Sick Chicks, Chaps and Children Who Craft — Represent!

I’ve been trying to make a list of everyone who has publicly acknowledged that they have a chronic illness and who also are crafters.  Maybe they make their living crafting or just use it to cope with the everyday stresses of living with illness.  However, this is obviously an impossible task — there are millions of people who fit this category!  So I’m just going to do what I can and start the ball rolling!

Since this is Invisible Illness Awareness Week, I can’t think of a better time to start ah, taking names 😉

If you are, or know of, a person who is out about living with chronic illness (please don’t divulge secrets not your own!) who is into crafting, please please comment!  Leave the blog, website, Twitter, Facebook, Etsy or other URL where we can find them so we can spread the encouragement!

Invisible Illness Awareness Week 2009
Invisible Illness Awareness Week 2009

And please don’t forget that I am crafting for the chronically ill & their support teams, donations of craft supplies & postage greatly needed!!

Startitis

You’ve probably heard of Startitis — the term for the state in which a person is constantly starting new projects, regardless of the number of unfinished objects awaiting their attention.  A new idea comes to mind and wham! they start again, leaving the last great thing in the dust.

While this term is generally applied to crafting, I’ve discovered to my dismay that I have startitis when it comes to blogging.  I have almost a dozen half-finished posts sitting around in draft form, all crying out for my attention.  I’ve been quite ill this last month, admittedly, but the silence on this blog has been caused far more by the dreaded startitis.  As if I needed another disease 😉

I’m going to do my best to *finish* posts now, so if all goes well there may be many in quick succession.  If not, well, I think we know what to blame…. 🙂

Blog Reboot: Introducing The Sick Chick Crafts 2.0

It’s been a wild year since I stopped regularly posting.  My father got worse and then better, but is still on the long road to recovery. My health has been on a roller coaster, my husband has been laid off and we’re currently living with our respective parents in the US & Australia — not because anything is wrong with our marriage but to spend time with our ill fathers. (& also because it is taking soooo freaking long to get a green card for him to join me in the US!! Grr!) Hopefully we’ll be reunited — with a green card in hand — by the end of the year.

Life changed, and this blog is going to change with it.  I’ve been very inspired by Diane Gilleland’s ebook about making crafty blogs. I’m not sure that I can follow her mantra (“It’s [your blog] not about you. It’s about them.”) all of the time since I love to babble, but I shall try to keep that limited to Twitter as much as I can.

My new direction with this blog is to be more open and giving rather than self-referential.  More tutorials rather than just pictures.  More interviews with others than rambling about myself.  And most definitely, more about the intersection of craft and illness, especially how crafts can help heal both the crafter and the recipient. Basically, I want to make this blog more about crafting than the crafter.  That’s the plan, anyway. Please give me a nudge if I seem to be straying away from this.

I’ll probably not be able to write deep, insightful posts all that frequently. My health is poor at the moment and I don’t know what specifically is wrong so I don’t know how to fix it.  So please bear with me if I’m not a regular once a week like clockwork kind of writer. I hope that what does come out will be worth the wait.  In between I’ll probably post a lot of snippets of things I have seen, podcasts I have heard, projects I have planned and stuff I covet.

I want to hear from you, my dear readers, as to what YOU want me to write about.  Is there something you want to know about my crafty life?  About being a sick chick who crafts? Just ask and I will do my best to answer.

So from now, I declare this blog to be re-opened.  There’s still a bit of technical dust as I redo widgets and whatnot and add pages and links and the like, but the important thing is that my mind is ready to write again and now I have a place for it.

Old friends, welcome back!  New friends, welcome aboard! Let the journey begin!