Love your Blog Challenge - Community

 Have I mentioned that I'm terrible at keeping up with this blog?  As much as I love reading other people's knitting blogs and as much as I find inspiration from them all I just can not seem to manage to get that same feeling for my own.

That said, this is the perfect time for the Love Your Blog Challenge that was given to us by Kate from A Playful Day.  She is challenging us as part of her "An Inspired 2015" to fall in love with our blogs again.

This week the topic is Community.  I started knitting as a way to feel more connected to ladies in my family who knit and get in touch with a creative side that needed an outlet.  What I found was way more than that.  When I got my first ipod and discovered podcasts and that there were lots of people talking about knitting I got so excited!  Then one of them talked about this new website that was just starting called Ravelry and I knew I had to join.

Fast forward to now and Ravelry has become a part of my every day life. Trying to explain it to someone who does not know what it is can be hard to do.  You can say "it's like facebook for knitters and crocheters," but that really doesn't explain all it has to offer.

What I found in Ravelry is my knitting community.  I now live in a warm climate and knitting is not really a thing that you see people doing a lot around here.  My family members who knit are a far distance away, so if I have a question I can just go to Ravelry and someone can answer.  If I find some awesome yarn and need to gush about it to someone that will not roll their eyes at me and say "isn't that just like the one you got the other month?" I can go there and show it to others who can appreciate it.

Connecting with so many others who share my love of this craft is incredible.  They say the internet makes the world a whole lot smaller and I have to agree.  I have connected with people from Australia, Scotland, Denmark, and all over that I would never have met or connected with otherwise.

On another level, being part of this community has helped me to challenge myself in what I knit.  There is so much support from designers, other knitters, and people with just more experience that I am not afraid to knit anything.  I do tend to stay away from certain patterns for now as I have a toddler and complicated things are not what I need in my knitting right now, but I do not feel like I need to stay away from certain patterns.  People are there to support me now matter how difficult it is.

On a more personal level, there are people that I connect with on a daily basis.  Yes, mostly about knitting, but often times about struggles or troubles or general silliness and good things going on in our every day life.  It is such a wonderful thing to be able to chat with people and hopefully be able to help them and make a difference in their life as I know they have all made a difference in mine just with kind word or a personal message.

This knitting community that I have become a part of is ever changing and growing.  There is so much to explore and find and develop that every day is an exciting step on this journey.  I am looking forward to doing a better job at keeping up with the challenge and gaining inspiration to continue on the journey and hopefully inspire others in the process.