Last Friday I was knitting with my friends, and we got on the topic of my blog. I mentioned that this space will be ten years old next year, which is kind of cool, and the conversation moved on to other things. Well, I got home that night and got into bed, and it suddenly hit me that I started my knitting blog in the fall on 2008, my freshman year of college, so it turned ten this year, and I missed the official anniversary by about a month! Oops.
Before I started this blog, I had a locked LiveJournal, which I treated like a semi-private journal. I wrote about movies I saw, anonymized stories about drama in my friend-group, and stuff I did or made– the normal kind of content you’d find in a teenager’s journal. But when I got to college, I didn’t have enough friends to have friend-drama, wasn’t going to the movies anymore, and I wasn’t doing much that I was interested in sharing online other than crafts. My personal LiveJournal was becoming filled with knitting. Almost none of the people who read it were knitters, and my knitting was far from personal stories that needed to be private, so it seemed silly to continue to use a locked down space where so few people could read about my knitting.
So I started Untangling Knots! I originally was on Blogger, and my first ten months of blogging were extremely infrequent, but over the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, I decided to start sharing more than just crafts, without getting more personal. I had begun reading personal style blogs, and they inspired me to add more kinds of content to my blog. Posts dedicated to my family dog Bean, outfit-of-the-day posts, and styling posts got added into the rotation of craft posts, and once I started writing regularly, I got more of an audience, which motivated me to write even more.
In the early days, I’d take most of my pictures using a crappy little point-and-shoot camera. I’d hold my arm out as far as I could and try to get a picture, or I’d balance my camera on a pile of books as a makeshift tripod. The pictures weren’t great. When I was at my parents over school breaks, my sister would let me use her DSLR camera and tripod, which made blogging so much easier. I had taken photography in high school, so I knew how to use a good camera, and for Christmas in 2009, my parents agreed to split the cost of my own DSLR camera with me as my present. Being able to take gorgeous photos and have somewhere to share them got me hooked even more, and I started blogging multiple times a week.
In 2009, with encouragement from my friends and blog readers, I began to dabble in design work, and in the summer of 2010, I got my first pattern commission and published Miette. After that happened, it felt like it was time to make my blog more professional, and I moved Untangling Knots from Blogger to this space. I still kept a mix of craft content and bits and pieces of other things, but I began to treat the blog a little more professionally and added in more informative content, like a review series on different methods.
After I graduated college, this blog helped me land my first job working at a magazine about cake decorating. The blog was such big part of my life and routine that I kept going, and I continued to post several times a week. It was because of Untangling Knots and the more informative posts that I was contacted by a craft tutorial site to be a regular contributor a year later. Writing for that website let me become a full-time knitting pattern writer for several years, until the website closed down their craft section and I got a part-time job downtown.
And here we are! My blog has changed a lot over the years, and I’m delighted to have kept it up for so long and figured out how to make it fit into my changing lifestyle from my late teens to my late twenties. Happy birthday, Untangling Knots!
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