Stickytapeandstring

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productivity

Blog progress #5

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Hello and welcome to my (definitely not weekly) update!     The last time I posted on progress with my blog was mid June.   Since then my day job took over and I haven’t really been able to put out new content.    I have been finding ways to spend what bit of time I had profitably though.   This post covers what I have learned.   At the bottom of the post I will share my progress for July 18 and going forward I plan to share monthly.   Please note – this is an update on the process of running and developing my blog rather than on the crochet side.    For crochet updates and patterns – please check out the craft projects area of my blog! 🙂

How to keep up blog progress when you have NO time!   10 ideas below.

It takes a long time to craft a blog post.   At least, it takes ME a long time to craft a blog post.   Maybe some of you have them tripping off your fingers and all the technical tweaks and twiddles just glide through in your world….. mine is more of a struggle.    Write, read back, edit, read back, scrap and start again, write, read back repeat….  then once I have a post I am more or less happy with…. time spent fighting with the idiosyncrasies of the technical side to post and promote the work.   I could go on – but basically I need a good few hours of clear time to be able to put up a post.    Usually this is a weekend task but there are times when my weekends are just too full.    I have the odd fifteen minutes here and there but no solid block of time.    The list below covers what I have found to be the best uses of these short bursts of time.    These are also the things I do when I am out of inspiration for a new blog post.


Brainstorm ideas for future posts.   You can do this whenever, wherever – as long as it is safe to let your mind wander.  Always carry a notebook!

Take photographs.   Keep an eye out for useful shots.  It doesn’t matter if they are not perfect – you can always crop them and focus on just a small element of a larger shot.   They could give you ideas for a future, more professional shot.

Keep up on social media.   Do you promote your blog on all social media sites?   Does one work better for you than others?  If you are travelling or have a short break in your day.   Make sure you are set up to use social media on your phone and put in any time you have building your network and engaging with your potential audience.

Keep on top of email and comments.   It doesn’t take long to respond to individual emails or comments.   However, if you let them build up it can feel like a big task.  It should be fun/exciting when you get contact from your followers.   Feedback is also a potential generator of ideas for posts so again – keep your notebook handy!

Read other blogs in your niche area and consider what appeals to you.   What works well and why?   What can you learn and apply to your own blog?

Contact other bloggers in your niche area or related subjects and give them support.  I don’t know about you but I am soooo thrilled when someone contacts me with supportive or constructive comments.   I don’t do enough of that but plan to do more!   It only takes a minute or two to leave a comment.

Reschedule Pins on Pinterest that you do not feel have had as much success as they could have had or reschedule Pins that were very successful first time round.   I use Tailwind for this.  I think you can use it for Instagram too but I am only a beginner on Instagram and haven’t yet linked my account to Tailwind.   When you reschedule old Pins make sure the links back to your blog are working!   Please note – these links are affiliates link so if you do click through to the Tailwind site it could generate a small income for me at no additional cost to you.   However, Please note, I am recommending Tailwind because I really rate it!

Develop more content in your niche – for me this means designing crochet items or producing crochet.   Working on existing projects is something I can do when I am too tired to think so it works well when I am busy.

Re-read your own blog (critically).   Blogs build over time and it is easy to forget what you have posted previously.    If you re-read it can help generate new ideas or you might find that there are posts that need a small edit to be brought up to date.   Make sure all the old links are working.   I often find I am reading old articles on other people’s blogs and they are normally still relevant but sometimes the links are no longer working.

Sketch out a draft post.   If you don’t have time to write a post but you do have an idea albeit very high level, get it down on paper or capture it on your device.   This could be in a note app or in the wordpress editor as a draft post.   It is much easier to flesh out an idea that is already written down.  At least – that is my experience!

Those are my 10 ideas.    I hope you find them helpful and that you find the time you need to work on your blog soon.

Finally – here is my status report.   Showing progress in July

  • Pinterest followers – 702
  • AdSense income to date – £1.82   (up £1.70 this month)
  • Amazon affiliate income – 0
  • Shareasale income – 0
  • Subscribers – 3 (myself, my son and MY FIRST actual subscriber – woo hoo!)
  • Etsy listings – 10
  • Etsy sales – 0
  • Page views  – 590 (up 170 this month)

Still a long way to go 🙂  Happy blogging!

Annie.

Crochet blog – update #7

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Hello and welcome to my 7th update.    I am still aiming to do these weekly but my week was crazy busy last week and I didn’t make enough progress to tell you about!

Over the last two weeks I managed to complete the squares for my hearts and spots blanket.  Here are the last four rows.    These are not laid out in the order I plan to put them together here but you get the idea.

