June | 2015 | First Light Handcrafts

So, it’s day 3 without Facebook and with decidedly less social media.

There have been stumbling blocks.

Last night, for instance, I was feeling lazy and merely substituted Twitter for Facebook. It did the two things I was trying desperately to avoid: 1) wasted copious amounts of time and 2) made me aware of the horrible abuse of animals in another country, which upset me. So, it seems this whole avoiding social media while still keeping up with the people I care about is going to take some tweaking.

On the bright side, I spent some quality time knitting yesterday morning, out in the beautiful sunshine, and the leg of my mom’s black Petty Harbour sock is growing a few 4-row repeats at a time. I promised them to her for autumn and I’ll never hear the end of it if they’re not ready! 😉

Today, I am very pleased. I finally got my Lendrum outside on the back deck and did some spinning before I started my workday.

I, then, cleaned the kitchen and hung out a load of laundry on the clothesline. Mmmm…air dried sheets.

And before starting work for the day, I put a skein of yarn on to dye.

Today’s experiment…orange. This is following my last attempt at orange that wound up scarlet. Insufficient yellow was my diagnosis so this is attempt number 2.

There really is something to be said for feeling like you’re accomplishing something.

This blog post started off as “Wow, I have been so busy” post. Until I realized that, really, I hadn’t really been all that creative from a crafting standpoint lately.

Okay…not entirely true. I’ve knit a few rows here and there, and I have spun up a batt and started a new braid of fibre earlier this week. I bought a sewing machine and took up sewing, but I am pretty sure if not for the involvement of my Mom and my friend Karen, that the machine would still be collecting dust in the corner, and I’d have the most expensive pair of pyjama pants on the planet.

Otherwise, I haven’t really felt like I have accomplished much in recent weeks. When I looked at my internet habits, I located a large part of the answer to the question, “Why the heck not?”. I realized that I lose hours a day to social media. And I wish to God I were exaggerating. The worst (although not nearly only) time sink occurs in the mornings. I wake up, reach for my iPad or iPhone and lose every bit of 60-90 minutes checking social media, before I even make it out of bed. Instagram, Twitter, Ravelry, Pinterest, and by far the biggest time suck of all…Facebook. Facebook, dear readers, is seriously killing my creativity.

First off, it’s the unbelievable amount of time it takes to read everyone’s statuses, and admire C’s artfully crafted café photo, R’s picture of her daughter at her recital and T’s picture of her beach vacation. Then there’s the clickbait articles that take me down a completely different rabbit hole, from which it takes me ages to return. And then…there’s the comments. Internet Rule Number 1: NEVER read the comments. A cardinal rule I break every. single. time. A rule that, when I break it, seriously leaves me wondering about the future of humanity.

Then there’s the impact some of the stuff I read on my mood and psyche. These are mostly sad animal stories, that, as an animal lover, just take all the good right out of me, but there certainly are lots of others that just leave me sad and morose.

I read a quote yesterday: “It’s amazing how long it takes to complete something we’re not working on.”. So I made a decision. I am seriously curtailing my Facebook use…in fact, for the next few days, I am avoiding it altogether. Other media may follow, although I will likely stick with Instagram as it eats up far less time than the others and inspires me with all the pretty pictures. And you’ll have to pry my Ravelry login out of my cold dead hands (brain?). But I digress…

This morning was officially Day 1 (even though I signed off Facebook mid-day yesterday) and when I woke up, took 2 minutes to check my email. Then, wonder of wonders, I actually got up, went downstairs, sat at my wheel and spun.