Blog About Crafts

OK, so maybe this isn’t truly life-changing news for anyone other than me but this has been a great week for the sites in my little crafting world.

Blog About Crafts News

I received an email the other day from a subscriber of this blog. It was so nice to hear from her. It was such a happy surprise to realize that there is actually someone out there reading to my posts on a regular basis. If there are more of you out there, I would love to hear from you as well.

The Crafty Tipster News

Along with my blog, I have a website called The Crafty Tipster where I have a few original crochet patterns, some vintage crochet patterns and a handful of other free crafting projects. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t already.

Today brought an unexpected email from a wonderful crafter and I truly thank Laura for taking the time to send it…

Reason #umpteen gazillion why I love crafters…Laura was trying to make my Crochet Santa Pattern and she realized that I had made a small typo that created a big mess of Santa’s hat. A dozen rows of double crochet is a whole lot bigger than a dozen rows of single crochet. Oops. She could have simply pulled out the rows and made her Santa correctly. But, no, she took the time to drop me a note that I had a problem with my pattern. She didn’t rant and rave, just kindly asked if it was a typo. I love kind and helpful folks like her.

Reason #umpteen gazillion plus one why people in general drive me crazy…That pattern was posted last Christmas and has been linked to by numerous other crafting websites and no one, up to now, took the time to let me know of my mistake. Bah humbug to all those folks who didn’t ask if I had made a mistake; I just hope there aren’t too many Santas with gigantic hats out there.

Crafty Tips News

Crafty Tips is my site where crafters can share their websites and crafting tips with each other. It is something of a labor of love with the goal of helping some of my fellow crafters advertise and promote their websites and online businesses. Participation is free; the more the merrier.

This is always a busy season for Crafty Tips but this year has been the year of new, exciting categories along with the increased visitors and submissions that Christmas always brings.

Not too long ago, I added a new Crafting Software category. Today it was Craft Vacations. A French company that provides jewelry making supplies and their own finished items also offers several great beading and jewelry making vacations each year. The workshops all looked so tempting (what craft lover wouldn’t love go on a vacation where they get to make things too?) that I thought that the visitors of Crafty Tips might find such a category useful. For now, the category only has the listing for the great workshops from France but hopefully more crafting vacations and tours providers will add their websites in time.

Reusable Art News

Christmas time has also brought an increase of traffic and interest in Reusable Art. Word is really starting to spread about the great copyright free vintage drawings and illustrations that I am sharing. After noticing a nice-sized spike in traffic, I discovered that Yahoo! has my site listed #1 out of 180,000,000 (yes that’s 180 million!!!) for free Christmas images. Google unfortunately doesn’t rank it as well but I have seen over 1,000 visitors from Yahoo! so far this month from that listing. #1 of 180 million sites? wooo-hoooo!

It’s been a long three weeks. My soon to be former webhost moved servers, including the one Blog About Crafts was hosted on. In the process, they dropped some of the required files to run this site. Apparently a common thing with the blog software I was using. Had my hosting provider apologized and offered to help restore the site, I might not have made the move. Instead their support person told me the site was working fine. Oh, yes a 500 error and no loadable pages was his idea of “working fine”. Mistakes I can forgive, lies like that are inexcusable.

This awesome graphic by an artist on the photo sharing and gallery website Stock Exchange is something I thought would exemplify the resurrection and awakening of Blog About Crafts.

If you’ve never been to the Stock Exchange, it’s a wonderful site were photographers and graphic artists share their work and allow others to use it; often for free or with an on-page credit.

The biographical information on this image lists it as the creation of a young artist named Zeth Lorenzo who is from the Philippines. Artists like Zeth often provide a number of variations on their work and the one I’m using has five different variations. Along with great graphics like this one, Zeth also has a great collection of true stock photos that are superb.

Today marks the beginning of yet another web blog.

Hopefully, my new blog named Blog About Crafts will offer something people find interesting.