The original colour layout looked like this.    I will be joining the blocks in this order more or less.

The heart squares are less stable than the spot and solid squares so rather than make it random I am rotating the three designs which means that a heart square will always be surrounded by solid/spot squares.  Here are the finished blocks in their colour piles!

I have been working on joining methods.    For my sunshine flower blanket I wanted to make the joins as invisible as possible.    This hearts and spots blanket will make a feature of the joins.    I am using the mid colour from each of the sets to join the blocks in each row.    For the joins between rows I haven’t decided what to use yet.    I might carry on with the mid colour of the previous row or might use the bold colours.

Away from this blanket I have been trying to get organised.    I recently published a couple of posts on daily and weekly planning with free printable planner downloads.  I have also been working on a stash catalogue which I will share in a separate post but this is what it looks like.   Here is the file as a free download.   The file is A5 size so you might need to resize it if you would like a different format.    If you have any problems with this please let me know and I will resize the file for you!   stash catalogue (14669 downloads )

I have quite a large stash of yarn (!) and much as I try to make use of it before buying more yarn, it doesn’t seem to reduce any!   I hope that having it catalogued and available to browse through will improve my ability to create ideas to use it all.   One thing I have found is that as I go through the backs of cupboards and packing boxes to look at all my yarn, I am falling in love with it all over again.    I have found some yarns I didn’t know I had!    I read an article on yarn stashing and I know I am not the worst for this.   I do not have any yarn deliberately hidden from my family.    I loved one story I read, of a knitter who had removed a bath panel to create a new hiding place for an extreme stash 🙂

That’s all from me this week.   I will go back to joining squares and cataloguing my stash.    I hope to be able to edge the hearts and spots blanket next weekend and to share the final pattern.   Happy crocheting!

Annie 🙂

Daily planner

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Bullet journals are amazing.    You can spend hours drawing up the pages and making it as neat and pretty as possible.    However, there are two problems with that….  

Firstly, we don’t all have hours to spend on things like this!   Secondly, if you are not the most artistic nor the neatest person the finished results can be quite disappointing when compared to some of the beautiful pages you see online.

Some pages in a bullet journal are created once and last for months but some need to be set up monthly, weekly or even daily.    This can be very time consuming!   I often find I am recreating the same page over and over with only minor tweaks.   

I realise that in part, that is the point.    The mindful practice of keeping the journal has its own benefits.   I am sure that that is true, it is quite relaxing sitting with the coloured pens designing pages and thinking about layouts.   I would just rather be doing a little less of it and still have the pretty trackers and organisation.  Rather than create each journal page and tracker from scratch having the most commonly used ones as printed sheets saves lots of set up time.

How many days do you start with an enormous do list only to end the day with most of the list untouched and a feeling of failure?   Could it be that you simply didn’t have the time available to complete all your planned tasks.   If so you were bound to fail before you started!

The picture below shows a version of my daily planner.    This is one of my favourite pages as it tracks back to goals and forces you to take a view on the time available in your day and how you spend that time.     Let me take you through it…

