What started out as a  way to occupy himself one boring afternoon has turned out to be Walkerton resident Michael Sellick’s call to fame.
His crochet how-to videos on YouTube have attracted a strong Internet following, with views reaching one-million per week. That popularity has earned Sellick a spot at the 2010 Creativ Festival in Toronto Oct. 22-24, which has kept him quite busy of late, as he prepares samples and lessons for workshops.
“The Creativ Festival is huge for me,”?Sellick said, in his bright basement studio, from where he Web-broadcasts.
Organizers are expecting 40,000 people at the three-day festival, which will have vendors and workshops in jewelry-making, sewing, scrapbooking, yarn work, and anything the crafter can imagine.
Sellick said that he was contacted by Creativ Festival organizers and offered a booth, recognizing his YouTube celebrity.
“They wanted to be the first to have me,”?Sellick said.
Red Heart, Bernat, and H.A.?Kidd have supplied materials for Sellick’s workshops at Creativ.
His YouTube channel, Mikeyssmail’s Crochet and Loom Knitting, gets nearly a million views a week, and has about 8,000 subscribers. He also has 2,000 followers on Facebook, and 2,000 video downloads on iTunes.
And with that kind of fanbase, the viewers get curious about who is attached to the hands in the tutorial videos.
“They like to know about my personal life. I get almost 200 emails a day. People are just interested,” Sellick said.
So he indulges them from time to time. Sellick and his partner Daniel Zondervan regularly post videos of their adventures, sometimes in a long-haul truck (Sellick works for a local trucking company), or just being their “zaney” selves.
They even sometimes get gifts shipped to them from enamoured viewers, including a miniature replica of the bawdy lamp from A Christmas Story.
“Some want us to film as we open them,”?Sellick said.
He also gets a lot of requests to make and post new projects and patterns, which he says is very time consuming.
“It’s a tough marketplace, with very little kickback. We’re offering free tutorials on the Internet, and there’s lots of demand,” he said.
He said, that some people don’t realize that four minutes of tutorial takes days in some cases, to film, edit, and post.
But crocheting is a labour of love for Sellick, not a living. He said he doesn’t sell his work because the cost of yarn can cost just as much, or more, than a ready-made blanket that can be bought at a department store.
“I make a blanket and it costs $100 in material and someone offers me $20 for it. They don’t consider that it takes 100 hours to make it,” he said, adding that it’s increasingly difficult to compete with cheap imports.
“It’s almost too expensive to crochet,”?he said, and yarn work getting to be a lost skill.
“A lot of people (on the Web forums) say that crocheting is something their grandmother did.  
There’s a missed generation – their parents never learned so they don’t know,” Sellick said.
But part of the problem, is that the industry is limiting itself because it gears its products to girls, he said.
“If a little boy is interested in learning, you’re never going to see him go down to Walmart and buy a pink loom,” he said.
Sellick learned to crochet as a teenager from his mother, who taught him the very basics of the crochet hook. He bought a book to teach himself complex stitches and to read patterns.
“I would turn to that as a way to deal with stress or depression.”
He started making and posting his videos two-and-a-half years ago. It started out as travel videos as he trucked across Canada and the U.S., and documented it for a Grade 5 special needs class in New York he was volunteering and corresponding with. Once he realized that the videos were being watched by more people than just the students, the idea of reaching people to teach them appealed to him, so when he was bored one day, he decided to film himself crocheting.
He was picked up by an american e-magazine shortly after, and his videos were posted there. Now his videos are posted on several creative Websites, and the fanbase continues to grow.
He said that people like his tutorials because he keeps it simple, and doesn’t use language that only seasoned crocheters would understand.
“Some hardcore people get upset that I don’t use the proper terms... but I want to keep it professional, but also keep it light,” he said.
The style has worked for him, and thousands of others, and he hopes to reach hundreds more in real time this October. He said he is expecting to teach over 700 people to loom knit and crochet at the Creativ Festival.
He encourages anyone from Walkerton to stop by his booth (number 009) if they’re making their way to the festival.
For more on Sellick, or to view his videos, visit http://www.youtube.com/user/mikeyssmail; or http://www.mikeyssmail.com.