Hard to believe that Veterans Day, 2002, I wrote my first blog entry for QueerJoe. It was really just a test-balloon and now it’s been twenty years of QueerJoe

Please Help Me Celebrate Twenty Years of QueerJoe

There are over 2,600 blog entries in the past 20 years…an average of 2.5 blog entries per week, which I am surprised about.

Just a few throwbacks:

• Thaddeus and I hadn’t quite celebrated our 19th anniversary when I first started blogging
• My first blog entry, I had an idea about how I could make digital photos and post them, but I honestly wasn’t sure I could
• All my first blog entries were written in HTML
• There weren’t any decent and affordable softwares for editing digital photos that I knew about back in 2002
• Posting photos required me to upload them to a host server, and posting an HTML link to the photo
• I only knew of two other knitting blogs back then…Marilyn’s (The Knitting Curmudgeon) and Wendy’s (Wendy Knits). I tried to be a little bit like both of them
• Most people thought I was the nice one and Marilyn was the mean one…until they met us in-person
• The blog was named based on my AOL screen name at the time
• I have never gotten used to being identified by my blog name in public places around people I don’t know well
• If the blog never existed:
  • I may knot have continued knitting at all and I probably would never have designed knitwear
  • I would never have met some of the most amazing people I know (early on, Ted, Kathy, Carol, Marilyn, Selma, Franklin)
  • The Men’s Knitting Retreats probably wouldn’t have ever happened
  • Craft shows of me selling my knitting wouldn’t have occurred

Many thanks to anyone who has ever read QueerJoe over the last two decades. Thank you to anyone who has ever commented or contributed to QueerJoe. Thank you to anyone who has ever felt they found community because of this blog.

I have often replied to readers who e-mailed me that I love writing QueerJoe and would write it even if no one read it and the readership is the icing on the cake. But that’s not really true…the community of this readership is the only reason I write QueerJoe.

Current Knitting

Despite all the recent healthcare activity and associated recovery (I’ll post about it on Monday), I was still able to finish the latest Knitted Cross Stitch Scarf.

Not my typical colors, but I still think this one is a real beauty and will sell quickly.

I also started a second one which I think is even better.

Of course, this one has the deep blue yarn to complement the bright yellows/oranges/reds in the yarn from the first scarf. Maybe that’s why I think it’s even better.

What do you think?