The Crocheting Community Finds a Home on Instagram
Years ago, if you had asked the fiber community where its online community resided the resounding answer would have reverberated from the mountain tops — Ravelry.
Ravelry was the original free social networking service and website for crafters. It was founded in 2007 and functioned as an organizational tool for multiple fiber arts such as knitting, crocheting, spinning and weaving. The amount of chat rooms and groups a single person could access could be overwhelming at times. Things have changed. The fiber community has branched out since then. You can find them vlogging on YouTube or lamenting their crocheting struggles in Facebook groups, but the place where most crocheters seem to have flourished and found a community is Instagram.
With Instagram’s use of photographs and hashtags it became a naturally accessible and place for the fiber community with its image focused projects to thrive. Users have found a place to chat about their craft, advertise their wares and post pictures of their latest WIPs (works in progress).
I realized I couldn’t comment on the values of the Instagram crafting community without reaching out and getting their opinion on the matter. A community doesn’t exist on the assumptions of one person. It is built, brick by brick, by a collective of voices. I reached out through Instagram stories and a post on my feed where fellow fiber artists could respond publicly or in a private message on what values or assumptions existed for them on Instagram.
The resounding answer was that there was a lot of generosity in the community. Generosity in supporting others over competition, in sharing tips and knowledge, sharing inspiration and providing constant encouragement in other’s creative endeavors. There is a value in shopping small. The false assumption that the fiber arts is an inexpensive hobby only draws attention to the cheapness and lack of value in human skills and labor that exists in fast fashion. The community also values diversity and inclusion for interests, sizing in patterns, even the types of crafts (crochet, knitting, weaving and yarn dying). Another important value in the community is crediting the original artist and using the community to fight against large corporations that copy small artists work and steal their creative content.
A community as large and diverse as the fiber arts community on Instagram will, of course, have some disagreements. With a platform as large as Instagram some of these arguments will happen publicly in comments, some in direct messages and some in videos posted back and forth where names are hinted at, but not directly said. There is a regular debate over whether influencers should use their platforms for voicing their political opinions, or if the community should simply exist as a form of escapism.
There was a huge push to include Black Lives Matter as a constant topic coinciding with posts about crafts. We saw this last year when people wanted to show inclusion in the fiber community and support Black makers. There is a huge lack of diversity in blogs and crafting magazines and people pushed and demanded that more makers of color be represented in the craft. There was overwhelming support over the fiber arts community I’m involved with. It was decided that the maker community needed to engage in bigger issues and couldn’t just exist in a little yarn bubble.
Sadly, the stereotype that only rich, white women can be crafters is one that has been pushed for so many years that many believe it’s true. In reality, people post about their projects from all over the world and from very different economic brackets. There was a social media trend that made its ways across Instagram over the summer which had designers showing their patterns made with cheaper yarns not just expensive indie dyed yarn. They wanted to show that anyone and everyone is welcome in the maker community. Anyone could have success and be embraced wholeheartedly. Personally, this was a really cool movement for me to see as a maker who primarily crochets in acrylic and less expensive yarns while being surrounded by a sea of posts on sweaters made from potentially hundreds of dollars of specially dyed yarn.
Another issue that piggybacks off the last one is whether people should earn money off of political movements. You see this in yarn color names, patterns inspired by the movement etc. When these disagreements happen, people get involved, lines are sometimes drawn and messages are sent back and forth. An unspoken rule to these disagreements is that you don’t say something and then block the person so they’re unable to respond. I find, as a whole, the Instagram community is much less passive aggressive and argumentative than the crafting community that resides on platforms like Facebook or even TikTok.
Tracking the Social Media Experience
It was an enlightening experience tracking my Monday Instagram post interactions over the last couple weeks. Each post did better than the last. This felt like quite the accomplishment. Some received more comments than others or inspired more interaction, but each week the number of likes increased.
My first post was a #meetthemaker post. It followed the #makermonday theme. The picture was a close-up selfie without any crafting projects in the image.
This was my longest post and did the least well. It received about 40 likes on Instagram, 1 comment, 1 share and 0 saves. It created 4 profile visits and a reach of 184 accounts/users – 14% of those accounts reached weren’t already following me. For my impressions (The number of times your content, whether a post or a story, was shown to users. While commonly confused with reach, impressions are the total number of times your content could have been seen) its reach was 195 — 167 of that was from “home,” 26 were from the hashtags I used being searched and 2 were from other.
