Reusable Art

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!

One of the most fun things about searching for vintage illustrations to add to Reusable Art is when I discover a wonderful artist with whom I am unfamiliar with.

This week brought one such discovery, Ida Waugh. Her specialty? Wonderful portraits and illustrations of young children and infants.

I know I’ve talked about my art site before but I am so excited about how it is growing. The search engines are finally starting to send me some traffic and a few other crafters have started adding links to it from their websites - Thank you, thank you, thank you.

In case you missed my earlier posts, the website I’m talking about is Reusable Art. Reusable Art celebrates old illustrations, pictures, and photos from books and magazines. These wonderful pieces of art have fallen out of copyright and are now in the public domain. Crafters, website designers, and anyone who’s stick figures need subtitles like mine do can find a growing collection of Free Downloadable Images.

In my research to determine copyrights of images for Reusable Art I have been quite surprised how little information there is on the web and elsewhere about the many wonderful book illustrators for the books that I have been working with.

Did you know that when old artwork falls out of copyright, that you can use that same artwork for new crafts that can be given away, traded, or even sold? That’s good news for scrapbookers, stationers, collage makers, mixed media artists and anyone else who needs a steady supply of interesting pictures for their work.

First a few words about what copyright means. Copyrights are given to the creator of a work the moment that work is first published. The idea is to allow the creator to enjoy the appropriate compensation and accolades for their endeavors. The length the creator of a work and his/her descendants enjoy copyright protection varies from country to country.

Copyrights were never truly intended to create ownership forever. According to a gentleman at the US Copyright office that I spoke with recently, copyrights are not forever and the intent is that the creative works will be built upon to create something even greater. Which means that once a creative work is no longer under copyright protection it can be freely used however an artist sees fit.