Sunday, September 23, 2007

fabrics & blogging



lynn & i went quilt-store shopping yesterday. it was my first experience in a store that's completely dedicated to quilt making. and it was fabulous. :) we drove out to princeton, which is about halfway to cornerstone, if that gives any of you a good reference. same place i got my alternator swapped out a few summers ago. same place some sort of work got done on josh's car on our way back home after the last cornerstone. i want to say it's where doug has a friend's mom who makes good pancakes. and actually, it's the same exit as dixon, which of course is ronald regan's boyhood home - and we all know where that is, right? no? okay - it's about 2 hours west on I80. seriously, how hard can it be to describe princeton? yes, yes, especially when no one really cares. anyway ...

we went to princeton and visited a couple of quilt shops. the first one was huge, but a little disappointing. a lot of their fabrics were old (literally old, not just geared towards an older quilter) and the whole place was just kind dull. so then we went to a smaller shop further down the road. and it was very cute. had some good fabric. lots of good quilts hanging on the walls. we bought a couple of patterns, i got a paper-piecing book with some amazing star patterns and we each got a small cut of fabric. very cute store. so we grabbed some lunch & headed home.

so then we saw this billboard as we're zipping down I80 for another quilt shop in peru. we had time, so we stopped. the front of the building proclaims that d's sewing center sells vacuum cleaners, sewing machines & fabric. we were a bit leary - expecting 45 vacuums and one small wall of fabric. wow were we wrong. the store is AMAZING! they didn't just have a few gorgeous fabrics - they had the entire collections of gorgeous fabrics. so every little section of fabric you walked to, you could make one quick grab & have everything you needed for a quilt. it was at d's that i got the fabrics above. i'd been saying that i wanted to do something in fall colors, but not necessarily a fall quilt. and this set of fabric was just gorgeous. and when i say "set of fabric", seriously, there were at least 30 fabrics that all coordinated in this section. they had the polka-dots on brown, green, gold, orange and red. they had the large floral on brown, orange and neutral. they had the small floral on brown, neutral and green. they had the very patterned polka-dot in blue, orange, green and gold. the fabric on the far left is a neutral background with green outlines of leaves - they had that as green on green, brown on neutral and neutral on brown. they had a set of stripes that coordinated on four different backgrounds. plus everything i'm not listing because seriously - you'll just have to trust me they had at least 30 fabrics in this collection. it was so cool.

plus, they were cutting the fabric using this ruler that totally had a stop on the end that automatically squared it up with the cutting mat. how smart is that? granted, they didn't have any in the store to sell ... but i wouldn't have even known to look for it until i saw it in action. seriously a smart tool.

alright, i'm pretty sure i've established my fabric nerdiness. my work here is done.

on to blogging ...

mel asked what i thought about her starting a blog versus a web page with a blog. i'm with jody - i say start a blog. it's free. and free is good. a blog is going to let you post all your happenings, photos & what-nots. and i highly recommend using blogger, because it's so easy to use and has some great templates to choose from. you can customize your colors, link to your friends blogs, list previous posts, etc. you can tag your blog entries, so every time you post pics of the boys you can tag it as "puppies", and when someone clicks that tag at the bottom of a post they'll see every post you've tagged as "puppies".

most people i know who blog use blogger. you just set up an account, tell them what you want your web site to be named (example: melrocks.blogspot.com or melsadoll.blogspot.com or melwantsbeccatovisit.blogspot.com) and it does everything else for you. technically you have your own web page, i suppose - but you're not paying for a specialized name (example: bluehighlights.com) - you're just using some of blogger's web space to post your blog (thus why your web site will always have the ".blogspot.com" in it).

i pay for my web page, which i'll probably stop doing once my contract is up. i bought the name bluehighlights.com, which is cheap - maybe $6 a year or something. and then i pay $10 a month for someone to host the space. so $126 a year. it made sense when i was using it to have a photo gallery & stuff like that. but if all i'm going to do is blog, i might as well just have a site through blogger. especially since right now i use blogger & then just link my bluehighlights.com site directly to it.

i'm actually thinking of starting a second blog to use as my online portfolio. it feels a little cheap - like i should seriously just design something instead of using a template. but i'm not a web site designer, so i'm thinking i'll be just fine doing it this way instead. my point on that is that you can use a free blogger account to do a lot of things. and since they're free, you can set up several blogs (all under one account) & use them for different purposes. so the free blogging services are multi-functional.

yeah, i vote for you to start a blog. if you find you need to do more than a blog will let you do ... then look into paying for a web page.

i'm talking mel into joining an online craze. that's a role reversal, eh? :)

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sweet! I knew you'd have the expertise I needed! You answered all of my questions and then some without me even asking. One especially was that not only do I pay to own the name of the web page...then I have pay for hosting. I actually went to godaddy and saw malissabeamer.com was available. I even told Dan I was going to buy it, but....now I don't think I will. I didn't know about the hosting thing. I did set up a blogger account. 'becca I did like your name suggestions. I went with the boring malissabeamer, though. It's great you talked about having different blogs under one account. The whole reason I'm thinking about doing this is to create an online identity for myself. I attended a webinar last week called the google factor about it. It's a good way network in the business world and you just never know...recruiters like myself might be checking me out. With that in mind...I was thinking that it would be a pretty boring blog for most people. I wanted to have a fun one, too. Now I think I understand I can have both in one account. Thank you, 'becca! Yes - it is a bit of a role reversal!!! I guess I'm a bit behind on the blogging craze. I'll probably disappoint some people - my life is pretty boring! Sorry, Jody. We will see....I like new projects! I'm thinking I should probably do my report for work that I should have sent Friday before I get going on that new project, though. It is almost 11pm Sunday! I'll keep you posted once I get things up and running.

January 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That was really long but entertaining.

January 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

most people won't care about the difference between malissabeamer.blogspot.com and malissabeamer.com.

Starting off as an adult means you can be more aware that people might see what you post so you don't want to put stuff online that you might not want to be there in the future, because the internet lasts forever.

A blog that you don't like and don't update is slightly worse than having a webpage (which you could also have for free) but you could figure out later if you want to switch it over so it just has something like your resume and talks about business networky stuff but doesn't get updated.

Having both blogs under one account can also mean that tracing the connections between the two accounts may be possible. I stumbled upon the group excersize blog from fred's blog because it's listed as one of her blogs somewhere with her blog identity. So if your crazy fun blog is not something you want your serious business networking peers to see, you have to verify that the link can be hidden or doesn't exist.

January 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks, Dave ~ Have you been reading about "The Google Factor"? One of the things they warn about is what you just wrote about. They stressed if you start a blog, you must be able to maintain and update it ---- I'm not sure how good I'll be at that, but maybe once a week will be good enough. I should be able to commit to that. Thanks for the tips!

January 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM  

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