how it changed her life 
• Knitsofacto posted on March 17, 2014 about staying true to yourself on your personal blog 
• Cindy Rickey, a local friend, knitter, photographer and writer, helped remind me that our creations deserve a place online when she introduced me to her beautiful site
• Kristin Nicholas (blogging at Getting Stitched on the Farm), writer, knitwear designer, painter, and farmer, blogged her own 8 year anniversary post on February 28, 2014

These women reminded me that blogging is what I make it. That it can be a powerful outlet and a way to connect to a rich and diverse creative community. I didn't jump straight into blog posting immediately, but I began to feel more confident. Confidence is something that has been scarce for me in recent years, so I've also had to be patient, which is not one of my specialties.

*Startitis is obviously not in any common dictionaries, but I assume most readers will know that it means the tendency to begin, but not necessarily finish, many projects, often having such projects stored about one's home in various stages of completion. Out of curiosity, I Googled "startitis" and, to my surprise, the first three pages of results all pertained to knitting, crocheting, or sewing. Are we the only folks who suffer from this affliction? Or just the only ones silly enough to go public with it? Or maybe Google's "smart" algorithms are showing off and only letting me see craft-related results. That's kind of creepy. And potentially not very helpful. Did I mention I will also happily follow tangents to the ends of the earth?