Blogging? And a Challenge

So obviously, I am blogging again, and I do have the intention to keep it up longer than last year. Yes, this is one of those dreaded “why do I blog?” postings ;-). I do this for me, because it helps to motivate me to do creative stuff, and gives me sort of deadlines for my crafting. I need to have stuff to blog about, after all.

I know it is sort of cheesy to use that sort of motivation, and the I don’t want to stoop so low to do stuff just to blog about. But sometimes, I just need a bit of external motivation. I like to tell myself that I do a good thing along the way because my postings may provide entertainment or even inspiration for others. Like ever during the last years, I have been battling health issues and stress at my day job the last months, and sometimes I forget how good it would do me to create something instead of just sleeping or watching TV through most of my free time.

The thing that inspired me most to stitch during the last years was Sharon Bogon’s TAST challenge, which is on a long break at this point. I have done more for it than I posted during the last year, and I miss it. I have a few stitch tutorials in the pipeline anyway, so I’ll do my own challenge, again, both for you and for me. Of couse, it will not be on tuesdays, I respect Sharon too much for that. It will be stitch sunday. I may post a detailed challenge proposal tomorrow and the first installment next sunday. Basically, I will post a stitch description each sunday and everyone who wants to go along with it can do a blog post about the stitch and comment on my posting to let people know where to find it. What do you think, will there be participants?

Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. I have resumed work on my samplers and other stitching, and writing about it in a somewhat structured way will be no loss of time. It definitely will help me to keep at it.

OK, enough navel gazing for today. And to make sure even this post doesn’t come without eye candy, here is a pice of fabric paper I did last weekend. I haven’t messed with acrylics for too long, it was such fun. it was made from cheap 100% cotton fabric, commercial flower paper, dried moss and turquoise silk chiffon as top layer.

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My Blog and Me

My ISP has problems again, so another posting without pics. I know this is getting old.

The important news first: Sharon Bogon has moved her blog, it is now at www.pintangle.com . If you happen not to know it, it’s one of the most useful fiber art blogs and a great community hub, check it out. She has moved all her content over already, and is going to wipe out her old blog soon, so do change your bookmarks and such. But I guess many of you knew that before me.

In her first real post over there, she is describing her progress with moving and cleaning up everything, and muses a bit about her blog and blogging. This made me think about my blogging habits. It is fun again since my blogging break, but sometimes I ask myself if it is useful for anyone but me. One of the good things is that it pushes me to create things when I’m too lazy to do this on my own, because I always find that I feel better when i express myself in someway. On the other hand, I have to be careful that I don’t fall in the other extreme and create meaningless things just for the sake of blogging. But why else do I blog? I enjoy writing, I want to give the inet community something back after I learned so much from other blogs and websites, and I like to interact with other fiber folks that way. And yes, I do enjoy the attention and praise I get out of it. Somtimes I think I’m rather pathetic for that last reason.

Sharon writes that the focus of her blog has narrowed down over the years, got more strictly on topic. For mine, the contrary is true. When I opened it it’s sole purpose was to give me a place to post my stuff for Sharon’s take a stitch tuesday challenge in order to take part properly. But as I got used to blogging, I started sharing whatever remotely creative thing I happened to do. I meandered from stitching to knitting to painting to photography and back again, and it got even worse when I gave up on the take it further challenge due to time constraints. Sometimes I fear my readers will be taken aback by this, but I have no tome to make things up just for the blog and I don’t want to impose limits on what I do because my readers could consider this or that off topic.

These days I often ask myself in what direction I should go with my blog. Be more considerate of the wants of my readers, give them something that is useful, consistent and on topic (as far as I can)? Or continue as I do now, using this as a kind of journal, featuring whatever I happen to work on, including photographs I really like, and throwing in the occasional tutorial when I feel like it?

Sharon writes that she blogs more intensly when she feels she is tireing of it, because this will give her more feedback and bring the fun back to it. I guess that is what I need right now. Something new. Now my idea was to write a review once a week, about a book, a kind of thread or other raw material, anything that is about fiber art in any way. That would give me easy postings because I could prepare them a few at a time on weekends. Would you like that? Or is that a bad idea, since amazon is full of reviews?

What do you like about my blog, what not? Is there something I really need to change dear readers? Why do you blog the way you do?