So, there are a lot of craft-project blogs out there, of course. This month, I thought I’d share one that’s been in my RSS reader for quite a while, and still gives me that little thrill of excitement whenever I see there’s a new post – which is saying something, in this crowded internet landscape of ours!

Gail Jacobson’s blog is aptly named Can’t Stop Making Things. Just about every post is a tutorial of some kind, and for a crafty omnivore like me, there’s a ton of inspiration.

All images by Gail Jacobson, used with permission.

Project: Decorated Shoes

Gail seems to work in just about every medium under the sun – she makes things with wire and beads, she sews, she builds and paints, she makes digital art, she creatively reuses materials from her recycle bin, she does paper crafting, metal crafting, and on and on. I love this diversity so much! Not only has Gail inspired me to try some new things, she always gets my wheels turning with new ideas. Also, I wonder what her craft room looks like!

Project: Button Card made from take-out packaging

I’m always impressed by the quality of Gail’s how-to’s as well. I mean, tutorial-izing a paper project is a completely different thing from tutorial-izing a woodworking project, and yet Gail always manages to make the process clear and understandable, with lots of process images.

Project: Eyeglass Hoop

Gail’s projects are always, as the blog’s header proclaims, “Doable, Affordable, and Useful.” The “Useful” part is where I think Gail really excels as a project blogger. I’m always seeing ideas on her blog for genius little stuff to better organize my home or belongings.

Gail also finds really innovative ways to use common materials, and she gives you nice, accessible points of entry into crafts you might not have tried before. You never need a ton of supplies, and most projects can be completed in just a few hours. This is a great blog to peruse on a Friday when you’re wanting a weekend project, but aren’t sure what it should be.

Project: Plastic Rose

As a case-in-point on the “innovative materials use” front, check out one of my all-time favorites: Gail made this rose out of plastic spoons. And a candle. It’s MacGyverlike, really.

I haven’t even gotten to all the holiday-related ideas on Gail’s blog. She always has fun projects for celebrations. Go spend some time in her archives!

Project: Simple Bench

This “Freaking Genuises” thing, by the way, is a series. If you’d like to see the other freaking geniuses I’ve featured, head over here.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

I’m proud to unveil my second incredibly nerdy plastic canvas project.

For those of you saying, “Ah, she made a little square man with blocks,” let me clarify. This thing is based on a video game called Minecraft. It’s a really interesting little low-resolution-graphics game that has a huge following. It’s pretty simple; you build literally anything you can imagine with cube-shaped blocks of various materials. You can also dig into the ground to create caverns and tunnels and things. (Oh, and sometimes zombies come and destroy your stuff and kill you at night.)

Image from The Independent Games Wiki

Minecraft utterly charms me because it’s so simple-looking, but it’s utterly addictive. Watch these kids build a model of the Taj Mahal in the game. Watch this other kid build a pirate ship.

It seemed to me that PC was particularly perfect as a medium for a Minecraft set because: a) the two things are equally blocky in nature; b) It would be a great exercise in translating video-game graphics to needlepoint patterns; and c) the whole idea made me giggle uncontrollably.

So I spent a lot of time in the Minecraft game on my phone, walking around and around the various blocks until I had the right angles and snapping pictures. When you’re in-game, you only see the “Minecraft guy” that represents you from the back, so I also did a lot of Google Image searching for a front-view.

I’m particularly proud of a tiny detail you can’t see: I was worried my guy would be too top-heavy, so I dropped fishing weights down his mono-leg. Now he’s nicely balanced and hard to tip over!

Here’s a scale shot. The blocks each measure 2″ x 2″. The guy measures about 4″ tall. The whole set used 47 pieces of canvas. And what can only be described as a buttload of floss colors.

…Oh. And his arms are articulated, so he can drop and give you 20. Which is something he can’t do in the game.

Next up, Tiki Gods.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Image by Paola Kizette Cimenti, via Flickr

I’ve said this before, but the number one question people ask me about blogging is this: “How to I get more readers?”

Usually, the question I ask in response to this question is “Why do you WANT more readers?”

Some bloggers want those readers so they can get more comments, enjoy people witnessing what they make, and build some online friendships. Other bloggers want more readers because they want more customers.

…And this second group is often making a pretty big leap of logic: More Traffic = More Business. (Which always reminds me of The Underpants Gnomes, but that’s another story.)

