Seven Tips for Beginner Vloggers

| Katie

Welcome to the shiny new home of Katie Writes Stuff! To celebrate this move, I thought I’d kick things off with something a little different: a sewing vlog.

This may not make a lot of sense, given that I’m meant to be introducing you to my all-new, all-singing-and-dancing blog home. However, this vlog neatly combines most of my favourite things: roadtripping, vintage knitting and sewing, and op shopping (or thrifting, or whatever you call it in your neck of the woods). And if you add in the fact that I recorded it on a camera, then I’ve included photography as well. So it has a little bit of everything, which is coincidentally exactly what you can expect on the blog.

(I’d love to say this was my plan all along, but I really just thought of it a moment ago.)

But why a vlog, all of a sudden? Continue reading →

And now for the news

| Katie

It may not have escaped your notice that quite some time elapsed between the publication of my previous two blog posts. Almost five months, in fact, if we’re counting (and if we’re using our fingers to count, this fortunately leaves the other hand spare for a cuppa).

Now it’s easy to imagine I’ve spent that time gallivanting about the countryside, visiting all of the op shops while knitting and sewing with wild abandon. And to a certain degree, that’s pretty much what happened (although I was obliged to turn up for work on a regular basis, which puts somewhat of a crimp in the gallivanting).

However, given that I’ve attracted a whole bunch of lovely new followers thanks to an unexpected shout-out from Phil at The Twisted Yarn*, I’d like to avoid giving the impression that gallivanting comes first and blogging comes second. Except in the logical sense, where I can’t blog about gallivanting unless I have first gallivanted. Continue reading →

I’m Knitting it for Myself

| Katie

There’s a duet of questions you get asked whenever someone discovers you knitting and it goes a little like this:

“What are you knitting?”

Every knitter loves hearing this question – it’s exciting to be able to share our obsessive habit crafty skills with people, mainly in the hopes that we’ll induct them into the Secret Society of Knitters and thereby advance our plan of introducing world peace by getting everyone to sit down and knit.

Preferably with a cuppa.

Or wine and cheese; we’re pretty flexible that way. Just… don’t bring your lacework or fair isle to these ones. And… possibly expect to un-do a lot of the knitting you do at these ones. Actually, it might be best to stick with tea. Continue reading →

What Happens on Band Camp…

| Katie

If you were to sit me down one day and say, “Katie, I am so incredibly fascinated by your entire life story – pray tell me, what was your favourite thing about secondary school?” then my answer would be, simply: Band.

I ended up in Band by pure chance, which is just as well, because I have a terrible habit of holding myself back from trying exciting things by telling myself all of the ways it will go wrong. Luckily for me, my Year 7 history teacher just happened to have taken over the Band programme and she decided to look for a piano player in our class for complicated reasons that would bore you should I go into them. The short version goes like this: I was there; I played piano; I’d passed the highest AMEB exam of the piano players in the class – I was in.

All of my best memories of secondary school revolve around Band and my VCE History class, because I had an amazing History teacher who gave us lollipops in our last class and told us to save them for the exam because having a lollipop in our mouth would make our brains work better. I’m not sure how that would have gone down in exam conditions, so it’s lucky we all dealt with our lollipops long before the exam turned up.

But as much as I loved History, Band was even better. Continue reading →

How To Roadtrip: A Brief Guide

| Katie

There are many fine traditions in my life, one of which happens to be a tendency to go on a roadtrip at the drop of the hat. Unfortunately, another fine tradition seems to be my incredibly bad habit of waiting weeks before I share photos of the adventures on which I find myself with my exceedingly excellent friends, the Failboats.  For example, I happened to be seeking out a blog post about a Failboats trip that occurred during a particular new year.

I found it in my March archives.

Today, however, I am delighted to report that these photos are only three weeks old and I must thus be improving when it comes to sharing my roadtripping photos.  That means it’s under a month since I went to Canberra with the Melbourne contingent of the Failboats to commemorate the impending birth of another Failboat’s offspring.  (Next time, I’m aiming to have the photographs up within a fortnight.  This seems overly optimistic at this stage, but we’ll see.)

Join me as I share photographs with a bonus serve of My Thoughts on Roadtripping.

Continue reading →