This is the gown I wore when I first started blogging.
I guess I thought I should make an occasion of it!
The last almost two years and 200 posts have been both interesting and painful. Initially I became quite caught up in the stats and enjoyed the friendship of the commenting community. Recently however commenting has become a bit of a burden as I find the discipleship aspect of some blogging communities to be both disheartening and disturbing.
I started blogging because of insomnia which was a symptom of intractable pain and it was distracting and rewarding to while away the hours reading, commenting, trying to build some sort of a relationship with whichever bloggers reciprocated at the time. I know a lot of bloggers have been advised by their doctors to start blogging due to ill health or a death in the family. I really did it because it is very isolating being awake when the rest of the world is asleep. Now I find that I am just starting online in the middle of the night when my online friends overseas are going about their day and it has become routine for me to check in and see if they have updated their blogs or flickrstreams or groups. One thing that has changed for me in the last year or 100 posts is that I am using twitter more and also networking through my flickr craft groups more than before. I find flickr to be even more immediate than blogging and indeed blogging to me is a tool which goes with the more visual aspect of flickr.
Over the last 100 posts I have continued to meet the most wonderful people. I met a lot of lovely bloggers after the Kaylee scam and am still in touch with several of them now. Widdle Shamrock, Dina and Teeni are much valued fellow bloggers and indeed I met Dina and family when she came to Australia earlier this year. I meet a lot of artisan bloggers through flickr and also some who do not blog but are very loyal and supportive crafting friends. Aneela is hosting a quiltalong and her fun quirky style is a boon to the craft community. Two of the ladies who are involved in the quiltalong have just started blogging and I am so pleased and happy to encourage them.
I would like to take this moment to thank my dear friend Angie of Nanna Days, we have known each other for some time now as blog buddies and I have come to be very fond of her and her family. She has enriched my life with her wonderful and humourous tales of life with her three homeschooled children and her childhood sweetheart husband. My life has been enriched enormously by knowing her.
Compare my relationship with Angie to the one I had with another blogger who recently told me that online I “befriend people with no class, no tact and who bore people stupid”. That I and my friend Dina were “but tiny little specks of nothing in the whole blogosphere”. And those were two of the nicer observations.
That is the beauty and the ugliness of the blogosphere.
I have started a new blog, Just Speaking From The Heart, where I will be blogging in future about things that are on my mind and heart. I think it best to separate the creative blog from the personal one….on the few occasions when blogging has backfired on me it has affected my creativity here and I cannot allow that to happen. I have been contacted increasingly for commissions to make various quilts and homewares so need this blog to become more of a design and crafting one. Watch out here for tutorials, artisan profiles and lots more of my thrift finds. And of course for giveaways. Speaking of which….
Anyone who has commented regularly before…..or semi regularly…..will go into a draw for my 200th post giveaway. Comments close on June 30th. There will be a choice of prizes…the main one is Dragonfly Horses…see below.
Oh yes I am almost finished it now…..just the binding to do!