But Traffic=Business is just not an automatic relationship. Let’s talk about what a large readership can and cannot do for you.

Image by epSos.de, via Flickr

Eyeballs vs. Compadres vs. Customers

The first assumption to debunk is, “Anyone who shows up on my blog stats is automatically a fully attention-paying customer with a big wad of cash to spend on my stuff.” In fact, people come to your blog for all kinds of reasons, with all kinds of intent. You can have lots and lots of readers and still have few sales.

This touches on what I see as the number one stumbling block crafters find when they’re trying to make a business through blogging – they write their blog to attract fellow crafters instead of actual customers. (This is natural to do – blogging started as a personal medium, after all, and in many ways, it still is.)

Image by annethelibrarian, via Flickr

If you sell craft supplies, this blogging-for-crafters approach makes sense – fellow crafters are also your customers. But if you make finished handmade goods, then fellow crafters really don’t represent the market for your product. People who need what you sell are your customers.

If you make jewelry based on internet memes, then internet nerds are your customers. If you make sets of coordinated bags to organize stuff for traveling, then people who love to travel are your customers. Can you see either of those customer groups tuning into a purely crafty blog?

So, you can share craft tutorials and pretty pictures with fellow crafters all day long and get lots of traffic and wonderful comments, but if you don’t sell something crafters can use, then that traffic may not lead to much in the way of sales.

Image by hotdogger13, via Flickr

How DOES a big audience make money, then?

Now, there are ways you can build a huge audience of crafters and still make money. You can sell exposure to those crafters to advertisers. You can use the attention of all those crafters to prove to a mainstream publisher that you’re a good bet for a book deal. Similarly, you can use the attention of all those crafters to convince a craft company to hire you to design fabrics, craft supplies, paper goods or whatever.

…But do you see the hidden factor here? In all those cases, traffic does not automatically equal business. Traffic equals something you use to go out and create business for yourself. (And sometimes, that business comes to you, but less frequently these days.)

Image by mikefats, via Flickr

…And, to refer back to the earlier point, if you’re building an audience of people who actually need the thing you sell, then lots of traffic actually can equal lots of sales. But getting that audience requires more than making nice content. It requires getting very clear about who you need to be reaching, and writing content specifically for those people.

Remember when I decided to stop doing free craft tutorials last year? That’s a good illustration of what I mean here. Tutorials, although they’re huge traffic-drivers, don’t reach the people who need what I actually sell. That decision has had a very positive impact on my business in the past year.

Image by Stephanie Kilgast, via Flickr

Is a Big Blog Audience Necessary for Business Success?

Nope. What’s necessary is a well-targeted audience. Which is, in fact the audience Tara and I will teach you to create in our class: Busting the Blog Myth: how to make a blog that actually improves your business (without being spammy).

We start this thing up on Monday, and we’d love to have you! Just follow that link to learn more and sign up.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

This post blends two related things, so put on your multi-tasking cap!

First, up above there is a mug rug I made for the Craft Social Cuppa Cozy swap. It’s paper-pieced, because that’s the only way I can get nonwonky results with patchwork.

My swap partner was Tsoniki – and this brings us to the second, related thing…

Tsoniki has decided to adopt a monthly practice of supporting Free in her community, which I think is wonderful. And, she had a truly lovely idea: this month, she wants to give the gift of a seat in our upcoming Busting the Blog Myth class to someone in the community who needs it.

You can read her post about how she arrived a this concept here, and to enter your name for this giveaway, post your comment over there.

Isn’t that a nice idea, to give one person a gift that will in turn help them grow their dreams?

…And I’ll just wrap back to the original thing of this post, and share what I received in the swap: this beautiful cashmere mug rug from Heidi.

This little tableau was very cheering this morning. But I already miss that coffee.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

First, let me say a resounding WHEW! On Friday, we opened the doors on the new podcast store, and brought CraftyPod 2.0 back into production. It was a staggering number of details to settle out, but I do believe we’re back in business again!

So, here’s how the whole thing will work going forward…

Free Shows and Sponsors

After this discussion we had, it was clear that there had to be some mechanism for making some of the new podcasts free. But I needed a way to cover their production costs. So I’ve decided to open a sponsor program for the podcast.

