obligatory introductory post; or, how Slow Fashion October begat Maybe I Should Start A Knitting Blog November

Hello and welcome! My name is Leslie and I’ll be your hostess for this month long experiment, which may or may not turn into a knitting blog. Before we get to the knitting part though, I feel like I should kick off the blogging part with a bit of backstory, so bear with me. Or skip ahead. I won’t judge.

Anywhoo, for reasons I have no plans to share in any medium, the end of September was a rough time for me and, at the beginning of October, I decided I needed a bit of a healthy distraction. Knitting has long been one of my favorite ways to de-stress and one of my least favorite things about my knitting, and crafty pursuits in general, is how lax I am at documenting them. So, after reading about Slow Fashion October on Fringe Association, I decided joining would be a good distraction as well as an opportunity to steer myself towards keeping some sort of knitting / crafting journal.

Thus an instagram account was born. I dubbed it Mystery Girl Makes for no other reason than my pseudonym, Bunny Fontaine, was already taken (as was every configuration of Jade Pussycat I could come up with) and it was the first thing that came to mind.

[ETA: This problem has since been solved; you can now find me on IG @bunny_fontaine]

Over that first weekend of October I posted a few pics. Some people liked them and a couple of people – three exactly – even hit the follow button. During the next week I had a bit of unexpected afternoon down time (one of the bonuses of self employment) so I decided to spend a little of my long lunch break exploring the hashtag. And thus an instagram account was almost deleted.

(Truthfully, I did delete it. But apparently the IG crew is well prepared for such crises of insecurity and if you sign back in within a week, the deleted account will magically reappear as if nothing happened. Just FYI.)

(I snapped pics of this shrug - one of the first non-scarf items I knit - to use during SFO "love" week; a lot of my early knitting experiments have since been frogged, gifted, donated, etc. but I still find myself wearing this more than I ever thought I would.)

As I read through some of the posts and comments, I learned for many involved it was a far more serious and studious pursuit than my hastily conceived “upload a pic of your WIP and tell a little story about it” concept; a jumping point for intense, lengthy discussions less about what a person was making and more about ethics, sustainability, accountability and consumer culture. Conversely, many entrepreneurial folk decided to add the hashtag to the posts they likely would have uploaded during the month anyway to attract potential customers.

For the record, I have nothing against the former or the latter but the more I read the less I felt I was using the hashtag properly. So I stopped using it. And posting things to that account. To quote one of my scant few entries, it was a #slowfashionfail.

(I forget whether I planned to post these pics during "love" or "worn" week; either way, I love this pair of well worn leather boots. I thrifted them over a decade ago and still wear them all the time.)

As the month wore on I debated jumping back in but wound up in the same cycle of getting a post together, looking at other people’s posts and promptly deleting mine. Le sigh. Then I had an epiphany. (Is it still an epiphany if you lose sight of and later return to the same basic concept at several points in your life? Either way that’s pretty much what happened.) I realized I didn’t need to join a movement in order to achieve my original goal. Which brings us to Maybe I Should Start A Knitting Blog November.

The idea behind the project is pretty simple, if not self-explanatory, but to clarify: for the month of November I’m gonna try my hand at blogging about my knitting / crafty pursuits (possibly other people’s knitting / crafty pursuits as well, assuming I can figure out the politics of that end of this medium) and we’ll see how it goes.

I have to admit I don't have a schedule planned and I don't plan to do much aside from the writing part of blogging. (Meaning forgive the sparse sidebar and layout, lack of an about page etc.) If this extends past the month of November I will amend all of that.

In the meantime, if you'd care to follow along with my little experiment that would be lovely! And since the length of this post is giving us all eye strain, I think I'll cut myself off here.

Thanks for reading down this far!