Friday catch-up
I’m not saying it’s been a busy week, but when I sat down earlier to write a list of things to talk to you about today, I easily covered a side of A5 paper in my journal.
But time is precious and we all have things to do so I’ve scaled it back to just a couple of things that I’m most excited about.
Summer of Books and Yarn - a knitalong/readalong
The first is that I’m running the Summer of Books and Yarn again. I first ran it last year and had an absolute whale of a time. There were so many great books being read by those taking part - which fueled by ‘to be read’ pile for months afterwards.
We start on Monday July 24 with the prompts coming out on Monday 10 Jul - giving you a full 2 weeks to plan your reading. If you didn’t take part last year, it lasts for six weeks and I suggest a book prompt each week - it’s very loose though so please don’t worry about not being able to find a book to suit. I’ve jotted down all the details and how to sign up so if you are interested please head over to my blog and take a look.
There is also information there on the knitalong aspect of the event and how to access a special pattern discount just for participants.
East Anglian Yarn Crawl
I took myself off for a little road trip the other day and decided to tick off two of the eight yarn shops listed in the East Anglian Yarn Crawl. A sunny day, a few podcasts to listen to, coffee in my travel mug and the prospect of a little, light yarn shopping. Sounds like the perfect day to me.
I visited The WoolPatch in Long Melford and YarnWorx in Hadleigh and had a thoroughly enjoyable time. And yes, a few purchases were made.
If you’d like more details on the Yarn Crawl and how to take part you can find all the information here.
Threads - an alternative to Twitter made by Instagram.
I’m not going to talk too much about this one as things are still quite new there. But you may have heard that Meta/Instagram have launched an alternative to Twitter called Threads. It links up to your Instagram easily and provides a more chatty way to interact with those who you follow on Instagram. At present it is free of adverts and your feed is made up of a mixture of people you follow and suggested content.
It’s early days, obviously but over 10 million people signed up in the first 24hrs or so. I have to say that I really like what I’ve seen so far - and it amuses me that individual posts on Threads are called Stitches. Meaning that the equivalent to a retweet is a cross-stitch. Seems like they are already using our language.
Fair warning though - indications are that if you sign up and then decide you want to delete your Threads account there’s no way to to do that without deleting Instagram also. You can deactivate Threads but not fully delete it. At the time of writing there is also no alt text function so image descriptions have to be added within the caption.
But if you’ve been unhappy with Twitter since Musk took over and looking for an alternative, then Threads is well worth a look.
This article is pretty helpful in explaining it.
I’m going to leave it there for this week - and save the other things for next week. I’m hoping that things will slow down a little as the summer holidays approach. I hope you have a lovely weekend and that I can tempt you into a little, light summer reading. With that in mind I’m going to hunt out my slightly neglected Kindle and find what on earth I did with the charging lead.