Any show that has a sponsor will be made available for free for its first 30 days, and it’ll have a sponsor message it. (You can hear a sample in the new show on The Art of Letter Writing, which was very kindly sponsored by the lovely folks at Swap-bot.)

If I can find two sponsors each month, then both of the month’s shows will have a freely-available period. If not, then I’ll try to make at least one show per month available as a sponsored free show. All the free shows will be available on iTunes as well as here on the blog, like in the olden days. :-)

Here’s what I’m hoping: that every business that sponsors a CraftyPod show you enjoy will then get a little love from you. After all, you got to enjoy the show because they paid for its production costs. This is an ecosystem! Sponsors, in this case, aren’t for ignoring – they’re for appreciating, visiting, and interacting with.

(At the end of the free 30 days, you can still buy a copy of each new show over at the podcast store.)

Subscribing to the Podcast

Now, if you want to become a subscriber, there are three new subscription packages to choose from: 3 months, 6 months, or one year. Subscribers get two ad-free shows delivered to them each month. The new podcast store will create you a personal Library page, where you can stream or download your shows, and get all the show notes in PDF form.

All these spiffy new options are made possible by K, who spent many hours programming all of this, and is quite seriously the best partner of all time. He is the Dude Who Saved CraftyPod 2.0.

What about the archives, then?

After we all had this other discussion, I decided to keep most of the old CraftyPod archive intact. (Thank you so much for your input there! Very helpful.)

I deleted just a handful of old shows, and it was only the ones about projects that don’t exist anymore.

The rest of the old archive, I divided into two groups. There’s a small group that I’ll leave available for free here on the blog and iTunes all the time. (Yup, every show I’ve done with my Mom is included in this group!)

The larger group (about 100 shows) will be accessible to CraftyPod subscribers. You’ll be able to stream or download those from your personal Library page on the spiffy new podcast store.

Many of you are past guests, and I hope you won’t be upset to find the show you were in in one of these groups or the other. Believe me, there was absolutely no way to go about this and make everyone 100% happy. I did my best to have a varied representation of the show in both groups. If you were in a past show that’s now available to subscribers, and you don’t have a copy of it downloaded, please email me and I’ll be glad to get one to you.

(All of the old podcast show notes and all your links are still here on the blog. Use the search box at the top of the page, or click the Podcast category in the sidebar.)

If you were an iAmplify subscriber…

Hopefully you received my email several weeks ago about shutting down your iAmplify subscription. If not, you can download this PDF, which has all the details.

I will not be doing business with iAmplify again, and all my content has been removed from that site. If you subcribed but didn’t get your shows downloaded in time, please email me and I’ll be glad to help.

Again, I am so sorry about any inconvenience this creates for you. If I could go back in time, I would never make the mistake of doing business with iAmplity.

OK… I think that’s all the news for now. There are a lot of moving parts to this, so if you have any questions or concerns at all, please feel free to comment away.

‘Tis so freaking good to be back, I’m dancing in my chair right now! I have a lot of great shows in development and I can’t wait to share them with you! Thank you so much for all your kindness during this transition.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Woo-Hoo! You’re getting this show free for 30 days thanks to Swap-bot!

Swap-bot is a magical place where you can join hundreds of genuine snail-mail swaps, involving letters, postcards, art, crafts and so much more. Or, you can host your own swap!

Click over there and show them some love for sponsoring this show – and while you’re there, dip a toe into the joy of mail by joining a swap.

How many letters have you written in the past year? Not emails, and not greeting cards or thank-you notes, but honest-to-goodness handwritten letters? If the answer is “Now many”, that’s not surprising. With the advent of email and social media, we’re doing more speedy communicating with each other than ever, but the slow, thoughtful nature of letters is getting lost.

My guest for this show is Donovan Beeson, who co-founded the Letter Writer’s Alliance – a worldwide group with over 2,000 members and counting. Donovan and Kathy Zadrony offer pen pal connections, downloadable stationery, and both online and real-life camaraderie to letter-lovers everywhere.

Donovan also maintains the INtangible Blog, which is 100% hand-lettered and hand-drawn. It celebrates her love of vintage post-office goodies and interesting ephemera.

This show is actually about a great many things: it’s about why letter-writing is beneficial, but it’s also about what online communication does well. It’s about mail art, and how a well-decorated letter actually touches many more people than whoever it’s addressed to. Donovan and I also talk about letter-writing socials, mailable carrier pigeons, and perfection in blogs vs. the honesty of errors.

