On today’s episode of the Craft Industry Alliance podcast we’re talking about YouTube with my guest, Melanie Ham.

Melanie is a YouTuber and blogger who loves to create and share easy to follow sewing, quilting and crochet video tutorials to empower your creativity. She discovered sewing shortly after graduating with an art degree with emphasis in art history from California State University of Northridge when she found herself with more time on her hands after her husband joined the U.S. Army in 2007. Along the way she picked up crochet because it was easy to travel with and in the fall of 2010 made her first quilt.

What started out as a way to be creative and stay busy turned into an obsession and by 2011 had started a blog and YouTube channel.  She now has over 400,000 subscribers on YouTube with over 32 million views and has grown to include premium content on melaniesmakers.com as well.  After living in Alaska and Hawaii with the Army, she and her  now live in Los Angeles where they are both self employed creatives.

Watch this video to get a sense of the kind of content Melanie creates.

Melanie became a crafter as an adult. She learned to sew and crochet by taking classes at JoAnn stores. Her husband is a documentary filmmaker and her sister-in-law is a full-time YouTuber as well. Their encouragement helped Melanie see the potential in YouTube and over time she’s been able to it into her full-time career.

We talk about the early days of Melanie’s YouTube channel and how her technique and equipment has professionalized over time. Melanie explains what makes a particular video gain popularity. (We refer to this envelope pillow tutorial.) She also talks about how she approaches doing sponsored videos.

Melanie has embraced Facebook Live and she contrasts this platform to YouTube. She also explains why she expanded into offering premium content through paid video classes.

And, of course, I ask Melanie to recommend great stuff she’s loving right now. Melanie recommends:

• the audio book of Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
• taking hula and Tahitian dance lessons
• Clover products

Subscribe to Melanie’s YouTube channel for lots of great crafty content, and check out her online classes for more in-depth tutorials.

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This episode is sponsored by Crosscut Sewing. Located in Melrose, MA or online at CrosscutSewingCo.com, Crosscut offers fun and modern fabric for all of your sewing projects.  In addition to quilting cotton, Crosscut offers a variety of apparel fabrics like denim, chambray, jersey knit, canvas, corduroy, flannel and more.  Use the code WSN18 to save 20% on your next fabric purchase.

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You can listen to this episode by clicking on the green arrow below, or subscribe to the Craft Industry Alliance podcast in iTunes or on Stitcher so you never miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, tell a friend about it! Thank you so much.