Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner

Thanks to Maddie for that comment, by the way… This evening, when I sat down to blog, I discovered that my “bandwidth had been exceeded” and I couldn’t access my site. WHAT?! Thirty posts in to the #31dayblogchallenge and NOW I get shut out?! WHAT IS THIS MADNESS? Maddie had that nobody-puts-baby-in-the-corner comment, which made me laugh.

So. I told Jerry, “Go check messygoat” and after he got finished with his indignant “don’t tell me what to do and what sites to go check I will decide for myself” shenanigans, he said, “Huh. Bandwidth exceeded. Lemme see what I can do about that….”

(Have I mentioned that I love having my own webmaster in-house to help me out in situations like this? Because I totally do. I love it. Don’t think I’d be able to do most of the stuff I do if I didn’t have him around. Seriously.)

AN-Y-WAY.

So he checked around and texted some people and they texted him back and we had Family Game Night (see Exhibit A below, of Alice not having any fun whatsoever):

and there was much laughing and revelry and the crisis was averted and now I have enough bandwidth to make my final post of the month. I know. You’re excited for me, too.

Just humor me.

Right.

Apparently there was a huge surge the other day when I posted about Sue and Brian’s quilt and it got shared a few times on Facebook. And then this morning at 7am something happened (don’t know what, as I was asleep since it’s BREAK), and there was another surge.

He’s still digging around in the stats as one does (does one, really? I don’t know. But he does. So it’s happening.), and I’m posting. Because I can.


 

Jerry threw down the gauntlet, though. In 2015, I made a goal for myself to publish 5 patterns. I succeeded, in October.

The first one happened in January.  Two more this summer:
    And two more this fall:
  You can find all of them in PDF or print format by clicking over there in the sidebar on the right.

He wants me to shoot for 7 patterns in 2016.

This is a great idea, except that I had concrete ideas for ALL FIVE PATTERNS when 2015 started, and Big Bang was almost finished. So all I had to do was harness the other four and get them written down.

This year? I have concrete ideas for TWO. Well, maybe three. Is this idea below worth writing up into a pattern? It doesn’t require foundation piecing or anything.

Initial reactions on Instagram indicate yes, I should write this one down. OK then. So that’s three.

So now I gotta come up with four more ideas that are worth writing up into patterns.

At least now I know what I’m doing in Illustrator… Jerry gave me this book for Christmas and I’ve already done all 15 lessons in it because I’m obsessive during school breaks.


I have the correlate book for InDesign, so before too much longer I might actually know how to do all of the stuff I’ve been faking up to this point! Maybe I’ll even be more efficient at writing these silly patterns.

(Crazy talk.)

OK. Enough of that. Happy New Year!


Oh, and Jerry? Challenge accepted. And I hereby throw down a gauntlet of my own… I really really really really (really) REALLY really really wish Jerry would start writing again. Because he’s good with the words. I’d link to his blog but I’ll wait on that… Maybe he wants to start a new one.

 

This blog in 2015

This is the 65th time I’ve posted this year. 30 of those have been this month.

Stats for this site for 2015

I can’t control how many people visit, but I can control my contributions… And I enjoyed myself when I did blog this year. So clearly I need to do more of that again. 

🙂

I’d write more but I’ve had a wicked headache all day and I think I will just go to bed. 

4 weeks in and I’ve gone berserk.

So I decided to participate in the #31dayblogchallenge a month ago, wondering if I could manage.

I’ve managed: Check out that December Calendar over there! ——–>

Every  day that’s blue means that I’ve posted that day ALL OF THEM so far!

… So being here every day has meant that I’ve gotten tired of looking at the stuff that’s so out of date.

I spent today cleaning things up, rearranging the sidebar over there, adding new widgets and plugins, and figuring out to get direct links to where you can buy my patterns onto the page. It’s not a perfect solution — right now you click to pages on this site and then click again to get to Etsy and Payhip, but it’s better than the nothing I had before. Go me!

Writing every day has been good for me. Not every post is something I’ll get nostalgic about when I read it again in 5 years, but I’m glad to revisit blogging. It’s good for me and it stretches me.

 

New Outfit

Well, then.

This morning in my TimeHop app, I saw a two-years-old screenshot of a very excited Me writing about the long-awaited new look to this blog.


Um. That’s pretty much what it looked like this morning, except that I took the Flickr widget off the right sidebar because I quit posting stuff to Flickr when their user interface jumped the shark.

Other than that? It’s been unchanged and stagnant since 2 years ago, including “2014 Works in Progress” being one of the global menus. Oops.

So… I downloaded a few free WordPress themes, did live previews of them with some new artwork that I’ve been playing with yesterday and today, and things look a little different around here now. You’re welcome. I hope that the three of you reading this like it… And as my Illustrator skillset improves, I’ll make the graphics better, too. And maybe I’ll even update menus and tags and stuff but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The best part? I did all of this today ALL BY MYSELF without asking my in-house web geek to do it for me. HUZZAH.