Here, I’ll mail you some links:

• Here’s Donovan’s hand-written blog, the INtangible Blog. Always a lovely read.

• Join the Letter Writer’s Alliance to connect with other letter-writers.

• 16 Sparrows is Donovan and Kathy’s stationery business, which gave rise to the Letter Writer’s Alliance and the Pigeon Post.

• If you want to spend some happy hours perusing postal history and beautiful old typewriters, look no further than Donovan’s Flickr stream.

• If you’re curious about postal art, check out Good Mail Day by Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler.

• Here’s the Love Letters project Donovan mentioned in the interview.

• Don’t forget our lovely sponsor, Swap-bot! In fact, Swap-bot was the subject of a past episode of CraftyPod. Click here to listen!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Image by (Jc), via Flickr

(A little note, before I begin: this is one of those posts that could be construed as inflammatory, but I also think this is an important idea at this moment in our community. So, know that above all, I mean no offense. OK?)
 
So, here’s how it happened for me…

Back in 2006, I started this blog. I had no idea what I wanted to do with it, and certainly no idea that it would come to change my life profoundly. I just wrote things and took pictures. I shared them, and people sometimes commented. Yay!

Then, in 2007, I started getting what Betz refers to as “The Magical Emails.” I started hearing from bona-fide companies! They wanted me to do things for them! Sometimes, even, for money! In fact, I heard from enough companies that I was able to quit my day job! Holy crap! How lucky was I?!

…And all around me, other bloggers were playing out similar scenarios. Many, many bloggers I knew got book deals. Some of them went on TV shows. Some were hired by magazines. We were all super lucky.

Image by décalage, via Flickr

So more and more people decided to start blogs, because they’d seen things work out so well for so many Lucky Bloggers. There were widespread dreams of turning a blog into a creative small business. It was a hopeful and exciting time.

See, in the Lucky Blogger Era, because blogging was so new and different (and way fewer people were doing it), you could hang out your craft-bloggy shingle, post whatever caught your fancy, and sooner or later, you had a pretty good chance of being noticed by someone with money to invest. You didn’t really need to think about your blog as a business tool in the traditional sense. You could just share your blog posts and whoever offered you paying work would then help define what your crafty career was going to be.

Image by London Permaculture, via Flickr

But Then…

Then 2008 came, and the economy tanked. (Perhaps you’ve heard?) And with that, the Lucky Blogger Era came in for a landing, and the way blogging works for business began to shift.

This may sound like a gloom-and-doom kind of story, but it isn’t. I think it’s healthy if we can recognize the Lucky Blogger Era for the bubble that it was, and understand that the online world shifts quickly and we’ll always have to reinvent and adapt.

It’s still wholly possible to start a blog and have it grow into a livelihood – people are making this happen every day. But I believe that nowadays, it requires us to do some very focused thinking. We need to get clear about what we want from blogging, who we actually need to be blogging for, and whether blogging actually fits our lives as an ongoing marketing tool. The days of making nice crafty posts and waiting for someone to notice are pretty much over.

Image by dilatedpupil87, via Flickr

Why Bloggers Got So Lucky

Here’s why so many bloggers got lucky during the Lucky Blogger Era: all the eyeballs were leaving mainstream crafty media and coming to craft blogs instead. So, mainstream publishers and producers naturally thought, “Ah, so blogs are where the craft consumers are going. We’ll invest money in those bloggers, and that will bring us all those consumers.”

…Which is an understandable assumption, given that it was the early days of blogging and nobody fully understood the impact blogs would have on how we consume.

The point is, companies invested in Lucky Bloggers because Lucky Bloggers had the attention of other crafters. We got gigs because companies wanted to make money from our audiences. (Don’t get me wrong – it also happened because we were talented and had great ideas. But at the end of the day, I believe there were often corporate-growth angles behind it.)

Companies are still capitalizing on craft bloggers’ audiences now, but on a vastly narrower scale, as there’s less available money and waaaay more available bloggers.

Nowadays, if you want to start a blog and have it become your livelihood, it’s not really enough to blog for other crafters – unless you can offer crafters a product or service that they’ll actually buy regularly. There’s nothing in the world wrong with blogging for other crafters as an act of sharing or personal fulfillment! It’s just that the business game has changed.

