Love Your Blog Challenge: Beginnings
Last week’s blog post, as inspired by A Playful Day’s Love Your Blog Challenge, generated the most comments I’ve ever gotten. Since the topic was "Interactions and Community," seems only appropriate, no? This week's prompt is "Beginnings," so I'm going to dive right in again.New beginnings necessitate major adjustments. We have a new member of our family, which is pretty much the ultimate beginning. Everyone in the family has adjusted incredibly well, including our toddler, for which I am unbelievable thankful.I live in Kenya, but I traveled home to the U.S. to have the baby. Because of airline restrictions on flying late in pregnancy, this meant I had to return 6 weeks before the baby was due. He was 8 days late, and then it took 7 weeks to get his birth certificate and passport so we could return to Nairobi. This meant I was away from my regular job, which engages and exercises my brain in very fulfilling ways, for 14 weeks.So my brain turned to knitting. I very carefully packed the projects I thought would last me through the 3 months, ruthlessly ordering them by date: Christmas gift, baby item, everything else.
I stretched further, designing a hat for my brother. I wrote more blog posts in December 2014 than in any other month, mostly about finished objects. On January 1st I submitted the hat to the Knit Picks Independent Designer Partnership. Throughout January I ran my first test knit through Ravelry, definitely a learning experience. I wrote and designed and knit until my fingers hurt. I bought a new spinning wheel. Then I succumbed to Instagram enabling. Packages of yarn and fiber kept showing up at the house. I knit myself multiple pairs of socks, some of which I wore while in labor and during recovery in the hospital. I finally managed to get back to Kenya, reuniting our family in its new configuration, and... I was tired. I didn't knit a stitch for more than a week.It's funny. None of this outpouring of creative juices was planned. I knew I had projects I wanted to knit, but my brain, feeling underused, fired up its creativity sector and powered through those 3 months. It gave me something to think about and do and produce, instead of sitting on the couch and twiddling my thumbs, waiting for something to happen.The baby is a wonderful new beginning. But because of the down time he created before and after his birth, I feel like my flock of self-published designs really began, too. One wouldn't have happened without the other. Knit Picks accepted the hat, and when I look at my designs page on Ravelry, it feels like a respectable little start.
I'm Type A. Off-the-charts Type A. So I tend to want to know where things are going, what's the plan, what's the next step, what do I need to make that happen? And then I need to reel myself back in and remind myself that I have no intention of becoming a full-time designer or blogger. I like my regular job too much, and it fulfills me in ways I can't describe. But it doesn't produce tangible things. Knitting lets me produce tangible things. Designing enables others to produce tangible things that once existed only in my head. (Such a rush!) Something Sarah of Crafts from the Cwtch said on a recent A Playful Day blog post resonated with me - or at least I felt it should:
I’m often asked about my goals for the blog. There has never been any ‘plan’ for CftC. As in the beginning, I’m still writing about the things that interest me. I’ve never been a slave to statistics and the blog is not a stepping-stone towards some other goal - it is what it is.
That's what I need to remember. It's okay if there are no plans or goals for this blogging/designing THING. It is what it is. I'm enjoying it. As long as that's the case, I need to just go with the flow.