Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week

I briefly mentioned it the other day but thought I should say a bit more about it for anyone who reads my blog and isn’t a fellow knit/crochet blogger!

I mention Ravelry a lot. It’s a wonderful (free) online resource for knitters/crocheters, including a huge pattern and yarn database. There are also extensive forums, creating a wonderful online community that brings together knitters/crocheters from around the world. There are thousands of groups dedicated to all sorts of random things, and forum threads on all sorts of wonderful topics. My favourite finds so far have been the 9+ month long thread started by one Raveller asking for support on taking a pregnancy test, leading right through to her finally giving birth to her daughter a few months ago, and the thread discussing the development of a knitted pattern for a blanket based on Escher’s tessellating fish. If you are a knitter/crocheter and not already a member of Ravelry, get yourself over there and sign up. It’s awesome.

I digress. There is a group on Ravelry called The Blog Hub, for people like us who like to blog about our craft. It’s a great resource for advice on blog layouts, topics, advertising, technical issues and anything else we can think of to ask each other! It’s also a great place to go to find new blogs to read, as the lovely moderators maintain a list of group members’ blogs. As the group has over a thousand members, you can imagine that provides us with a lot of reading material and inspiration!

Last year, the group’s fabulous mod Eskimimi organised a week long blogging event called “Knitting and Crochet Blog Week”, where everyone came together and posted according to a list of seven set topics for the week. A very clever tagging system was developed to enable people to Google search for everyone’s posts (seriously, go to Google and search the term “knitcroblo1” to get about 1,700 results for Day one of last week’s Blog week). Overall, the week seems to have been a huge success.

So it should come as no surprise that this year Eskimimi has organised another one! All of the details, including the new topics and this year’s post tagging system can be found on the relevant pages on Eskimimi’s site.

For various reasons, I did not take part last year. I only took up crochet in May last year (a few weeks after KnitCroBlo Week), and only started blogging at Christmas! I’ve been on Ravelry since May as well, after my good friend (and fellow fiber artist) Em pointed the way, but only discovered the Blog Hub group in February, after a fellow blogger happened to mention it on her blog.

Happily, I joined the group in time to see Eskimimi get the ball rolling on this year’s KnitCroBlo Week, and am looking forward to getting involved. Because of work and studying, I won’t have time to blog every day on spec, so I have taken a sneaky peek at the topics and started planning/writing my posts already. Day five should be very entertaining; I can’t wait to see what people do for that one!

As I missed out last year, and the topics have changed, I am doing my level best to incorporate the topics from last year’s Blog week into my posts for this year. Luckily, most of the topics cross over with this year’s list, so it’s not that difficult to get them all in.

So don't forget to check back in next week, the magic starts on Monday 28th March!