Image by MyEyeSees, via Flickr

Time to Take the Reins!

If you have dreams of building your blog into a business, it’s time to stop waiting for those “Magical Emails” and get more purposeful. What do you want to be doing for your living? Do you have the skills you need in order to do that? What additional training, equipment or access do you need? Who do you need to connect with? Who is your ideal customer?

…And then, is a blog even the right marketing tool for this business you’re seeking? Contrary to the mythology, blogs aren’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all proposition. Blogs are effective storytellers, but they require time and energy and planning and focus. They’re not the best tool for marketing everything in the world. Nor is every potential customer in the world even reading them.

In the Post Lucky Blogger Era, it’s time we stopped seeing blogs as our ticket to an undefined goal of “doing what we love for a living.” It’s time we saw blogs as what they are – potentially-valuable tools in a business-owner’s toolkit.

Image by Michael Dales, via Flickr

See what I mean? There’s a lot of focused thinking to do!

My friend Tara and I have had so many conversations about this whole subject, we finally decided to join forces and offer an online class. It has a whale of a title, too: Busting the Blog Myth: How to make a blog that actually markets your business (without being gross). It’s a four-day intensive, starting on February 20, that aims to help each participant dig deep into how blogging can best work for their businesses.

By the end of class, we want you to have a clear picture of the kind of blog (and the kind of audience) you need in order to reach your business goals – or, whether blogging even makes sense for you. We’ve built a whole bunch of worksheets to help you get there, and we’ll be deep in discussion with our whole group all four days. We’d love to have you join us! Get more details here, or just register right now.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

‘Tis that time again! I’m gearing up for my next edition of my popular Craft Blog Tune-Up online class, which starts on Monday, February 13. (That’s next Monday!)

This is one of my favorite classes to teach. After all, it’s really easy to start up a blog, but keeping it going over time, especially if you want to tie it to a creative business at some point – that’s much more complicated. My class is all about good, usable information to help you improve the way your blog reads, looks, and engages with the craft community.

…And it’s always fun to see how each group bonds through the weeks of class. Many blog-friendships have been made in these sessions!

You can get all the details and register right over here.

…And if you aren’t available on the dates of this class, you can always take the self-guided version.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Holy moly, it’s that time again! Wasn’t it just New Year’s Day?

Anyway. I thought I’d compile a bunch of Valentine-related tutorials I’ve done here for your crafty pleasure:

Top row, from left to right

• Here’s a little video how-to for a pretty stand-up gift-topper. It uses plastic canvas. Of course.

• This button-embellished notebook cover is sized for standard small spiral notebooks. And if I do say so my dang self, there’s a nice little trick for placing buttons precisely in there.

• …And if you need an excuse to acquire lots of felt colors, look no further than my Simple V-Day Sachet.


Bottom row, from left to right

• Turn some scrapbook paper and old magazines into these hanging hearts, which spin nicely with the air currents.

• If you have some scraps of fringe in your stash, turn them into these flowery greeting cards in just a few minutes.

• …Or, get a little more detailed and create a wallet shrine filled with pictures and ephemera for your loved one.

Oh, and I couldn’t resist including this little bonus: a necktie heart brooch.

Happy Crafting!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Some of you (hopefully most of you, actually) are familiar with Nancy Zieman, of Sewing With Nancy fame. (That’s the longest-running craft TV program in the country – it’s been on PBS since 1983.) Nancy has a new line of Tablet Keeper products with Clover, and she offered me a chance to try them out. Having seen Nancy demo some of her other template products at CHA last year, I was excited to see how this one worked.

I was also excited to have such a nice use for the fabrics I’d ordered from Daisy Janie. I love how they look together here!

The Tablet Keeper is essentially a clear plastic template that guides you through the process of making fabric covers for electronic tablet devices or good old pads of paper. Used by itself, the template is awesome (more on that in a moment), but you can combine it with a few other products for an even easier experience, like the fusible Create A Strap interfacing shown above.

I’d recommend watching this excellent video Nancy made, showing how the Tablet Keeper system of products work. The whole process is very easy, and I love, love, love Nancy’s ability to make these extremely-simple tools that create perfect results.

I’m pretty measure-phobic and genetically inclined toward wonkiness. But with this template, you just keep re-applying it to your project at crucial moments. It’s your pattern for cutting the fabric. It’s your placement guide for the strap and Velcro pieces. It’s your guide for placing the inside spine.

