I started my blog in 2012 as a way to showcase my published work, which I had just recently begun in 2011.

I was looking for a way to make some extra money from home doing something I enjoyed. My hubs and I were both teaching full-time and he was also in the National Guard making extra money as often as they allowed him to come out. We also had a little boy under one year old.

I began researching ways to make money with knitting and crochet, and I learned that you could submit patterns to magazines! Wow! I had recently won several awards at my State Fair for my crochet work, and I learned as much about this as I possibly could.

One thing that tripped me up at first was that I thought you had to make the completed item before you could submit it. When I found out that wasn’t true, I was in! All I had to do was sketch out the design (which I knew how to do from my BS in fashion design) and make a swatch of what the fabric would be like. I could do that!

I got my first acceptance in October of 2011 and I’ve never looked back.

Because of this magazine and, later, yarn company work I picked up, I thought it would be a cool idea to start a blog. At first it was all “here’s my newest published pattern!” posts, but in the summer of 2013 I designed the Buckle Bag as my first ever free crochet pattern on the blog.

Back then all I had was a free blogger blog and the new pattern started getting about 100 visitors a day so I added a couple more free patterns and didn’t think much of it.

Fast forward to January 2016 when I was nursing my third little boy and scrolling through Pinterest where I found out you could make REAL money with a blog. I started reading income reports and I thought – I COULD DO THAT!

In May of 2016 I began to get serious about my blog. I still designed for magazines on the side but I got super serious about blogging. I moved to a self-hosted WordPress blog and learned everything I could about blogging.

It was slow going. I got up to around 50,000 visitors by April of 2019 and I didn’t hit 100,000 until later that year, but I had finally done it! I made it into Mediavine where I started making real money with the blog (not just $300 or so a month).

Now I’m with Adthrive and have been able to quit my teaching job, more than doubling the teaching salary I was making – all while doing what I love! I’ve hit over 300k pageviews in a month, which is unbelievable to me.

At first all my traffic was from Pinterest, but as I saw Pinterest declining, I decided to learn SEO – and that has made a world of difference.