april 2009 – february 2014
When I started my blog back in April of 2009, I was just thrilled when I had 50 views, never thinking that I would get to the point where I would have 40,000+ views a year.
Today by the time I am ready to publish this post I will have hit 100,000 views. Back in 2009, I just wanted to have a website that showcased my basketry work, and to promote the art of Seat Weaving and Hand Caning. I struggled very hard to have viable content as well as hopefully create a blog that did not look like a lot of other blogs, at that time so many blogs that I had looked at had very few pictures. I felt like a website a blog needed to be visual as well.
There was a period in the last several years where I was asked by many people that knew I had been an Old Order Mennonite background and that I loved to cook and do home canning to please post some pictures and recipes on the blog as well. I will admit that the blog unexpectedly increased by leaps and bounds.
While the original intent of the blog was weaving, I found from comments and emails that people loved the diversity of the blog, a picture of life itself was coming into being, not just something that someone wanted or liked to do, but was showing the interests and life of an individual..
From Art, literature, poetry, cooking, home canning, freezing, dehydrating, preserving for tomorrow what we can today. gardening, photography and flowers. tThis blog I did not realize at the time would see me through good and happy times, as well as the deepest, darkest most despairing abyss of of life I could have possibly imagined. When you have so many interests in life and then wake up one day to have them all taken away from you, it really makes you wonder how you can go on and that is where I found myself. However now those things of life that I do are returning to me.
I did not realize until long after they were gone why I had been or was becoming a hateful, embittered , angry and hostile person, something which I had never been before. It came to me one night a couple of weeks ago, while thinking back on the past two years. Whenever I had a problem, or needed to think a problem through or work on a solution, I always worked on art, watercolor painting, silk painting, precious metal clay work, jewelry making, basketry, chair caning, some sort of art work, and basically I was stripped of all of that for two years. It was like I was put in a pressure canner set on 25 lbs and had pressure release valves welded shut: well I can tell you what would happen to a pressure canner, not a pretty site. This is where I was headed rapidly. the blog helped me to vent some pressure and was a true lifesaver many times.
However those dark dark days in that great dark abyss is now over and I will not allow them to ever return again. The blog now takes a new turn, into the light, of photography which I need to continue on with the baskets and a new basketry website in the coming months. as well as other arts from my past. Once again I will have a container garden on my small deck of my new apartment.
I am looking forward to the coming years and where the blog will go from here, hopefully always bright and happy times and not the depths of despair.
This post will be divided into two posts, I was hoping to include some Statistics from over the years, however I was not prepared to reach 100,000 views today. actually as I look right now the blog as exceeded 100,000 views. Right now the total views stands at 100,024, 80 views so far to day.