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When I first started keeping a blog 7 years ago, there were very few fellow craft bloggers. I was amazed as I could clearly see that the ease of publishing searchable content to a global audience would help studio based artists promote their work. Since it was obvious to me, I decided to try blogging my craft.

Experimenting with this new communication technology, I was hesitant at first. I still didn’t see writing as my main skill. While I knew there was potential, I was treading on new ground, making my way into this new publishing platform with baby steps.

Today, my blog has become the main way I promote my work. I can’t imagine not having it. How far I’ve come. How far we’ve come.

A couple of years ago, I left my job as a university lecturer in new media to spend more time in my studio. I teach online to students around the world. This year, I am very excited about travelling to USA to teach at An Adventure in Crazy Quilting, a retreat and series of workshops.

To think that not long ago I was shocked to be described as a blogging success story! Today, with the amazing community and support from the online community, I realise it is in fact true. It can be true for you, too.

How Can a Blog Help a Crafter

I am still often asked how a blog can help a crafter. Let me share with you how social media has influenced my own studio practice.

Keeping a blog can highlight what you have achieved and help you own that achievement. As a studio based artist/designer, it is very easy to focus on day-to-day processes driven by an ever growing “to do” list. A blog becomes a “have done” list that you have to own, as the process of writing makes you see what you have achieved.

A blog documents the project as it is worked. If ever you need to prove that you own the design a blog documents the whole design process.

Many hand processes take time to perform and a blog can keep you interested in the project and most importantly on track.

A blog helps you focus on completion. UFO’s (Un-Finished Objects) are reduced as in writing about a project it pushes it higher in my priorities. It is only a little nudge but it is enough to mean I am that little more productive. It’s amazing how focused I become when the blog artificially creates a self-imposed deadline. I don’t get distracted. The result is that over a week, month or year more work is produced.

My blog is my number one advertising resource for my online classes. To be honest, I think using my blog as a promotion tool is possibly the most obvious part of blogging, yet for some reason it is the aspect marketers want to hear about, not crafters.

I am passionate about stitching and promote what I do but marketing is not the reason I started the blog nor the reason I still write it daily after 7 years. While not my intention, it serves that purpose, and serves it well, with little additional work on my part. Again, more time for me to focus on my craft.

Reading other blogs can inspire and be a catalyst for creativity. I am sure everyone has seen something online then, inspired to stitch, picks up a needle and thread rather than doing something else.

Blogs are social and they lead me to create a community website called Stichin Fingers on Ning. I saw blogs as being the 21st century version of conversations at a sewing group where people talk about techniques, share tips, along side their personal experiences. In a sewing group, needlework is done, but in the process friendships are built, traditions are passed on, and skills developed.

Once the options of easily run online community sites became available I saw that another aspect of the net could be harnessed to enhance peoples lives which is why I started stitchin fingers.

Online communities unleash creative forces through synergy. One recent community project was the Festival of Needles. While needles are critical to our craft, we usually focus our creativity on the fabrics and thread. This was a unique opportunity for us to all share pictures of our tools and learn how we use them, and why, opening up new connections as we found commonality through our everyday tools.

Blogs and online communities are not a substitute for face-to-face groups – they are an addition to face-to-face groups. They add to a creative life rather than detract. Online community sites like stitchin fingers can enhance people’s lives, particularly if people do not have time to join a traditional guild or organised group, or live in rural or isolated areas. The web is breaking down traditional barriers, allowing us to build relationships across where there once were walls.

It could be said that blogs and community sites have become an overlay to current craft practice.

It’s About Sharing

I love textiles and I love to share. I love to receive an email from someone who has started to embroider or started quilting because they have read my blog.

If a practice such as embroidery is to stay alive, we need ways to expose people to what is possible with needle and thread.

I want the practice to be alive and kicking at the end of the 21st century long after I am gone. The only way to keep the practice alive is to expose people to it. If a network of people constantly does this, it means that this subculture of stitching is alive and healthy.

Mile by mile, life’s a trial.
Yard by yard, life is hard.
Inch by inch, life’s a cinch.

Quilting is about piece by piece, knitting is row by row, embroidery is stitch by stitch. Each of these activities involve big things being made from small pieces. The same process can be applied to life online.

Blogs are built post by post. Communities are built conversation by conversation or person by person. To make a quilt, you build it up block by block over a long period of time.

There are times when you curse the thing, and other times you are enthusiastic and energised, the thing twists and turns under your hands, but overall the project is gradually shaped into something.

Life online and blogging using social media now overlay my studio practice, and life is the richer for it.

About Sharon Boggon

Known around the sewing and textile craft industry as Sharon b, Sharon Boggon is a master of traditional textile and modern digital technology. She founded the active Stitchin Fingers, social network for fiber folks on Ning with almost 4,000 members from around the world and travels that world online and off teaching classes in textile design, computer textile design, hand embroidery, and crazy quilting. Her personal blog is Sharon b's In a minute ago … featuring a popular stitch dictionary resources for crazy quilting and needlework pushing the boundaries of stitch wizardry. She also authors Pin Tangle – Pin Tangle, a textile blog and community.

Sharon was trained as a painter and in textiles. At the Australian National University Sharon taught in the Textile Workshop at Canberra School of Art, later shifting to the Computers Arts Studio to teach web design. Active online since 1996, she started blogging in 2004 and turned the concept of teaching crafts online on its ear by building a strong online community and understanding the power of the social web.

Mixing traditional with digital crafts, in 1997 she produced Playing False at the ACT Craft Gallery in Canberra, Australia. The panels showcase how women were representing themselves on the web and the connection between ‘home making’ and ‘home page,’ what personal websites were called then. Sharon explained:

I use stitchery as seduction. The desire to touch a textile and the need to connect with the work in a physical sense is a metaphor for the internet’s promise of community.

Interested in the connections between textiles and digital technology, in 2000 Sharon B produced an installation which looked at how the internet was profoundly changing cultural concepts about space, and community. The Shareware Project explored what it was to exchange knowledge for physical things, particularly in online textile community which are always swapping items in the post.

I have used these objects in a work to provoke ideas about the slippery exchange between the virtual and the real.

Another of her acclaimed projects, Wisdom of the Ages, hosted on WordPress.com, built upon the creative intuitive and cultural expression found in her work and asked others to pass down generations of little sayings, expressions, anecdotes, and personal stories that have been passed down through the ages as a “snap shot of common sense or popular wisdom.” From 2001 to 2007, 422 Wisdom of the Ages posts were created from participants sharing their cultural references of wisdom from around the world, creating a cultural crazy quilt of words and mini life lessons.