I just realized that Friday, September 28 was the 6th year anniversary of this blog. Oh, sure it hasn’t always been at this location. And sure, I may have gone one of those years and only blogged a couple of times. But it’s a little hard to believe that Knitting from Outer Space has been in existence for that long, or even that I’ve been knitting for 10 years.
It’s kind of interesting to consider how things have changed in that time. Some of the knit bloggers that I first started reading back in 2004 are still around. Sadly, many aren’t; they either simply stopped updating, or in some cases, deleted their blogs all together. Ravelry sort of had the same effect on knit blogs as Facebook had on Livejournal; everyone abandoned their separate little islands to be part of the bigger whole. I’ll admit I was one of them. Ravelry had so much more interaction (especially after they added the Forums), then an average knit blogger like myself saw in their comments section.
I don’t know why I recently decided to try my hand at it again. I think part of it is trying to reconnect with my own knitting in a way. I feel like I’ve been spending so much time reading about others’ knitting or searching for patterns that just lengthen my ever-growing queue that I don’t actually sit down and enjoy the feeling of needles and yarn in my own hands. I recently started taking a spinning class at my LYS, and it’s made me slow down my process and examine what I’m doing rather than dashing off headlong and being disappointed that things don’t work out quite as I was expecting. It’s made me remember that I feel calmer and more relaxed when I work with wool at least once a day.
I have no idea if anyone out there is still even reading my blog anymore. I know that as I stopped blogging, I stopped reading other blogs as much (especially when Bloglines was going to go away* and I switched to Google Reader, which only stores the previous month rather than up to 200 posts per feed like Bloglines did). I’m working at getting back into the habit of checking my blog feeds at least a couple times a week. Then, I’m going to work at commenting more so that other knit bloggers know there’s someone out there reading them.
Meanwhile, I’m also going to start working on my blog revamping project again. When I first started blogging at Blogger.com they didn’t have tags or categories, so none of my posts had that information when I transferred over to WordPress. When I moved my blog, I had to go through and change photo links (because I changed photo services at the same time); after all that work, it seemed hard to go back through and tag things. But, now the compulsive archivist in me wants everything to be nice and tidy.
*Apparently, Bloglines did not go away like they said it would. It looks like it changed hands. Unfortunately, it’s been so long they don’t have my information anymore.