  1.   Write your goals at the top of the page every day.    I know I just talked about this being a time saving download but writing your goals every day is important.    Each time you write them you are underlining them in your mind.    Think about your goals – are they really important to you?   Are they really what you want to achieve?   Good!   Now in the planner lets make sure you are getting to spend enough time on them.   Tip  I put a colour code beside each goal so that I can see where my time has gone quickly as I flip through completed pages.  Try to write your goals in a single short sentence.
  2. Work out how much time you have to spend on routine and how much time you have available for yourself.   There is a timeline giving a full 24 hours in 15 minute blocks.     If you are anything like me there are times when your day starts very early or ends very late and there are no hours of the day that are never seen!   When tracking self-care it is important to include the time you spend asleep or resting too.    Start by blocking out on the time available line anything that is fixed.     I include the time I plan to wake and go to bed here, work, fixed chores and appointments.  Tip – be realistic when working out the time it takes to complete fixed tasks.   Don’t assume that you stop one activity and instantly start another.  Be kind to yourself and allow breathing space.   It is better to plan to do less and achieve what you plan, than to plan to do huge amounts and fail.  This also applies to the next step where you list what you want or need to achieve.
  3. Write your do list of actions for the day.   Tip – you have already worked out how much or how little time you have available.   There is no benefit to setting yourself too big a mountain to climb in your action list.   Be realistic!   Try to start with the most pressing tasks or the things that are most important to you.    As you write your list consider whether each action is related to one of your goals.   There is a box to colour in or code with a number to tag it back to a goal.    Is the action a task that has to be completed, not related to your goals, just something that you need to do?    Is the action something that contributes to your self care?  Colour in the task box or self-care box beside the action.   Tip – this is where you start to see the balance of your day.   Are all your planned actions tasks?   Is there any self-care in the mix?
  4. Complete the timeline.   Fill in the Goals, Tasks and Self-care timelines.   Make sure you allow enough time for each action with a bit of breathing space in between.    Designate time for self-care.    During some parts of your day you might be able to work a bit of multi-tasking in!    Last time I read up on multi-tasking the general view was that it is a myth, nobody actually multi-tasks.   Our brains simply flip from one thing to another very quickly when we try.   The usual outcome is that we do neither task as well as we would have if we had focussed.   However, if you go for a run and allow your mind to wander over a problem you need to resolve…. in my book that would be working towards getting fit AND completing an action to resolve a problem!
  5. Select your key task.  To be positive, what is the one thing that would make your day feel successful if you accomplished it.    Put another way – what would you go to be worried about if you didn’t complete it!    Writing that task out again at the bottom of the list and selecting the slot that you are going to complete it in reinforces the plan.  TIP – highlight on the timeline the slot in which you will complete you key task.   Don’t look at my example for this – on the day I photographed my planner I didn’t complete the key task!   Hey…. nobody is perfect 🙂
  6. Review.   The remaining boxes on the page are for review.    There are tick boxes (or colour in boxes) to show which actions were completed and whether any were carried forwards.    The section at the bottom allows me to record a couple of points on the day.    Something good that happened;  something I learned and something I did to help others.   I don’t have time to keep a diary but I find just three sentences gives me a bit of a record.
  7. Mood and energy tracker.  This is helpful as background to understand whether you are asking too much of yourself on certain days when you are possibly not feeling your best.    Learn from this and set your sights at an achievable level to allow yourself to succeed.   You are more likely to keep going and working towards your goals if you feel successful.   The mood tracker has a blank box for you to put in however you feel rather than being constrained by a pre-printed list!

There you have it.    The planner works best when you spend 10 minutes each evening reviewing your day and then working out what the following day looks like and what you plan to achieve.   Filing the completed sheets allows you to build up a journal without spending hours creating little boxes.   You can also mix and match, creating your own pages when you have time and relying on the printed pages when time is short.   Here is the free download.   Daily planner (7881 downloads ) .  Please let me know how it works for you.  Happy planning!

Annie 🙂

20 May 2018

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Hello 🙂

I have decided to keep a log of my progress as I build my blog and Esty shop.  I will  share my experience here, in case anything I learn can help anyone else. This is my first weekly update post.   I might need to split the content between the nuts and bolts of blogging and the crochet/knitting design work as I am not sure anyone would want to read all of it!   I am not sure anyone will want to read any of it if I am honest but I am putting it out there in hope 🙂

So far I have only written a post when I had a project ready to share.  That makes weekly posts tricky as there are some weeks when I do not feel I have anything at the right stage.   You will see from these updates that I have a bit of a problem with focus 🙂 I tend to work on several projects at once and I am not much of a completer finisher.    Does anyone else have a problem with that?

I work full time and jam my crafting into the corners and spare moments of my life. I generally get a good amount of time to spend on my crafting and blogging at the weekend.  During the week I spend two hours a day on the train travelling to work.   I am normally surrounded by sleeping commuters!  I took the decision when I first started in this job, that I would not waste those two hours a day.

One of my tasks each weekend is to get myself set up with projects for the train.   I need the projects to be small and easy to carry.    I generally get a seat on the train but I don’t get much elbow room so the work needs to be compact and not need laying out.   This week I have been working on little crochet bags.    I started with a basic pattern which I will share in a separate post.    I worked up a number of variations.    I thought that these could be used for wedding favours.   We just had a bit of royal wedding fever here in the UK so that was what set me off!

I am still working on designs for my sample squares blanket.   I haven’t managed to get to a design I really love yet so I put the project on hold.    I started with the layout below then edged a number of squares in black and wasn’t sure I liked that look.

I think I am going to ditch the black edges and join with white instead.   Maybe it is because we are coming into summer and the black just looks too heavy.

I am progressing my Spring Flowers Blanket I completed all the flowers for one row last week.    I have joined them now and I am working on the next part of the design.   These colours really make me happy.    I was going to pick up a row of chain after the flowers but I think it will be neater if I start in the other direction and mirror the panel I just made.    My project for the train this week will be another set of flowers to make a new row across the work.    I am going to put in some zig zag rows this weekend.   It has to be a weekend job as the work is too big now to take on the train!

