Four
I can barely believe it, but it’s my blog’s fourth anniversary. Where did this year go? It seems like just yesterday that I blogged about it turning three. I really need to pay more attention around here!
Thanks for the commiserations and suggestions about repairing the shawl – it’s still keeping me warm, and my friend who took this picture imagined it unravelling all the way as I wrapped it around me. But the malabrigo has fuzzed just enough for it to stay in place, and at some point undoing the centre motif, removing a couple of repeats and then reknitting and grafting it is a distinct possibility.
Talking about the anniversary, I have been wondering a lot about blogging lately, and knit-blogging in particular. Most of my favourite knit-bloggers (not the celebrity ones like the Harlot, or Grumperina, or Franklin) have gone silent, either because they got busy with new jobs or kids, or moved, or switched to Ravelry. I miss them. I tried finding new blogs to follow from a friend’s blogroll. But many of her links too were either broken, or were nearly a year or more old. The latest posts on a few apologized about neglecting their blogs or rued their lack of knitting time and mojo. So many people are tweeting, and while I’ve resisted following people into a 140-character description of fair-isle, I wonder if everyone’s just bored with oohing and aahing over cool photographs, and the online moment of sighing over the magic of blocked lace is now well and truly behind us?
So I ask myself why I blog, but also why I read knit-blogs, especially as an avalanche of work has hit me this semester, and I barely have time to knit, let alone write a journal about it. I know that blogging, either about knitting, food or travel, helps me relate to my own creative expression in a different way – finding an everyday idiom quite different from my academic writing, and a means of honing half-formed thoughts about stuff I like, that keep buzzing around in the brain. Of course I love Ravelry and I love people’s finished projects, but the best part about craftblogs, and knitblogs in particular for me, was a neat mix of process posts or notes about modifications to projects with the a-ha! photo, and bits of the blogger’s life and opinions about this and that. These seem to have vanished, and the Ravelry ‘notes’ section on project pages doesn’t do it for me.
It makes me wonder what the knit-blogs will look like a few years from now, or if they will still exist. On the one hand I cannot imagine not having one, and on the other the idea that this will continue for ever and ever is also a bit odd. Many of those going strong either have a strong non-knitting personal component to them (the Harlot), or have constantly kept it fresh through new crafts (Grumperina – who really made me take a fresh look at crochet), or have books and designs, and tours and tour stories (Franklin, Brooklyntweed, Ysolda). Does the craftblog naturally tire itself out at some point, and have to keep reinventing itself to keep going if it doesn’t have the semi-advertisement/design-showcase aspect to it? Are there interesting and journal-y regular knitblogs out there still going strong that you can recommend?
I saw the film Julie & Julia recently, and while I hadn’t heard of or read the original blog that inspired the film, I knew about the phenomenon of Julia Child largely through a couple of my friends who are excellent cooks. Apart from Meryl Streep the film was a disappointment because I had unwittingly, from the knitblog experience, expected more about the challenges of writing about a craft; about a work in progress; about how the medium of the blog both frees and traps you into consciously or unconsciously shaping your goals accordingly. All it did was make me hungry, and very annoyed that all that butter didn’t make that Julie put on one single pound!!
Midway through I said to the friend I went to see it with – someone should make a film like this on the Yarn Harlot! Her community organizing, her writing, her books, tours, the lakhs she has raised for MSF… even those crazies that keep writing to her spelling doom on judgment day for not being pro-American or whatever. Maybe they could even get Greg Kinnear to star in it!
Previously in this series: Three; Two; (I forgot the first one!); zero.
