Hi ladies, gentlemen and all lovers of crochet! It’s been a while since my last post. I have been debating with myself over which direction I want to take this blog and business in and I change my mind from one day to the next. I guess I have had this battle since I started this blog back in 2018.
I started this blog because I wanted to do something with my life. All my life I have lacked direction and have had a hard time seeing what my life was amounting to, besides being a mother and wife. I never felt good at anything, never found anything I especially liked doing, until the day I picked up a crochet hook. To be honest I didn’t feel like I was any good at that either. But here in this amazing community I found people who liked what I made. People wanted to buy the toys I crocheted and with that came another problem. You see I have ADHD, a diagnose I got just a few years ago and suddenly I wasn’t just a girl who couldn’t understand why everything I did felt wrong, why who I was always felt wrong, but that’s not a story for this post. Back to the subject. My ADHD diagnosis also explained why I had a hard time doing the same project over and over. I had no trouble finishing the first toy but I couldn’t for my life motivate me to make another identical toy. And once again I failed in life, this was just another thing I would never be successful at.
But then someone asked me if I could write how I had made a baby coat, so I did and she loved the pattern. This was the starting point and slowly but surely I began to collect the courage needed to start posting my patterns and designs for other people to see then just friends and family.
Don’t get me wrong my first patterns were a disgrace and I had no idea that patterns needed to be tested and be more than just a word document and contain all sorts of information other than row 1-20. I got some hate from unhappy readers when a free pattern I had published contained some errors and once again I felt like a complete failure. I felt like I did before I found crochet, like my life was just a long line of utter failures.
I can’t remember now what it was that kept me going, but kept going I did, I redid the pattern and found some nice ladies willing to test it. I published it and waited with my heart in my throat to see if I would get more unhappy people. I still feel like that every time I publish a new pattern, either free or paid, because it doesn’t matter how much it has been tested, it’s enough that one number is off or one comma is in the wrong place and the whole thing is incorrect. And there is always someone who doesn’t seem to understand that we designers are human too. 99,9% of the people who have found an error in one of my patterns are kind and understanding and understands that I need a day or two to correct it. But there is still that 00,01% that leaves nasty comments and reviews. And I don’t ever think I will get over that hearth in throat feeling when I publish something.
Now I got a bit off track again. This last year has had its ups and downs, I got really discouraged when some lady stole the Facebook group that me and my amazingly talented and kind, good friend Audrey had taken care of for the past 4 years together. It had grown big and into a place where we encouraged one another, shared our love of crochet and yarn with each other. I can’t reset it because I don’t have access to the email I used for my old Facebook account. Some strange sites also copied and stole the patterns right from my blog to drive traffic to their own sites (that why it isn’t possible to copy the texts from this blog anymore, sorry!)
I have felt like the work I have been doing since 2018 slowly has been crumbling, like watching my life work go down the drain.
So I have had to accept that that community is gone and that’s been hard to do. But a few days ago I realized that it isn’t gone. You are all still out there! And we can rebuild and I can talk to you here!
So we started a new group called Swecraftcorner crochet group, please feel free to join if you want to help us spread positivity with crochet!
Back to the original thought for this post, in which direction to take this blog and business. What I want is to challenge myself, see if I can make it grow, make my pattern portfolio grow, make myself grow and to prove to myself that I am not just one big failure, I can actually do this!
But then the question remains, how the heck do I accomplish that? Anyone?
I have no real experience in how to market myself online or get people to notice me. Is it best to only publish free patterns, only paid patterns or both. Here is my internal struggle with that, I want everybody in the world to be able to use my patterns no matter what their financial standing is and I want to share my love of this craft and designing with everybody, but I still need to put food on the table. And recently I feel like I am not doing either. So one of two things needs to happen. 1 – I decide to dedicate my time and energy into this blog again or 2 – I give it up and realizes that it was fun while it lasted.
So now I must decide, am I going to go for this and make it more than just a hobby and some extra cash each month or am I going to focus my energy on other things, things like maybe getting an education so I can have a “real” job one day.
I am not a quitter!
So let’s do this, Let’s go all in And I hope that you are all with me, and will like what I have planned for the rest of this year.
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