A life in lists

Seven Days: Six things (because I didn't count when I made the photo collage)

1. Choosing fabric for my month in the Brit Bee
2. Ikea tape = pretty parcels! (Busy month in the shop)
3. Hexie progree (slow and steady)
4. Morning playtime. Is anyone else well into their day by 7am? I'm always pleased that I follow so many Australians on Instagram, as their sewing gives me something to look at when my day starts at 5:30am.
5. Bee block trian run
6. Finally turning last year's Brit Bee blocks into a (double sided) quilt. Thought I'd better crack on since I'm in the midst of preparing this year's blocks to go out.

The meaning of life blogging

This little blog of mine has changed shape, somewhat, over the years. It started out as a record of our efforts to become more eco-friendly as we started out as parents, moved sideways into an interest in eco-friendly crafting, turned into a portal to the world of vintage haberdashery and my original etsy shop (and the means by which I abandoned the world of actual employed work), changed a little more into a quilting blog and, over the past year or two, has become more of a record of handmade projects of all varieties, from knitting to sewing to children and vegetables. Some of those projects have been less time consuming than others, I admit.

Each little shift has been a source of discomfort and drawn out overthinking on my part (I am the queen of overthinking. I nearly melted with the overthinking over changing my blog name a year or two ago). You see, I always want to be able to pop my blog into a little 'box', so when people ask what I blog about I can reply, "green issues" or "quilting" or whatever. I also, in all honesty, thought that I was more likely to score more readers if I stuck to one category. But the truth is that this space has changed just as much as the people and projects that fill it, and it has never fitted as neatly into one category as I would like it to. And hey, I like my little handful of readers very much thank you. And if anyone else wants to join the two of you, I'd be very happy to have them read along too, but I can live without having 3,000 subscribers for now (I'm only kidding. I know there are at least four of you out there).

Over the past couple of years I've developed yet another hobby/interest/fascination/call it what you like, which I've kept out of this space for fear of boring my readers (possibly you're bored already, in which case I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to you for sticking around so long). However, I have decided that, in the same way that me, my family and our life cannot be neatly categorised into one little box, neither will my blog.

And so, my resolution for the rest of this year is not to produce a great quilting blog (fat chance, with so many other amazing quilters out there) or a great garment sewing blog (particularly unlikely given that I have discovered that I have sewn a pin inside the waistcoat I finished a while back) or a blog with amazing family photography (yeah, I'd need to actually be taking the odd decent photo of my family for that to happen), but to produce a blog that I think is great, and is full of the things that I want to share, regardless of which category they fall into.

Hopefully you will also find all my future posts as fascinating as I do (ahem), but if not, I hope you'll stick around for whichever ones you do like, whether they're quilting, Liberty prints, garment sewing, colour analysis (see how I slipped that in there? Expect to see more of that in the coming weeks and months), family snaps or just links to other people's awesome sewing.

Oh, and I promise to take more pictures. Of everything. Can't promise they won't be on my phone though.

Writing this has made me wonder. Why do other people blog? Fancy sharing what makes your blogging work for you? How do you manage to keep writing? Do you make an effort to stick to a neat category, or write about anything and everything that takes your fancy? I'm all ears (well, eyes, I suppose, since I'll be reading comments. Although if you want to come round and tell me in person I'll be all ears too).

ps, I just realised as I was writing this that my blog does, in fact, have one big fat theme. Lists. I still write lists for everything. Maybe I should share more of them too.

It's no Picnik

I am a complete luddite when it comes to photo editing. Luckily for me, I don't set terribly high standards for myself on the blog (what do you mean, you'd noticed?), and most of my shop listings involve scanning, rather than photographing.

Nonetheless, I do need to do the odd bit of image editing. mostly brighening up my woefully dim photos, or creating collages for the Liberty print charm packs I put together. And, since I am (a) incapable and (b) too poor to afford anythigng like Photoshop, I've always found the super-simple options available on Picnik absolutely perfect for me. For a couple of years I've been trundling along perfectly happily with the options "brighten", "increase contrast", "make collage" and "crop".

But a couple of weeks ago, disaster struck. I received an email telling me that Picnik will be no more, as of April this year. I am heartbroken.

The point of this post is not only to share my sorrow with you, but to ask you what I can use instead. Apparently Picnik's functions will be available on Google+, but I don't really want to have to use Google+ just to edit photos (also I don't even really know what Google+ is, and I can't be bothered to learn).

So, any cheap/free recommendations for photo editing tools that will allow me to make collages (most important) and brighten/crop/resize my pictures? I can actually do the cropping/resizing/brightening bit on the photo software on my Mac, but I like the convenience of doing it all in one place, and the collage-making aspect of things is eluding me.

Help!

Introducing (a bit late) The Liberty Scrap Challenge 2012

OK, so if you read Nova's blog you probably knew about this four weeks ago, but I'm blaming the children (that's what they're there for, right?) for me not posting about this little adventure at the beginning of the year.

At the end of last year, Nova approached me with an idea so brilliant that I said yes before we'd worked out a single tiny little detail. Some kind of challenge, she said. Involving scraps, she said. Liberty ones. I provide the scraps, she does the rest.

With that girl's love of scraps and my, ermm, scrap situation, I knew it would be a winning combination. And so, the Liberty Scrap Challenge 2012 was born!

Every month in 2012, I'm sending Nova a little parcel of scraps, or yardage, or whatever Liberty fabric I have kicking around and fancy sending over to her, and she is coming up with a selection of amazing projects.

First up (at least posting late means I get to show you what I'm talking about), she made the coolest wrapped wire word and miniature bunting. And, to top it off, she even made a tutorial so you can do it too. And as if that wasn't enough, she used some of the leftovers to make a rather fabulous sleep mask. I have convinced myself that she has made the mask because she is just desperate to fly over from the other side of the world to meet me. I think that's reasonable, don't you?

February's parcel should be arriving with Nova any day now, and no doubt she will produce something even more fabulous. If you want to keep up with the Liberty Scrap Challenge 2012, you can follow Nova or me (I'll update here when Nova posts her Challenges), or click on the button that I will put up in the sidebar just as soon as I work out how to do something technical like put a button in the sidebar.

If you feel like playing along with us, feel free to use your own scraps (Liberty is not compulsory, but we do love seeing any little Liberty remnants you might have!) or get some from me and come and join our Flickr group. We're very friendly!

As well as following Nova's blog for Scrap Challenge updates, you can also see all the challenges so far by clicking on a button that looks exactly like the one below, on the right hand side of my blog. Or by clicking here.

You remember last time I didn't post for a couple of months?

I had a way better excuse.

This time, I'm afraid it's been nothing more thrilling than real life getting in the way of my bloggy relaxation time. I've been horribly out of touch with all the blogs that I get so much pleasure from following, and this little space of mine has been woefully empty.

However, I've managed to carve out a few minutes here and there, written a few To Do lists in my gorgeous notebook and have actually started on a handful of blog posts. I'm not going to be foolish enough to promise daily blogging from here on in, but with a bit of luck you'll see me here at least couple of times a week.