Love your blog challenge: Gratitude

April 27, 2015April 26, 2015 ~ solrencoret ~ 2 Comments

Hello everyone, hope you had a nice weekend wherever you are. I am here with the last prompt for the Love Your Blog Challenge by A Playful Day and this time it is all about gratitude.

Life can get so busy sometimes that we often don’t take the time to be thankful for what life has given to us. I am very guilty of this, especially since I am more of a glass half-empty kind of girl. As part of my goals for the year the first one was: Appreciate the wonderful things in my life more often and write them down at least once a month. I am so embarrassed to say I have only done this once but I guess it is never too late to pick it up so without further ado, here are a few things I am grateful for right now:

The arrival of spring: longer days and colour.
A good cup of tea: especially after a long day.
Free yoga videos: I can’t believe I managed without them until now.
People who love yarn as much as I do: the only ones with whom you can be your true self without odd looks.
My yarn and my hook: for the lovely time we have spent together.
This blog and you guys: for every view and comment.

Finally, I just want to thank Kate from A Playful Day and everyone who took part of the Love Your Blog Challenge, it has been so fun to take part and to discover some new blogs, I would definitely agree now that the blog is not dead: it is alive and kicking and we are not going anywhere.

Have a great week everyone,

Sol

Love your blog challenge: Beginnings

April 13, 2015April 12, 2015 ~ solrencoret ~ 9 Comments

I am back today with my post for the next prompt for the Love your Blog Challenge organised by A Playful Day (if you missed the first prompt you can check my last post here). If you are a blogger I would really encourage you to check out the posts that Kate has developed to support the challenge, they feature some amazing bloggers and really great tips to help keep your blogging mojo.

First of all I want to thank everyone who left a comment on my last post about interactions and community, it was really nice to get your feedback and views on this topic and I really appreciate the encouragement you have given me as well. It has been so fun to read other people’s posts and I am very happy to be contributing to our awesome community.

I have been so inspired by readers and bloggers and what really made my week was to see Sarah from Crafts from the Cwtch change her “knit-along” to a “make-along” to include both knitters and crocheters! That really made my heart leap several times *sigh*

This week it is all about beginnings. And unlike last week’s post which was a bit of a struggle to get done, I couldn’t wait to get started with this one after such encouragement. I decided to give my blog a bit of a new leaf to honour this theme, with a new look, a new domain and also a new section. You can now find my blog at acrochetjourney.com, any of the links to the wordpress.com site will still work with this new domain.

If you look at the menu on the top you will see my usual pages for tutorials and free patterns, but you will now also see a new one under the name “handmade wardrobe”. I realised while thinking about beginnings that I really wanted to start exploring this theme more, first with crochet but eventually with other crafts such as sewing and knitting.

After realising that I was spending hours and hours working on projects that I never used I have been putting a lot more thought and attention to each of my projects to make sure that it will be something that I will love to wear once finished. One thing this challenge has made me realise is that I really want to inspire people to give crochet a try and wouldn’t it be great if I could inspire some of my readers so that we are all making lovely garments or accessories that we not only love to make, but also love to wear. There is something so special about handmade items, and clothes really strike a cord with my practical self. You always have to wear clothes don’t you? Well… not always but now we are getting off track!

The new section will contain all my posts from here onwards which relate to creating your own wardrobe pieces, from inspiration and patterns that I would love to try to WIPs and FOs that are being added to my wardrobe. I will do an introductory post soon and start creating content for this new section. Of course this is still a crochet blog so it will centre on crocheted items but with a bit of inspiration from other crafts as well.

So there you have it, my beginning in a new journey… a handmade journey. Hope you continue to join me and thanks for reading 🙂

Sol

Love your blog challenge: Interactions and community

April 6, 2015 ~ solrencoret ~ 23 Comments

Hello everyone, hope you had a lovely Easter weekend. Mine is still going actually since I don’t go back to work until tomorrow thankfully. It has been a weekend of relaxing, crochet, sun and a lot of cleaning and organising around the flat. I had a long list of things I wanted to do this weekend and one of them was to join the “Love your blog challenge” organised by A Playful Day.

I have been thinking lately that I need to have a serious think about what I want for this space since it is time to define it a bit better. I started this blog as a personal challenge but I think it has evolved a lot since then and I really need to find a purpose for it to keep me motivated. I thought this challenge would be a good way to start: the idea is to get inspired with your blog again by writing a post around a topic each week, and the first one is “Interactions and community”. Once you post it you can share it with others doing the same and see what everyone else is doing.

As preparation for this post I have been brainstorming in my little notebook and I wrote down (mostly) questions, such as:

What inspires me about this community?
How do I take part?
What makes us a community?
Knitting community versus crochet community?
How and what do I want this blog to contribute to this community?

After this I was blank for days. It is crazy that when you actually have the time to be inspired and creative nothing actually comes to you, but when you are very busy doing other things then everything starts flowing again. After chewing these questions and concepts over for a while I kept coming back to the same idea: sharing. All our interactions, our community and even our inspiration are based on the basic act of sharing between us.

We share our love for what we do, our love of sheep, yarn, patterns and everything in between. We share our frustrations and our achievements, we share our knowledge regardless of its size or limits. We share compliments and advice, tools and colours. We love to share and we also love to receive it.

And we share all of this to anyone else who understands how much a skein of yarn or a project can bright up your day, we don’t need to know more. There are no skills or tests required to be part of this community, it doesn’t matter what you do for a living, where you live or how long you have been crocheting, knitting, weaving or whatever fibre craft you do. You just need to want to take part.

I have spent much time lately thinking about the boundaries of the fibre community to try to understand how crocheters like me fit in a community that is knitting-centered and I still don’t have the answer for it. I have said before that sometimes it feels like unless you knit you won’t really be part of it. That unless I actually grab a pair of needles I will continue to listen to podcasts with many things I don’t understand and I will continue to realise how the options available to take part in this community reduce significantly when you don’t knit, festivals and workshops being an example of this (and knitting groups the exception). I know I am a part of the fibre community, but it does feel like I am on the outside looking in sometimes.

What I realised though is that at the core we are a community of people who love to share, that is what makes it so amazing, inspiring and open. No one has ever not shared advice, excitement, compliments or anything else with me because I am a crocheter, and nor have I not shared with someone because they knit. In a world where everything is a commodity, fibre people are walking to a different tune by simply sharing out of love. Even those who are trying to make profit out of their craft are sharing their skills and talent from the heart. In that sense, there is not a crochet and a knitting community but a sharing fibre community filled with amazing people who share their passion for yarn in all its states and forms, and our amazement at what it can turn into regardless of the tools we use. It doesn’t answer my question, but it definitely helps. It also explains why even though I don’t knit I still enjoy all those knitting podcasts 🙂

I can also say for sure that I want my blog to contribute to this sharing community. Most of all, I want to share with the world the amazing things that crochet can do, and that it can be as fashionable and stylish as knitting. And if time allows, I want to continue to design patterns that push those boundaries a bit and make people want to learn what you can do with hook and yarn. Just like everyone else in this community I want to share what I love with everyone willing to listen.

I leave you with a picture that I think really says something about our interactions as a community. This is my fridge and the postcard you can see at the bottom is one I just received from a fellow crocheter who was on holiday in Spain. We met on Ravelry a few weeks ago and she kindly offered to send me one while she was away. I think I should probably correct my earlier statement: we are a community who loves to share, and to bring happiness to others. It’s the little things people, the little things.