The Ugly Truth About Beautiful Blogs

So I get this magazine called Artful Blogging.  It’s eye candy, printed on high quality paper, with profiles of blogs and bloggers, and lots of beautiful pictures.  I enjoy reading it, and I’ve gotten a lot of good ideas and advice from it.  

The magazine has cooking blogs, and decorating blogs, and crafting blogs, and travel blogs, and lots of photography blogs.  The bloggers talk about “finding your voice” and “being true to yourself.”  The one thing they all have in common - they’re all perfectly beautiful.  Deceptively beautiful.  Depressingly beautiful.

Here’s a hypothetical example:

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a blog.  It’s about how, when you finish weaving, the cloth has to be wet finished.  A type of baptism, if you will.  And the wet finishing transforms the nature of the cloth.  I may yet write that.

This blog requires a picture, so I took out my trusty iPhone - which is the best camera that I own - and took some pictures.  Now, in the perfectly beautiful blog world, I would wash the fabric in a vintage enamelware basin, on a wooden counter with a faucet with a pump handle - or a least a designer Moen faucet.  And I would use herbal soap that I’d made myself, scented with lavender that I’d harvested from my garden with the morning dew still on it.

But I don’t have any of those things.  I use a plastic dish pan. My countertop is laminate.  I have a plain old Delta faucet.  I use Dawn dishwashing detergent - the original blue kind works best.  Although I do have lavender in my garden, I just haven’t made soap with it.  I can make soap or I can weave - I don't have time to do both.

So this is my photo.  This is my truth, and this is my voice.  It’s not perfectly beautiful.  But it’s enough.