…And what I ended up with was a level of precision that I’m not usually able to create myself. The written/illustrated instructions that come with the template are very clear and detailed, and walk you right through the process. It took me maybe three hours from start to finish.

One tiny caveat: I did have to cheat the measurements a little to fit my Kindle Touch.

The Tablet Keeper will make covers in three sizes: Large, for large paper pads, Medium, for iPads and similar devices, and Small, for Kindles and other e-readers. But after reading through the instructions and watching the video above, I noticed something odd: the Small size seemed a little too tall for my Kindle Touch. You can see what I mean below – the pink lines denote the Small template size.

So I went here and learned that different Kindle models have different dimensions. The Tablet Keeper, it turns out, is sized for the Kindle Keyboard and the Kindle Fire, which are a little taller than my Kindle Touch.

No problem; I just cut my fabric a little shorter than the template indicated (7 ¾” high, for those who are curious). The template, luckily enough, has a totally unrelated mark on it (shown below) that I was able to use as a guide line, and with that, my cover turned out just fine.

(For the record, I checked our iPad, and saw that the medium size dimensions for the Tablet Keeper do fit perfectly. But there’s no way K will let me make a girly cover for his iPad!)

I also opted to put some iron-on vinyl on my fabrics, as we’re in that interminable season here in Portland where everything in your bag tends to get a little bit wet. And, although you can get buckle hardware in the Tablet Keeper product line, I discovered that this little buckle, which has lived in my stash for 12 years, was just perfect for this project.

Which should remind all of us that it is completely okay to never, never throw anything away. :-)

I was curious about what kind of process goes into making a tool that simplifies a project to this degree, and Nancy was nice enough to elaborate:

“I have a bin of Tablet Keeper prototypes! My guess is that I personally made 12-14 prototypes, then my ace stitcher, Sharen, made another 8-12 tablet keepers before the design, size, details (snap, Velcro, and elastic placement) were finalized. When we have achieved the final design, photos are taken of each step, which I use to write the instructions. Most generally during the instruction-writing step, I’ll streamline the process and then make yet another sample!

As a side note, the initial prototypes did not include the Pre-Cut Tablet Keeper Shapers. That product concept came to mind when I was sewing — the Tablet Keepers were not secure enough to house an expensive e-reader! Clover agreed to pre-cut the heavy plastic. What a terrific finishing touch to the Tablet Keeper.”

(That’s true – those fairly rigid plastic sheets do give the finished Tablet Keeper a nice sturdiness. I was able to cut mine down to fit my altered size very easily using a utility knife and a cork-backed metal ruler.)

So, my Tablet Keeper has been out and about with me several times now, and I’m loving using it. It definitely gives my Kindle lots of extra protection in my bag, and makes it more comfortable to hold. And I might just make that girly iPad cover, and use it in secret. :-)

If you’d like to check out the Tablet Keeper template, take a look at Nancy’s website.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Image by trickypup, via Flickr

So, after twelve months, it’s become a firm habit with me to make a few purchases in support of our community. I wasn’t sure whether I’d continue the practice of reporting my purchases to you each month, though. Are you over this post series by now? Or is it still useful/interesting to see how it works for me each month? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments!*

Meantime, since it feels normal now, here are my acts of community support for January:

This month, I decided to focus on supporting bloggers whose work I’ve been reading for a long time.

I ordered a copy of Carina Envoldsen-Harris and Nicole Vos van Avezathe’s e-zine, Colour & Stitches. It’s a beautiful digital publication about embroidery, and this issue is filled with awesome tools and advice for choosing colors for stitchery projects. And like Carina’s blog, it’s filled with eye-candy.

I’ve reviewed some of Carina’s other digital publications before, and I always love supporting other indie publishers.

I also ordered my very own customized crochet hook from Lisa Clarke. I’ve read her blog, Polka Dot Cottage, pretty much since I started reading blogs. She used to do a lot of polymer clay work, but had taken a long break to focus on fiber arts. But she recently came back to poly with these embellished hooks, and I snapped one up. It feels absolutely lovely in the hand.

*I should say, I plan to continue this monthly project in 2012, even if you decide you’d rather not hear ongoing reports of it. So there are no wrong answers. :-)

Happy Monday, everyone! Later this week, I’ll have some craft-project-y things for you.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Whew! That was quick. It’s already time to report on the first month of my “Healthier Online Diet” project!

