First Post

Find our more HERE

The KIOS prompt for today is: 

Whether you've been blogging for 5 years or 5 days, share with us your first post. What inspired you to start, what have you've learned or how you've changed since then?

The first blog post I can remember is THIS one from my poetry blog, Ice And Sparrow.  I know I blogged a little before that, but I can't remember what the site was!  Crazy, because I do remember it was very important to me at the time.

The first post from this blog you can find HERE.  

With the poetry blog, I think I just wanted a place to put my writing...and possibly to know if other people thought it was any good...  I had written a lot of poems and was looking for a place to keep them so that they wouldn't be lost in case of a fire or something.  I doubted anyone would read them.  I ended up with 56 followers, which might not seem like a lot, but it really was to me!  And then I stumbled upon art journaling and that was pretty well the end of Ice And Sparrow...although I do still love the name and the poem that inspired it (which you can read HERE if you'd like).

For this blog, I wanted an easy way to share my art with my older sister (who is a spectacular artist) so that she could critique it.  So that she could tell me how to get better at the actual art...  And Ice and Sparrow was solely for poetry in my eyes, so Sweet Red Clover was born.  I thought I'd keep up with both, but once I got going with this one, the poetry writing and Ice and Sparrow fell to the wayside.

What have I learned?  What's changed since then?

I learned what a big deal visual art is for me.  I feel more like a human being since Sweet Red Clover came into being than I ever did before.  My real name is Amy, but I feel more like my genuine self as Sweets.  Like how I imagine Superman/Clark Kent/ Kal El feels about his multiple names...  Sweets is who I truly am...Amy is just what the humans call me.

I talked about it a little bit yesterday, but the art let me find a way to deal with emotions and to keep my sanity.  At first, I just showed pictures of my art (my horrendously ugly art)...but since then, I've began sharing what goes on behind the art.  My thought process and emotions...and just some ranting and raving on various topics.  That's a huge change for me, because I've never been emotional, and I've always resisted sharing my true thoughts with people before.  I was under the assumption that there was no way people could know who I really was and still want to be around me.  But for some reason, they do!  It's amazing!  On a personal day-to-day life level, I'm a completely different person now than I was just a few short months ago...for the better.

Another thing that's changed is my art has improved dramatically since I first started this blog...I make a lot less ugly pages than I did when I was first starting  (seriously, go check those hideous suckers out!)...  And I'm a lot better at looking at the art I make with a realistic eye...instead of an overly critical one...

Blogging has become a way for my true self (Sweets) to meet amazing and like-minded people.  I finally feel like I don't have to hide who I am.  When I blog, I can say exactly how I feel and think and that's a ridiculously wonderful achievement for a chronic people pleaser like myself!

I've learned so much and changed so much since I started blogging that I'm like an entirely new person...or, at least, a better version of me.