Sunday, January 17, 2016

Honoring My Personal Voice on My #Craft #Blog

This is going to be a different kind of post.  The experiment of my blogging daily has been going well for me.

I want to go back a little to the beginning of Art, Like Bread and blog with my personal voice.  

Being personal is what works for me on this blog.  I've always been honest, but I realized that while listening to all the crafty business advice about "giving your audience high value posts" and "establishing what your audience cares about" I have shifted away from personal craft blogging a bit. I don't ever want to lose that on Art, Like Bread.




I am wondering if it is just a cultural shift in blogging.  This platform has changed so much over the years and craft blogging has become saturated with shiny blogs written for first and foremost as a business.  It's not to disparage them - I'm just different from that.  I am from the other side.  I am a person who made a blog because I had an intrinsic need to share my crafts and elevate my creations and call them art.  This need came from an internal struggle of running with an artist crowd and wishing to find my place in it.  I was a college administrator but my role at the time did not feed my artistic side.  To me, art is breath, air, blood, water, and food.  I needed to cultivate to my creative side.

It is an act of courage to make something.  

I am happy for anyone who can put themselves out there and make a craft and then show the world what they've done.   If you think about it, it is incredibly brave.  Kids will plunge their fingers into the paint & get messy on the page because they haven't learned to judge their work and fear others' judgement.  There is no right or wrong for them.  There is just fun.  (Just don't eat the paint.)

When we get older, we become proficient in some things and shy away from others.  We wonder what is appropriate.  We become inhibited.  We self-censor.  We might stop trying.  But we should never stop trying.  Never.  

It is a part of my mission to make crafts accessible to everyone. 

Not every person will have an affinity to every craft, but every person can do a craft.  Every person can find respite in their private creative time spent cultivating their techniques.  And you can share it or not.  It's yours.  It's special.  It's perfect.

Making something is honoring your artistic voice.

What are you doing to honor your artistic voice?  Your personal voice?  I would love to hear from you.  You can let me know by leaving a comment or contacting me at artlikebread (at) gmail (dot) com.  As always, thanks for reading the blog!  Please leave your thoughts, ideas and questions in the comment section below.  If you liked this post, please share this post with a friend through social media & create with out inhibitions! Like my Facebook page for updates and more crafty sharing!

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