A long time ago when I was first learning to knit*, I had a blog. About knitting. Projects, plans, what I’d learned that day, fun events that were happening in the community.
Then I learned to crochet, and blogged about that too. Cross stitch joined the party, and by this point I had a decent network of crafting friends all with their own blogs.
We’d post WIP Wednesdays and FO Fridays, organise blog tours to share our audiences, it was just generally a good time.
“Social” media
Of course, personal blogs have become a much rarer beast over the intervening years and even I stopped posting in the end. Everything moved over to social media, on platforms that I never felt entirely comfortable on, and even when those platforms started making it harder to connect with real people a lot of us stayed there anyway because where else was there to go?
If you already know me, you’ll probably know that I sacked off that part of the internet a few years ago now, abandoned Instagram entirely and moved my social presence to the Fediverse, an interconnected network of all kinds of weird and wonderful social media sites that can all talk to each other. I waffle on craft projects but also all kinds of other things over on Mastodon, my videos are all cross-posted to PeerTube, and that’s really just scratching the surface.
But the thing with the Fediverse is that the low-pressure, relaxed socialisation really strongly reminds me of those halcyon blogging days. And naturally I started to think “what if?"…
2026, the year of the blog
So here we go. After literally a whole year of trying to find a blogging platform that ticks all my boxes, I’ve given up on that because my list of boxes was way too long. But I did find micro.blog, the service powering these words you’re currently reading, and it just about ticks enough of them for now.
You can expect an erratic as-and-when non-schedule of eclectic posts including written versions of my video tutorials, personal updates on crafts, but also just whatever I feel like writing and sharing even if it’s not strictly about crafts at all! Because the best blogs were always a bit chaotic and that’s one tradition I plan to uphold.
You can follow this blog and interact with it from your existing Fediverse account (search for @michelle@thegiddystitcher.com) plus apparently Bluesky (I do not know how that place works, sorry!), you can add the RSS feed(s) to your reader, and in a real blast from the past you can even check out my blogroll to find other crafty bloggers that might interest you!
I’m excited. Writing always came more naturally to me than staging photos or video, so let’s hope that still holds true.
* yep that’s a photo of my first ever knitted thing, an excitingly experimental rectangle