This was recorded between late Monday night and Wednesday afternoon. It’s not the worst engagement for one of my posts, but it definitely isn’t close to the best. Part of the reason for this is the way Instagram is changing how its engagement works. A lot of people on Instagram have been talking about how it has drastically affected their reach and I have noticed the same issues.
After further analyzation, I decided I had added too much text. Social media seems to do best when there is some text, but not longer than a few sentences. It also does better if it involves a question because that encourages interaction between the poster and the reader. I think the post didn’t get much engagement because it wasn’t very “artsy.”
My second Monday post was an image of a newly finished sweater I made. The picture was taken by a friend and was a full body shot of me in the sweater posing in a corn maze. I kept the text to a few sentences and tagged a few companies and creators in the image hoping to increase where the photo was seen on Instagram.
I received a pretty positive response to my post. I got 63 likes, 8 comments (though some of those were mine responding to people commenting), it inspired 1 profile visit and reached 296 accounts – 50% of those were people who weren’t already following me. The post had 303 impressions (the potential number of times someone could have seen the posts shared with the analyzed Instagram hashtag): 149 of those impressions were from home (people who saw it in their feed), 137 from the hashtags I used 15 from my profile and 2 that were classified as other.
The third image was a flat lay shot taken from above in my living room. It involved an unfinished project laid out on my hard wood floor, with yarn, a crochet hook, two books and a coffee mug that were all in shades of purple, white or gold. I tagged four companies in the image and tagged the pattern designer of the crochet scarf I was working on in the text.
I found that the flat lay image, which I consider the most artistic, did the best. People interacted with it with the most likes, profile visits, comments, sharing and saving the image to their accounts. I received 93 likes, 4 comments, 1 share and 3 saves. This post inspired visits to my profile and a reach of 470, 50% of those 470 accounts weren’t already following me. This led to one of those accounts following me. I had 500 impressions, 246 of that were from my home page, 225 were from hashtags, 20 were from my profile and 9 were labeled “other.”
According to research done by Circa Interactive, a digital marketing agency in higher education, in 2017 there were 2.8 billion social media users worldwide. The platform you’re posting on can make a huge difference in the way conversations are shaped online. I stopped posting in Facebook groups because there were so many unnecessary rules that exist within the groups that don’t on Instagram. On Facebook sometimes a post would get removed because you linked the pattern in the picture instead of the comments or vice versa. The comments are often passive aggressive or argumentative. People try to police your projects if they feel like you are showing too much skin in the picture or the language you used in the text accompanying the image. I feel like there isn’t that much of a fiber arts community on Twitter, at least not in the way there is on Facebook or Instagram.
Instagram invites conversation by expanding who can see your posts and making them easier to search with its use of hashtags. People can discuss posts, commenting publicly or privately through direct messaging. The platform isn’t policed by a few people like the moderators of Facebook groups. I think this forces people to behave better because there is no one to complain or tattle to if they see a post they don’t like. I believe this creates a different kind of power structure within the community than on other platforms. Each person controls the conversations they want to have or allow to be had under their images. They can comment back, block a person or report them to Instagram if the person breaks the Instagram guidelines.
The platform gives you so many ways to create and share content that it’s become easy to tailor the kind of social media experience you want and your commitment to the communities you want to join.
References:
Buschman, Frank. “Instagram Logo on Gradient Header.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 7 Dec. 2017, http://www.flickr.com/photos/138935140@N06/38004399845.
Szekely, Pedro. “Black Lives Matter Zoom Background.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 28 June 2020, http://www.flickr.com/photos/43355249@N00/50051956408.
Rocco, Stevie. “Knit Purl.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 12 Aug. 2009, http://www.flickr.com/photos/98336893@N00/3815561639.
Jillwrren. “This Is How The Instagram Algorithm Works in 2020.” Later Blog, 4 Feb. 2020, later.com/blog/how-instagram-algorithm-works/.
“6 Ways Social Media Changed the Way We Communicate.” Circa Interactive, 2 Sept. 2020, circaedu.com/hemj/how-social-media-changed-the-way-we-communicate/.
Spiers, Matt. “How to Stay Connected to Your Craft Community from Home.” Gathered, 16 Sept. 2020, http://www.gathered.how/arts-crafts/how-to-find-an-online-craft-community/.
Vincent, et al. “Favorite Crochet Hashtags to Use on Instagram!” Knot Bad, 1 May 2020, knotbadami.com/favorite-crochet-hashtags-to-use-on-instagram/.
“Ravelry Is a Free Website for Knitters, Crocheters, and Fiber Artists.” Ravelry, http://www.ravelry.com/.
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