Guest Blogger - Crochet Concupiscence

Today I'd like to welcome Kathryn from Crochet Concupiscence as my guest blogger! If you are interested in guest blogging for me about something crochet-related, please contact me at jaybird [at] acsol [dot] net with your ideas! I look forward to hearing from you!

I am trying to spread the word about three of my big crochet projects and I thought you might be interested in any or all of them.

The three crochet projects are:

1. Swaddle! A Crochet Art Project. Swaddle is a crochet art project exploring the ways in which women nurture the men in their lives. It looks at silent forms of nurturing but specifically delves into the way that women communicate. Swaddle looks at the positive ways that female approaches to communication improve relationships but also looks at the darker side of how differing communication styles can suffocate relationships. It does so using crochet, which has stereotypically been considered a female craft. It will include 12 – 24 works of crochet art incorporating a range of crochet types including hyperbolic crochet, mosaic crochet and granny squares and using yarn from indie dyers, sellers and small yarn stores. I am trying to crowdsource funding for the project and all people who contribute will be represented in the project. Learn more here.

2. The Health Benefits of Crochet (a book). I am writing a book about the mental and physical health benefits of crochet. Crochet is such a healing, soothing craft and can provide significant mental health benefits for people dealing with depression, anxiety and stress-related illness. It can be used as a form of both long-term and short-term pain management and also as a form of occupational therapy for people with various hand ailments. What I’m spreading the word about is that I’m still interviewing people for this book and I’d love to hear from anyone who feels that crochet has helped their health and who would like to complete an email interview for the book.

3. Hooked Together! (a blog project). Hooked Together is my huge crochet blog project designed to explore the connections within the crochet community. I have a list of 270 crochet / fiber / yarn blogs that I read. I am going through the blogroll for each of those blogs and exploring what they read, sharing their links to crochet, craft and other blogs on my blog every Friday so that my readers can find other blogs that they’ll enjoy. In the end, I’m going to put all of this together into a big display so that we can all see how the crochet community is connected within itself and to the larger craft community.