So, when I announced this thing, I said that my first decision would be to choose a few ideas each month that I wanted to focus on, and apply that filter to my online time.

You know what? That didn’t work. Overall, the nature of the internet landscape is just too varied and unsorted and rich. Applying these subject-matter filters did help me to avoid some needless link-following, but at the end of the month, I don’t feel like I’ve gained anything much in terms of these key subjects.

I realized that this is because there are essentially two brands of internet-consuming for me:

• Random wandering
• Focused searching

Anytime I want to know more about sewing clothes or plastic canvas, all I have to do is turn to Google. But honestly, that’s best done when I have a specific question to answer, like “how do I build my own dressmaker’s dummy?” or “who is building space-vehicle models from plastic canvas?”

Image by kelsey_lovefusionphoto, via Flickr

The focused searching, I realized, isn’t my problem in terms of creating a healthier online diet. It’s the random stuff that feeds into my consciousness from Twitter that consumes time and overstuffs my brain. If I want to enjoy the community and conversation on Twitter, I have to find a way to cope.

So, I gave myself permission to follow waaaaaay fewer links this month, and that was helpful. I know so many people on Twitter at this point who share tons of links all day long, but there’s no way I can provide everyone with clicks and reactions. So instead, I followed only those links where the tweeter gave me enough understanding of why I’d find the link valuable. That helped – I gained some time and brainspace, and I saw more that was genuinely interesting to me.

…And also interestingly, I discovered that it really is true that anything I truly need to see will find its way to me. I saw links to Alex Gross blow through my Twitter feed yesterday, but wasn’t compelled to click. And this morning, K turned to me and said, “Hey, have you seen this guy who turns old photographs into superhero portraits?” Turns out, I’m glad I did.

Un-Pinning Pinterest

I also stayed away from Pinterest this month, and you know what? That was kind of wonderful. For one thing, the problem of bad attribution over there seems to be growing worse and worse, and repinning so often becomes a ridiculous hunt for the original creator’s link. It just frustrates me too much.

Not only that, I realized that I’ve been staring at that endless stream of images as a means of distraction. I don’t think these images help me toward being a better or more original designer. I think they just overstuff my head with pictures. Staying out of that stream has definitely helped me think more deeply about my own projects in progress.

Image by blmurch, via Flickr

In future, I’ll just apply that “focused searching” mode to Pinterest as well. When I have a specific project happening and need visual references, there’s a search box that will deliver what’s relevant to my needs.

Perhaps we’re making some big assumptions that these socially-based tools require our constant presence, when in fact we can really just swoop in and use them as tools when we actually need them. What do you think?

Image by redstamp, via Flickr

For next month…

So, what info-health change will I make in February? I want to put some focus to blogs – the number of them I read, why I read them, and how I approach that reading. I feel like the state of general online overload has us poised for another big evolution in how blogging fits into our lives.

I’ll report back here! Thank you for witnessing this project. Your presence makes a hige difference.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

I just started a three-post series over on the Vianza blog. It’s about getting more purposeful about your online activity if you’re online to market a small craft business. These posts are getting at the core of some big things I hope to say about blogging and social media this year, in the form of that third ebook I’ve been promising since, oh, 2008.

I’m also the featured Crafty Superstar this week on Cut Out + Keep. All week long, they’ll be sharing some “greatest hits” tutorials, and there’s an interview with me over there, too.

Lastly… Boy, am I wanting to start up a Handmade Cats website, where we can all share our awesome handmade kitty pictures. (None of us really needs this distraction, of course, but then again, ca-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ats!!)

But I shouldn’t be taking on big projects like this solo right now. Anyone interested in forming a team play on this? I need a group of people who have time on a regular basis to help with posting submissions to the site, moderating comments, etc. Email me if you’re interested!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Some ideas are just too good to ignore. This morning on Twitter, I was giggling at how K, whenever he does something nice for me, says “Hey Girl…” a la Handmade Ryan Gosling. And then Rachel said:

…And I thought, she is absolutely right. And so, dropping everything, I made this collection of Handmade Pushkin images for you. I made myself stop at six.

Have a great week, everyone!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Interweave offered me review copies of two of its new iPad apps, and since I’m always hearing crafters on Twitter asking where the good apps are, I was excited to check them out.

