Dreaming Spirals

Anyone want an invitation to Google Wave? I just looked and I’ve got 17… first come first served!

This blog will be quiet for the next week because on Sunday I’m going to a workshop with Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan at Committed To Cloth. I’m looking forward to a stimulating and refreshing week! So look forward to lots of photos on my return. I’m going to do the Finding Your Visual Language course which is why I’ve been doing all the exercises over the last few weeks.

On a ‘blog admin’ note, because of all the spam I’ve been getting recently and comments from people who are obviously advertising financial products and the like, I’ve turned off comments on posts over 60 days old. I don’t think this will cause any problems for genuine commentors, but feel free to leave a comment on one of the more recent posts!

If this blog looks funny over the next few days, it’s because I’m trying out a new theme! If it all goes belly up I’ll change back post haste ….

I’m afraid this blog will probably be a bit quiet for the next couple of weeks. My trusty old laptop needs repairing – the mains socket is broken – and to add insult to injury, our internet connection keeps blipping and DS2 thinks the cable modem is on the way out…. So if you don’t hear from me for a bit, don’t worry. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, and all that…. Meanwhile, I may even get to the studio a bit more!

I’ve been busy today going through all my blog links and making all the sidebars a bit neater. Please let me know if you find any that don’t work. It’s been my aim to make it a bit less cluttered and easier to work round, so if you’ve got any suggestions to make it better, let me know! I’ll consider every suggestion!

Thank you to Julie for letting me know that the rss button on the right of the header wasn’t working for some reason.  2 hours later, and by dint of deleting my Feedburner feed and creating another, it does!  I upgraded Wordpress on 7 July and I think that must have caused the problem, so if you have tried to subscribe and couldn’t, I’m sorry but it’s now fixed!

If all the above is gobbledegook to you, I’ll try and explain a bit what ’subscribing’ to a blog means.  The difference between blogs and conventional websites is that their content is continually being updated by something called an ‘rss feed’.  You can find out when a new post is published on any blog by subscribing to their feed.  You do this in two types of ways. 

1. You can either go to a website such as Feedblitz, register and then enter the URLs of any blogs which you want to read regularly.  They then will send you any updates each day by email. 
2. You can register with a web based feed reader such as Google Reader, again fill in the URLs (the web addresses) of any blogs you want to read and they find any new posts for you.  You then go to your Google Reader page whenever you feel like reading new posts from any blogs you are subscribed to.  You can sort them into categories and then just scroll through them by pressing the spacebar.  This is what I prefer to do, myself.  The good thing about Google Reader is that if you are already registered with Google you can just login using your Google username.  And if you click on the little ‘rss’ button on the top or bottom of any blog you want to subscribe to, you can just do it with one click usually if your preferred blog reader is listed there.  Another popular web based feed reader is Bloglines.

If you already subscribe to my blog and haven’t had any new posts since early July, you may find that they all arrive in your reader with this one!!

As we are going on holiday pretty soon, I decided this afternoon to make a bag for my laptop.  I usually leave it at home but this year I thought I’d better have it as I now have my shop on Etsy and the Print Gocco machines for sale here on my blog, if only to tell people that I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth!

I wanted a felted bag, so I decided to use some old felted sweaters and a woollen dress which I felted here a few years ago.  First of all I thought I would stitch the felt from the woollen dress to the one shown in the link above to make it firmer and give it more protection but after some thought, I decided to make an inner bag from the woollen dress and an outer one from the felted sweaters.  Then I decided I had better line the inner one as it was a bit linty and I didn’t want any nasty lint clogging up my precious computer!    The advantage of having two layers is that for carrying it around outside I could just use the inner one and when it needed extra protection such as on the journey in the car, I could augment it with the second!

Here is the inner one:

It needs buttons or fastenings of some sort.  I bought some gorgeous raku buttons from Pearl of Fehustoneware and these are going to be a strong contender!   Here is one of them:

Here’s my laptop snug inside!

And this is the outside bag:

And the other side of this:

This one doesn’t have a flap on the top – I think I am going to put some poppers or something to fasten it inside.  Not sure what I’ll do for a handle yet.  Any suggestions for fastenings or handles gratefully received!!!  I’m very pleased with them as a whole – I am sure I’ll use them much more than I wore either the sweaters or the dress!  The woollen fabric was too thick for the style of dress I made and it made me look awful when I was stick-like.  I dread to think what it would look like now!