Hi there! I have some super exciting news to share with you today, and I’m sure you noticed it already just from visiting my website. If you’re reading this post in a WordPress reader, or Bloglovin’, you can click through to see what I’m talking about.

That’s right – Cogaroo Crafts is now Once Upon a Yarn, and I have my own domain name! onceuponayarn.net, not cogaroocrafts.wordpress.com. The short story is this: now my blog is self-hosted; I’m on wordpress.org. There are awesome themes and plugins, and you can tinker with the HTML and download all sorts of cool stuff!

If you want the long story, stick around and I shall tell you. 🙂

I started blogging in October 2012, and I had a really hard time coming up with a blog name. Eventually I decided on Cogaroo Crafts. I was fourteen at the time; to be honest, I’m just glad I didn’t decide on anything I would regret later. 😉 The name made sense: my nickname was ‘Cogaroo’ because of my initials, which spell COG, and this was going to be my crafting blog.

As the years went by (ha, I’m making this sound like a dramatic fairy tale or something), I accumulated a lovely group of followers and learned a bunch about WordPress. I learned there was a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The .com is the free service where you can quickly create a blog, and that’s what I started with. There are tons of things you can do with wordpress.com, but I started to realize there were more options with wordpress.org. About a year ago I decided it would be great to have my own domain name (like cogaroocrafts.com), but I was too intimidated.

So that brings me to the present day, or actually a couple days ago. I had been doing more research on wordpress.org and decided it should be the next step in my blogging journey. I wanted to be able to customize more of my blog, and start teaching myself HTML. I was really nervous about the whole self-hosting thing, but I took a deep breath and went to the WordPress support forums. Here’s the guide I used. 

The first step took me the longest – I didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg for hosting. After a ton of research (and, okay, a fair amount of stress), I chose Bluehost. It had good reviews and reasonable prices.

When I went to set up my website, it occurred to me – I wasn’t a fan of the name ‘Cogaroo Crafts’ anymore. Here’s the thing: whenever I told people about my blog, they would look confused and I had to explain the meaning behind ‘Cogaroo.’ Then I had to spell it for them. The other problem is whenever I hear people pronounce my blog name, they pronounce it incorrectly (‘cog’ rhymes with ‘dog,’ but most people say it like it rhymes with the first syllable of ‘toga.’) Also, lately I’ve been doing more writing than crafting, and I want to bring that into my blogging. The bottom line was, I needed a name change…and I’m terrible at naming things.

I won’t go into all the failed names I came up with, but this one hit me when I wasn’t expecting it: Once Upon a Yarn. I love fairy tales, and the ‘once upon a’ can work for a writing blog as well because it sounds like the start of a story. Of course, the ‘yarn’ part covers all my crafting, crocheting, and the like. I went with onceuponayarn.net, and I really like it. My blog has changed a lot since I started it, and I think this gives me more room to grow in the future. It’s also more ‘me.’ 🙂

Anyway, here we are now! I’m learning my way around wordpress.org. It’s going to take a long, long time, but I’m excited about it. I love learning new things. I know it will take some adjustment, and I’m sorry if the name change causes you anguish.

I will be changing my theme a bunch as I figure out my blog design, so please bear with me. I’m a little overwhelmed at the vast amount of themes out there, so I’m sure it will be switching around quite a bit.

A few other details…I set up a site redirect, so if you visit cogaroocrafts.wordpress.com it will send you here. That means if you visit my Free Patterns page and click on a pattern, it will send you to Once Upon a Yarn rather than Cogaroo Crafts, which is handy. Well worth the $13.

Also, I migrated my followers from Cogaroo Crafts to Once Upon a Yarn. The number dropped from 250 to 230ish, but WordPress assures me that’s normal – it doesn’t count my Facebook followers or something like that. Still, you may want to make sure you’re following me, just to be safe. (If you aren’t a follower, maybe you’d like to be one!)

I think that covers it all – please let me know if you have any questions, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new look! Thanks so much for all your support throughout the blogging journey; I really hope you enjoy Once Upon a Yarn. 🙂