Now that I’m fairly confident there are more people than just my mom and my girlfriend reading the blog, there are a few things I’d like to know:
Mostly, I’m curious about how frequently you want to read posts. I’ve been admittedly sporadic… sometimes putting out four posts in four days and other times radio silence for two weeks. In an effort to get organized, I’m wondering if you like the idea of daily, weekly, or bi-weekly posts?
Which day(s) of the week do you MOST like to read blogs?
And, what’s your favorite topic on One Crafty Lady? Do you like the recipe posts? The travel? The general musings?
Mostly, I want you (the reader) to feel a little more power over the blog – like it’s a choose your own adventure book. I want what you want; we’re all in this together…
First of all, LOOK! One Crafty Lady went and got herself a facelift… er… a new free theme (!). What do you think of my new digs?
I thought I’d celebrate the recent crossing of 100 posts on the blog (this one here is 110) by dressing her up in fancy new clothes and offering my reflections on the journey to becoming the writer I am today.
Pondering a post. Just another day in the office…
I first started writing online in 2009 while I was finishing up my masters degree in Kinesiology. I was creating static content for Art Intercepts, but began dabbling in blogging to express more opinion-based topics that I wanted to discuss with other dancers. I kept a little private blog between myself and my friend Erin as we traversed life, and One Crafty Lady was born upon her moving to Africa to work for the Peace Corps.
Even though I’ve been writing ever since, I didn’t really start calling myself “a writer” until this summer. I guess I didn’t feel like I could because writing has generally been a hobby, an extra-curricular, something I do for fun. People that play volleyball in their spare time can’t exactly call themselves “volleyball players” on their Linked-In profiles, right?
Over the past three years I’ve gone through four blogs (not including the two I have now), a couple hundred posts, and about 600 tags. I’ve also created 3 columns on other sites (with a fourth pending), 2 magazine articles, and a gaggle of guest posts. It feels really weird getting pitches from other writers and publications; it feels even weirder when you find out you’ve been added to someone’s press list.
You mean, people care enough about what I have to say to send me their press releases? How cool is that?!? I’ve either created a reputation of “crazy and incapable of saying no”, or I am now doing professionally what I like to do personally.
Isn’t that kind of everyone’s dream?
Writing has become an important aspect of my voice in the dance community, my professional life at UIC (each of my 300 students is required to keep a fitness “blog” on our internal class site), and my personal life. What started out as a hobby is now a huge part of who I am and what I do, regardless of whether or not I get paid. Because writing permeates all those other aspects of my life, I guess I kind of AM getting paid – essentially.
I’m embarking on two rather big projects: one with friends and collaborators in the blogging community and one on my own. Starting these (yet to be announced) projects, in conjunction with presenting at Dance/USA with a panel of dance bloggers this summer sealed the deal.
I’m a writer.
When is it okay to give yourself the title of writer? When you have the confidence to own it.
After the traumatic loss of Charlotte the spider, I was astonished to make my way out to the car a few days ago and find this remarkably familiar spider hanging out on the side mirror.
Charlotte? Is that you?
OMG! You didn’t die!
Ok, but here’s the weird part: After that awesome reassurance that I hadn’t let our spider friend plunge to her death on Roosevelt Road, I haven’t seen her since.
Was it her ghost? Or perhaps she is alive and was calling on me to stick out her spider tongue and say, “Ha! I lived and now I found a better place to reside than your stinkin’ side mirror!”
I’m now fairly confident that Charlotte is either in a better abode, or stuck in some sort of spider purgatory where she can occasionally come by and stick it to me.
If you’ve been following closely, you’ll know that I recently downsized from a house back into an apartment. While I love the apartment, I can’t say I don’t occasionally miss having a little plot of land to dig in the dirt.
To fill the void, I spent a good portion of my summer digging in someone else’s dirt. A lot of it. I worked at Midnight Sun Farm this summer and got free vegetables in return. We also planted a little window garden at the apartment.
Which was really beautiful.
Until it died.
Record heat, no rain, and too many jobs were the culprit in killing the little window garden. But fear not, I managed to save the marigolds for a little while, and one of the pansy plants lives on!
Using the basil plant I got in the CSA box a few weeks back, and two geraniums I picked up at the farmer’s market last week, and the garden is back in action and looking lovely. As I write this I’m gazing out my sunny dining room windows, past my little pink geraniums toward Chicago’s far north skyline, and thinking, life is pretty good, Lauren.
When I first wake up in the morning, I usually take a big stretch, scratch my belly, and check my feeds. I browse Facebook and Twitter and update my Words With Friends. Occasionally I glance at the news. Then I eventually roll out of bed and get my day going.
So this morning was extra special when I pulled up the Huffington Post’s Arts and Culture page and saw this:
Maybe you didn’t know that this isn’t my only blog… I also write about dance on my own site, as well as here and here. And did you happen to catch the guest spot I wrote here?!? And it just so happened that my recent post on 4dancers.org was pitched to HuffPo and they liked it.
Anyway…
Had I known all it would take was talking about modern dance in the buff to get in at Huffington Post, I would have done it a lot sooner.
In any case, I’m simply tickled to be part of the the team of esteemed bloggers at HuffPo, and couldn’t resist taking a minute to brag.
I spent a lot of my Labor Day in the kitchen with lots and lots of tomatoes. I bought 10 pound from my local farmers market and though my intended sauce turned out like juice (this is the topic of another post, perhaps), I thought that it would be fun to start a tiny little how-to video series!
I have tons of recipe books, but sometimes instead of browsing through index after index I find it’s just easier to google stuff that I want to know instantly.
So here I am on the YouTube, in my teensy apartment kitchen (hey, a lot of awesome stuff comes out of that little room…), giving a quick lesson on how to core tomatoes. The video is tiny, like my kitchen, because it was taken by iphone… but you’ll get the idea.
For the past month, there’s been a spider living in the side mirror.
After about a week, she earned a name, Charlotte (naturally).
She grew larger and spun intricate webs. Sometimes she would enjoy a breezy ride down Lake Shore Drive in the mornings. Other times she would hang out in the mirror, only to reappear days later. Yesterday as I was driving with the window down she managed to get inside the car, and, thinking we were tight I placed her on my pen to coax her back to the mirror. With two inches to go, Charlotte feel off my pen and I haven’t seen her since.
Ok, so I got attached to a spider. Whatever.
I can just only hope that she’s in a better side mirror now.
Lauren Warnecke 
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