All about the blog

This is a week of change, for the blog and for the studio, and I am looking for your help.

For the past twenty years I have written blog entries on all sorts of subjects. There have been articles on nature, weaving, crafts, painting, writing, landscape, travelling… the list goes on. Over the years the number of subscribers to the blog has gone up and down. Currently it is falling but this is rather like the stock market: a long term outlook is required. People will start to subscribe again and all will be right with the world.

Every so often I ask readers what they like, what they dislike and what they’d like to see more of. That is a series of questions I’d like to pose to you, dear readers. What is it that appeals to you each week (if anything), what turns you off, and what would you like the blog to become for the next few years? Any answers would be greatly appreciated by email or by commenting below this article.

The blog takes hours of preparation each week. There is, first of all, a subject to write about. Sometimes this is immediately obvious, for example, there may be an event that is running about which I can write. Quite often though it is not as simple as that. I will worry until Friday or Saturday when it is time to actually put fingers to keyboard and then the ideas might flow. Sometimes friends of the blog will write in and tell me about something that captures the attention. Sometimes there are no clues at all and the blog evolves out of nothing. However it happens, writing the entries is a way to keep myself connected to the wider world of art and craft and creative minds, and that is a Very Useful Thing.

The blog started when I was reading a Facebook page about the decline in the number of blogs being published. There was a sort of modern-day moral panic about the loss of this type of writing and I, in reading about this, thought “I can do that.” Little did I know that twenty years later I would still be writing about creative things around the globe!

Over the next few weeks the studio will become the focus of the blog. I have started to establish a new charitable organisation to take on the legacy of GlobalYell. The Textile Trust, Aotearoa will be the deliverer of the blog and I will be migrating the subscribers list across to that. If you don’t want to continue to receive the blog it is easy to unsubscribe on the form above. Simply enter your email address and indicate that you would like to do so before submitting the form. Don’t worry about unsubscribing. Writing this blog is a very personal thing and I presume that receiving and reading it is too.

This week’s playlist is contemplative and inspirational vocal music on Spotify. There is also an article on the Conversation and Cloth event held on Friday that introduced people to the studio along with the video of the talk, and another article on the making of the new studio logo.

Thank you for being a subscriber to this creative endeavour. It is lovely to have such a good network of friends across the globe with whom I can share these enthusiasms.