
For my first post of 2020 I'm taking a look back, way back. I began this blog twelve years ago, and have been posting more or less regularly, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, for all that time, during good times and bad. It's interesting to see that my first post mentions a walk around the Furman lake. Of course I never dreamed that I'd wind up at Furman in 2020! Curious.

My original intention was to record my impressions of my weaving life and other thoughts that drifted through my mind. In my blog I wanted to avoid politics and religion, because there were (and are) plenty of other places on the Web to engage with those topics, if one wanted to. I always found weaving the perfect tool to bring comfort in difficult times in my life. Once in the Zone, whether at the loom, the spinning wheel, the warping board (and later, when binding books), the troubles melted away or anyway stayed in deep background. I thought there would be other people out there who would like to read about my activities. And there were. Many of you.

I knew that most of my readers were lurkers (awful word!) and read the posts and moved on. That's OK. I'm mostly a lurker myself on the Web. Occasionally someone would post a comment, and I would be notified of comments by an email alert from Typepad. Sometimes I replied, sometimes not. I always appreciated the comments. They were like a little hello across the planet.

Now here's the funny part. Recently (maybe during the past year or so) there were no more comments, or so I thought, because Typepad, for some reason, ceased sending me the email alerts. I never thought to check on the actual blog page. But a friend told me yesterday about all these comments, and when I went back to the posts, and there they were! Comments galore, and comments on the comments. And no reply from me. You can imagine my surprise and chagrin. Had I known about the comments, I'd have chimed in! I so appreciate the comments, and they tell me that I am not shouting out into the void, but actually communicating with live people. So thank you, thank you, to all of you who have taken the time to comment.
About politics and religion. We are living in such perilous times, that continuing to drone on about this or that yarn or my latest favorite weave structure seems dishonest, as if that's all that's on my mind. Occasionally issues of how we relate to each other as human beings spill over into my weaving life, and I find I must share them with you. Yes, it's my blog, and I can say what I want, as long as it's not harmful to another person. You, in turn, can read or not read, as you choose, and comment or not comment.

So I will continue to post about Weaving. Pixels. Life. for the foreseeable future. Thank you for reading. And keep those shuttles flying.