If You’re Here…

If you found yourself here, most likely it was because of a turtle planter I made using a wire hanging basket, some moss, chicken wire and four clay pots.

By all rights that post should never even have been noticed let alone gone viral. The pictures were low quality and even the video I made showing the process was awful. But I planted it with succulents – Oh My! (heavy sarcasm here and it was actually hens and chicks or sempervivum) and one day a very popular site – Goods Home Design –  shared it on their own site and all of a sudden my crappy little post went viral.

Exciting right?

Well no, not really. Absolutely it was exhilarating to have thousands of views in a single day. Some of those views turned into followers but I was never able to build that into any sort of community. I would get comments asking me where to buy the baskets or the moss, but it never extended to anything else I was doing. And the truth is I don’t like succulents much at all. I’m up in Canada and growing any sort of succulent that looks nice is a lot of work and supplemental lighting.

A Painful Truth

For a while after that stupid turtle went viral, I tried my hardest to ride the wave and turn it into something bigger. I made crappy posts on shittier crafts that nearly always went into the garbage after. Worse it was garbage I didn’t even enjoy making.

I followed other diy bloggers and sometimes watched them share that stupid turtle and give all of the credit to Goods Home Design. I’m pretty fu*king confident Goods Home Design made way more money off of my work than I ever did. Some bloggers even posted their own “turtle” which even if they gave me credit for the idea still left me with a bit of resentment.

Blogging about Blogging?

There is an entire corner of the blogging world where bloggers blog about blogging. I do believe some of them make a living and at least a few of them make a very good living doing so. But if you look really close a lot of it is just scammy bullshit. Pay $10 for this single page PDF that will tell you how to build for success type garbage. As much as I would love to make money at this (I do make a small amount that covers the hosting costs) I’m not here for the scammy shit.

Moving Forward…

So to put this all together, moving forward I won’t be doing scams and nor will I be cobbling together shitty crafts for views and clicks. What I will be doing is the things I enjoy doing and sharing some of those projects here. So no there won’t be any more topiary – probably.

There might be some garden crafts – I really liked the chicken wire allium I made. At least until my current dog destroyed every single one of them along with all of my solar lights. There will be some knitting – both hand and machine, some sewing and whatever other hobbies I decide to pursue. If you’re down for that, I look forward to hearing from you on future posts here and on my YouTube channel.

Meanwhile…

The turtle gets to stay for the people who still find it and enjoy it. As I add new posts, I will probably delete some of the older posts. At least the ones that are crap or making crap.