Interweave has quite a range of apps now. (Unfortunately, it’s surprisingly difficult to find a single web page that shows you all of them.) You can get a preview of each title for free, and then within the app, you can purchase individual “eMag” issues. I wanted to try two titles with differing aims: Live Wire, which is an instructional app for making wire jewelry, and Colorways, which is an informational title about natural dyes and textiles.

The downloads each took a couple minutes on my iPad. (You can go in and view your app while it’s in mid-download, but that means you’ll have lots of pauses in the reading experience while individual pages finish downloading. So it’s better to make yourself some tea while the download completes.)

The issue price of $4.99 is great as compared to the prices of many print magazines these days. Both apps, however, contain some sponsorship presence – Live Wire has a one-page ad from an outside sponsor, plus another one-page ad for Interweave wire titles. Colorways contains a few ad pages as well, and all for various Interweave publications for the spinning and dyeing crowd. I didn’t find any of this very problematic – given the quality of the production here, I’d think some sponsor dollars/house advertising would be helpful for keeping the cover price down.

So, let’s take these one at a time…

Live Wire is an excellent entry point for what I’d call advanced beginners with wire. Much of the instructional content is aimed at the basics (opening a jump ring, making wrapped loops), but the project set also involves some hammering and patina.

The projects themselves are pretty and interesting, and each one provides a nice entry point into a specific wire technique. Each project is covered in complete step-by-step fashion.

There are also show-and-tell sections covering the tools and materials you’d need and the basics of handling wire.

I love embedded video in ebooks – it’s so great to see a key technique in motion, with helpful tips from an expert. Denise Peck’s videos on making link loops were worth the five bucks to me all by themselves. And I loved that even the hammering and patina projects had their own basics videos.

Live Wire also takes advantage of the on-screen format to really maximize the size of the step-by-step photos for each project. The photography throughout is wonderful – Clear, sharp-focused, and perfectly framed to communicate the kinds of tiny details wirework is all about.

The Resources page, of course, links you directly to company websites – another thing apps can do better than print.

Speaking of print, each project has an accompanying PDF, which you can open in iBooks and, assuming you have a wireless printer connection for your iPad, print them. Personally, I felt this was a slightly weak point in the app. The PDF’s, constrained as they are by an 8 ½” x 11″ page format, contain much smaller photos. I’d use the easier-to-read layouts from within the app, but I can see where having a means of printing individual projects without consuming too much fo your toner could be useful for some users.

Colorways was, for me, an interesting glimpse into a craft I know next to nothing about. This app seems to be aimed at people who already have a good working knowledge of dyeing textiles; there’s a fair amount of jargon that doesn’t have explanation.

This app is much more about storytelling than how-to’s, however. As a newbie, I thoroughly enjoyed reading about cochineal (a red dye made from dried Peruvian bugs), the various natural colors of cotton fiber, a Japanese sun-dyeing technique called Kakishibu, and the Hèrè jè Center in Mali, which is a micro-enterprise teaching women and girls to dye beautiful cloth as a means of income and independence.

There is a also little how-to in here: Chris Conrad has a fascinating demonstration of Kakishibu, and India Flint demonstrates a technique called “cold-bundled eco-printing,” in which fabric is rolled with natural ingredients and then left to imprint slowly over time.

As in LiveWire, the still photography is excellent. I did feel that the videos in Colorways left a bit to be desired. I loved, for example, watching the Kokishibu demonstration and seeing a woman in Guatemala spinning cotton yarn. But there are quite a few “talking head” videos, in which the author or subject of an article stand and talk about the subject matter, and for me, these quickly grow stale, as they’re missing interesting visuals.

All in all, though, I think these apps are beautifully-presented and each one does what it does well. I like that Interweave is reaching artists and crafters at a variety of levels, and hope to see even more issues aimed at beginners and more advanced makers. The nice thing about these apps is their relative permanence as learning resources, which is a weird thing to say about a digital product, but bear with me. Print magazines, as we all know, tend to become clutter over time. We shelve them, or box them up, or trip over them in the hallway, but no matter how we archive them, locating a specific article at a specific time may require some time and effort.

Digital apps like these take up no space, other than disk space on my iPad. So I can easily refer to them again and again and easily get at specific pieces of information when I need them. Well done, Interweave!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!