Keeping It Real Challenge

Obviously this is not a Silent Sunday Post!

The #Keepingitreal challenge started on IG yesterday.

Full disclosure, some designers (including me) on Ravelry have been talking about it for about a month now!  So, we have had time to plan things out a little but my May was so hectic...apart from noting the prompts I haven't "curated" anything for the challenge.

Wait?  You mean you don't know what it is about?

How does that line go..."Let me explain...No, there is too much...let me sum up!"

With all the conversations happening (specifically in the stories) on IG there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between what the true life of a designer and the pretty instagrammed life of a designer (knitter, crocheter, dyer) looks like.

Surprise..it isn't all rainbows and sunshine.  Being a designer (or dyer or crafter) doesn't mean sitting around in an IG perfect environment, eating bonbons and (in the case of designers and dyers) rolling in cash.

My first post included a picture from several years ago (before I needed progressive glasses because some meds I am on mean my eyes don't work properly and I can't change focus...I am like that old pin-hole camera...fixed focus which is not so great in real life!) and one of the comments I got (from someone I chat with regularly on Ravelry) was she had never seen a picture of me before!

Yep, that's me...looking at yarn, as I love to do!

In light of the conversations happening in IG stories I think that there is a prompt missing...maybe two...Why do you design (craft) and What do you gain from it?

The "I knit so I don't kill people" is true for me!  I design because I love it. I get kinda geeky about how/when/why things go together and I (apparently) have the secondary skill set of being able to explain what I did so you, the knitter, can duplicate what I did.

One of my test knitters accused me of having an "over active imagination" and that is probably true!

I can imagine a world where we all get along, can be real and everyone can be what they want.

Yep, I have an overactive imagination!

I'll jump off my soapbox now and let you get back to your crafting...I have 14 more rounds of a shawl to go...and while I love the concept (fractals, anyone?) I am itching to get something else...anything else... on my needles!  I am a very productive knitter and have had this design on my needles for nearly two weeks (with frogging and rewriting when things didn't look quite the way I envisioned) it's time for me to cast on something new!

~M