New Website Y'all!

Hi all,

Fall semester has wrapped so I have a few weeks of time to check back in with you again. Lots has happened over the past months, but I won't take the time to recap them here. If you want to check my Ravelry projects to see what I've been up to, that's cool. If not, also cool.

For now, a quick check in to tell you the exciting news that over the last month I've put in some quality work in what little bits of spare time I could grab creating a new website. It combines the hand-dyed yarns and project bags from my two Etsy sites (girlwhocrafted and 223people) with (eventually) the posts you all see here on my blog. In the future it may also do other things, I have no idea. It was super easy to set up (unsolicited plug for Wix.com) and will hopefully allow me to better manage everything in one space and not pay fees to Etsy for listing and selling items.

For now, the blog posts will also remain on blogger and on Tumblr (until I can figure out a good way to re-direct to the new blog, which likely won't happen until I've got more time) and the two Etsy sites will also remain open for a while as I figure out a way to drive traffic to the new websites. For anyone following me on Twitter, links to new listings will all take you to the new website.

If any of you find any issues with any aspect of the site, please send me a message (there's a contact form on the site, or feel free to leave a comment here) and let me know and I'll see what I can do to fix it.

I'm going to try to resume my 3-days-a-week posting schedule for at least the month I have off school (no promises beyond then, although I'd like to keep it up). There's still crafting going on (LOTS  of project bags!) and I have all sorts of ambitions for the new year. Let's hope these ambitions go better than the last (more on that next week!)

Thanks for those of you who stuck with me through my hiatus and sporadic posting schedule. For those of you just finding the blog, I have ambitions to update regularly, but I'm currently working half-time while getting a masters degree while running a crafting business, so blogging is often the first thing to get pushed to the wayside. At any rate, thanks for being here.

Resolutions Check-In: March

I think the fact that it's currently April 7 and I'm just now getting to this post speaks VOLUMES about how well I did on my resolutions this month. But the current run of Do All The Things is behind me and I'm hoping to make some headway as I gear up for the next round of Do All The Things. Maybe. I hope. I've got some new strategies, at least. But, let's check in anyway. If only because even though I know I'm failing, I have a scientific need to quantify how hard I'm failing. Or something like that.

Resolutions Check-In: February (or when I fell hard off the wagon)

I suppose while I’m sitting here thinking about how I should be writing all sorts of blog posts and then not actually writing them (and digging myself into a bigger hole of “I have to write about all these things and I don’t know where to start” while accumulating more things I have to write about) I may as well start with my February resolutions accountability post.

February. I really dislike February. For so many reasons. First, it’s almost always the point at which I just start to get 100% DONE with winter around here. It’s cold, it sometimes snows but not that much, and all the holidays/my birthday are done. Plus, I was raised to think “March = spring” but around here, it doesn’t. So there’s this part where February feels like a neverending Thursday before the weekend starts and then Friday never actually happens. For someone like me who suffers from the whole reduced photoperiod/Seasonal Affective Disorder business this is bad news. It basically means that although I know there are things I want to be accomplishing, my brain just doesn’t have the motivation to actually accomplish them. And then I feel bad about not accomplishing them. Which leads me to more inability to accomplish things. Add to this that I have (for the past eight years) had a major freelance design/layout project I do for a local non-profit and all the work for that happens in February. Which means that in addition to my regular job and my other hobbies (and now my yarn dyeing job) and my real life, I have to put all that together. Ordinarily, I take a week off of work and I knock most of it out in a week, but this year I had to head to an out-of-town work conference the week I’d be doing that, so I quite literally spent all of February trying to work this in to my spare time. Which means that things like blogging and knitting suffered. Oddly enough . . . yarn dyeing didn’t. Hopefully you’ll be hearing about all of that soon.

So. I’m going to make references to some things here that I meant to blog about and didn’t. It’s my sincerest hope that March and I can make a fresh start and I can actually tell you about all these things in the coming days so you can fill in the gaps. I was trying to put off this post until I managed to post about all the things I’m going to reference, but I realised that if I did that, I’d never get anything posted, so I just have to start here and work backward through time.

All that is a long way of saying, sorry I fell off the posting wagon, I’ll try to be better now. Words you’ve heard before. I really do mean them every time.

New Year: A Look Backward and A Plan for the Future

Hi there. First of all, wherever you are in the world, happy 2015. I wish you and yours a safe, happy, healthy year.

Now...down to business. First, a little look back at 2104.

I know I've been pretty bad about blogging regularly, and there were a lot of things I wanted to share with you that I simply didn't make the time for. I hope to get better at that in the future (see the plan for the future section), but for now, let's do a little recap of the year and then talk about what I have planned for crafting and blogging in 2015.