Every week I like to do a bit of research on blog or Etsy tips.  I read an article this week on Etsy success which said that you need c200 items listed to start to get a higher chance of sales.    I was shocked.   That is a huge number of listings.   I am currently at 10!   I think it will take about two years of work to get me to the 200 listings point

I do have a lot of patterns in draft that I plan to list and a number of those could be projects that people could give as Christmas presents.   It sounds dreadful to be thinking of Christmas in May but given the time it takes to produce items I think it is a good time to be planning and starting to make gifts.    This is a link to my shop in case you want a look.   Stickytapeandstring

One of the problems I used to have with my blog and Pinterest posts is with photography.    I have now invested in a light system and have a small ‘studio’ set up in a corner of my bedroom that allows me to take great photos of small and medium sized work.   I bought the kit on Amazon – it was a lot cheaper than I expected.   Problem solved!!

I have included an affiliate link here to the type of kit I bought, which if you find the link helpful, allows me to get a bit of income whilst not costing you a penny more than you would pay anyway.

The problem I haven’t been able to crack so far is how to photograph really  big items.   My sunshine flower blanket looks lovely in real life but I cannot get a decent picture of it to list on Etsy.   I might take it into the garden on a sunny day and see whether sunlight does the trick!

When I am travelling to work I listen to audio books.   After a phase of murder mystery type books I have moved on to self improvement.   Everything I have read/heard tells me that I have more chance of success if I write my goals down so I am working on a bullet journal page to do just that.     I will post an update on this next week.   I love my bullet journal and have a board on Pinterest to keep all the inspiring ideas that I see.   Many of them seem to need more artistic ability than I possess but a lot of the pages can be copied.   Working on the bullet journal is an exercise in mindfulness all on its own and I find it very relaxing but it is a bit of a drain on time if I allow it to be!  Pinterest board link here – Bullet Journal.

I will share my progress against my goals each week once I have set those goals.   For now I can give a status report.    I have 522 Pinterest followers and 10 Esty listings with no sales.    I do not have any blog subscribers yet but plan to start a mailing list next week.   I rarely get comments on my blog and haven’t really looked into how to improve that yet.    I signed up with AdSense a couple of months ago and so far my cumulative earnings are 16p 🙂   The only way is up!!

I think I had better stop writing now and go and make something.

More next week,

Annie 🙂

 

Commuter crochet

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Commuter crochet – I thought I would start to share some of the methods I have of making my commute more enjoyable and productive.   After recently moving jobs I now have a daily train journey of more than an hour each way.    This means that over the course of a year I will be spending the equivalent of about 61 working days sitting on a train!

I don’t know about you, but I cannot afford to lose that kind of time.   I certainly don’t want to accept that that time is lost or will always be a miserable time of the day.

All my life I have loved crafts so it makes sense to me to use the time to craft and create.  However, I am constrained in terms of the amount of kit I can carry.   I also don’t get a lot of space on the train.   Whatever I do needs to be small, easy to work and carry.  Finally, the trains I am on are reasonably stable but not smooth enough to allow fine work that needs a steady hand.

Knitting was my first go-to but my knitting style is a bit anti-social in that I tend to swing the needles out to the sides.  This doesn’t go down well with my fellow passengers!   Crochet however is perfect!!   I have been crocheting flowers to use in my Sunshine Flower blanket and am almost complete on those now.   They have been ideal for the commute as you can build them up in layers.  This means you can work several at once using only one ball of yarn.  Much better than having to carry four different colours every day.    I also weave in ends on the commute – not my favourite job but it has to be done.

Commuter crochet - blocks made during the commute

Use Pinterest boards to collect ideas!

Pinterest is great as a complete distraction from the journey.   I have a board where I keep all the ideas I find for small projects that would work on the train.   You can see my Pinterest board here.   I will work my way through these ideas and show the results here on my blog.

These ideas for small projects are not restricted to being used on a commute.   It could be that you have time on your hands in other circumstances.  I have been known to whip out the crochet whilst waiting for a film or concert to start.  Sitting in the car waiting to collect my children – out comes the small crochet!

The other thing that makes my commute more enjoyable is listening to music or the radio.   Recently I have been listening to audio books and they really help pass the time.   The books can be expensive but signing up to Audible which charges a monthly fee, gives you one credit a month which means one free book a month and there are regular offers to allow you to get books more cheaply.   There is all sorts of inspirational stuff to listen to 🙂  There is a link below in case you would like to try Audible.  I need to tell you that I am a member of the Amazon Affiliate programme and if you click on this link below or any other links in my blog I might receive a small income at no additional cost to you.

When I have more tips for a happy commute I will post them up here so check back in soon.    I would also love to hear any tips you have to share, just leave me a comment above.

Happy commuting 🙂

Annie.