An Auspicious Start?

I'm not quite sure what I'm doing here. Auspicious start to a new blog, huh?Aside from not knowing what I'm doing technically, I've really resisted the urge to blog at all. In a world with lots of really amazing knitting blogs, I've questioned what value my added voice would provide. I used to only read and delight in the yarnharlot's blog, but I recently added several other knitting blogs to my Feedly queue that have saved my sanity during the excessive time I've spent in waiting rooms lately. However, even those haven't been able to keep up with my appetite. Add to that all the cross-pollination that happens in the brain when you read and think about and are inspired by other people's work, and the urge to create my own knitting space grew too much to ignore.Another reason to get my own space comes from a New Year's resolution I had: design, knit, and publish at least one knitting pattern - and then see if a complete stranger would knit it. A few friends graciously test-knit the pattern for me, and I threw it out on Ravelry in April... and two strangers bought it!

Not the two strangers - just my two favorite knitwear models.

I have yet to see their finished products posted on Ravelry or know if they'll ever actually knit the pattern, but they, and the 36 people on Ravelry who favorited it, generated such warm fuzzies that the ideas for more patterns started coming fast and furious. My brain is full of knitting, people, and I need to get it out.Here's what I envision for this space:

• a place to collect my original patterns and inspirations in one spot,
• a place to rhapsodize about other people's patterns I've got on the needles,
• a place to review local yarn stores (LYS), since finding an LYS in a random city and buying a skein or a book as a souvenir is something that delights me and that my husband graciously enables, and
• as requested by a friend who is a relatively new knitter, a place to pass on some of the tricks and tips I've figured out during my decade of knitting. I taught knitting for a few years and really loved being able to show students techniques that, while not called for in the pattern, made their knitting lives easier.

Basically, I have no idea where this will go. There are no LYS in Kenya, where I currently live, so a friend there and I have been struggling to build our own little knitting community. We started a club with a bunch of beginners, but I'm hoping this virtual community will fill some of that gap. I don't know if readership will grow or if it will become a solitary place to collect my thoughts - but I'm excited to experiment. Many thanks to Jeni of theblogmaven for helping me get started.