Remem­ber saku­ra mochi? :D

He’s the first ever post­ed pat­tern on this blog!! Feels like ages ago. It is ages ago. It was in March 2010 that I start­ed this blog, and today it is home to over 40 tiny plush pat­terns, almost 20 wear­able pat­terns, and over 30 oth­er craft tutorials.

When I came up with the num­bers I was quite blown away myself! Actu­al­ly I was more blown away by the fact that I nev­er count­ed or took stock of what has been cre­at­ed on this blog until now. Real­ly because I have two days off, with noth­ing planned, but only had to use up the vaca­tion hours that would oth­er­wise be lost by the end of the year. 

So I did a tuto­r­i­al over­haul! :D

I real­ized that even when I was scrolling through my own tuto­ri­als it was tedious to have to scroll for­ev­er back and forth to find what I need. So I cat­e­go­rized them! 

If you go to the Tuto­ri­als page now, you’ll see a list of cat­e­gories, from tiny plush to non-yarn crafts! 

I don’t know how to do this just yet but in the future I hope to lay­out the tuto­ri­als in a grid rather than a list, like I see on oth­er nice mod­ern look­ing blogs :) But I hope at least the cat­e­gories make things eas­i­er to find.

In the begin­ning this blog was more for me as a way to feel moti­vat­ed to cre­ate, and record pat­terns and how-to’s that I come up with so I can go back to them lat­er if I need to remake some­thing. I real­ly only expect­ed about a dozen peo­ple read­ing it, most­ly my fam­i­ly and friends. It’s nev­er intend­ed to make prof­it. I wel­come yarn and relat­ed prod­ucts and pro­mote yarn-relat­ed busi­ness­es by writ­ing review posts, but I always turn down offers for ads. I have not yet writ­ten a pat­tern for sale. I’m lazy about the blog’s appear­ance (hence the long over­due tuto­r­i­al over­haul and the ear­ly 2000’s look, kind of like my every­day appear­ance :S). But it’s a com­fort­able place that I always go back to, a vir­tu­al home, updat­ing and writ­ing posts even when I’m swamped, even when I don’t feel like it, even when I thought it’s not amount­ing to any­thing, even when Word­Press tells me that my read­er­ship is dwin­dling. Some­how, I want to keep it alive.

Since then I’ve met many great peo­ple through this blog, shar­ing such kind com­ments and craft­ing along, let­ting me know that they’re try­ing out my pat­terns, exchang­ing notes so we can fig­ure out mod­i­fi­ca­tions togeth­er, com­mu­ni­cat­ing in dif­fer­ent lan­guages across the con­ti­nents (me using Google Trans­late), actu­al­ly exchang­ing snail mail and hop­ing to one day meet in per­son… I’m so grate­ful for the con­nec­tions and for the kind­ness you’ve shown me and gen­uine mud­pie. Per­haps it is not real­ly the blog that I want to keep alive, but the con­nec­tions and cre­ativ­i­ty that sus­tain this blog.

So cheers to you! Let’s craft for­ward! :D