To Reply, or Not to Reply? Blogging Buzz

May 17, 2013 Elizabeth E.22 Comments

I guess the first thing to get out of the way is to ask one of the big questions:

No, that’s not it.

The big question is: why do you blog?

And if you are like most of the blogs I see in Blogland, the answer falls into these categories:

making a living at quilting
want to make a living at quilting
will never make a living, but still have hope
pleasure of sharing my quilts
love to write and would write about making tires, if necessary

And then the next question:

Wrong.

Here it is: What do you expect of the people who visit your blog?

Should they leave a comment? Visit only? Not steal your content (it happens)? Not copy your ideas without attribution (it happens)? Which leads us to the really big question:

(from *here*)

When I first started my blogging adventure, in September 2006, I didn’t even enable comments, coming as I was from the “pure” experience of a Creative Writing degree where it was always expected that you would write from within yourself. Soon after that, the digital world exploded and during grad school a few years later, even though we were still yearning for that isolated writing experience, the reality of the market now loomed large, and we had classes on marketing, selling your novel, pitching stories, being aware of What’s Out There.

And that now is the world in which we quilt bloggers find ourselves, I think, which means that the pure excitement of sharing our quilts, our ideas and just chatting up the room seems to be slowly sinking into the swamp of Making Connections, Pitching My Stuff, Pick Me! Pick Me!, and so on. I think I participate in all of everything, as do most of us. But I was quite struck by the thoughts on Carrie Nelson’s blog, LaVieEnRosie, about how so much of blogging has become about advertising. Carrie is one of my heroes in the way she blogs truthfully about her life, so I really perked up when she next said:

With blogs, I’m also betwixt and between about responding to comments. I feel horribly – terribly! – guilty when I don’t answer each and every comment with an e-mail but since I can’t bring myself to send just a quick “thank you for commenting” – I think we all know I’m a bit chattier than that – do I answer just some? And if I don’t get to it right away, is it awful to respond a week or ten days later? That might be worse than not answering it at all. So I stick my head in the sand and hope the e-mails answer themselves.

Sometimes I think that comments are just comments–not requiring a reply. When I leave a comment like “Great quilt!” I don’t really expect a reply at all. But other times I’ve been pleasantly surprised when a reply has come, and over time it has deepened to a correspondence of some sort. However (and she peers over the top of glasses), I know several bloggers who feel so swamped by their own success, of the imperative to thank everyone who comes by, that they withdraw from blogland, retreating back to their studios to Make Stuff, which is — if you think about it — the main reason to have a blog. And I also cringe a little when I happen on a blog where they cheerfully say “I want to grow my blog!” as we are expected to carry away a task from that honest goal, and as I slink away I feel guilty, because certainly one of the true pleasures of blogging is building a community of like-minded folks.

So, does this strange cultural custom of expected replies to comments enhance your appreciation for a blog? Do you leave comments regardless of whether the blogger will answer you back? And if you blog yourself, do you feel compelled (and I chose that word purposefully) to answer back all your commenters?

Do Tell.

Quilts

Entering the Grading Galaxy

May 15, 2013 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

(She moans. Loudly.)

But! I will return, because I excel in Grading Avoidance–a skill not all possess, but my guess is if you are a college English Teacher, you probably do. GA, we call it around here.

But I’ve been working on some things.

Like a visit to Arizona to see two of my children and their families over Mother’s Day Weekend. Grandchildren are the frosting on the cupcake of life, or so the sign in my kitchen proclaims, and my husband and I had a lot of fun, but came home tired. Mothering is a young woman’s game.

Received this greeting from another son and his wife on Mother’s Day, as they took a belated honeymoon trip to Paris, France. (I’m pretty sure he’s on the Eiffel Tower.) The card says, “Happy Mother’s Day from Paris.” Awwww. He’s a keeper.

Received my chicken fabric from Spoonflower, along with two textbooks for next year (Yikes! Already??) , and this:

To paraphrase something my students would say, I was like what? I was thinking what is all this? And I was feeling awesome as I lifted it out of the mailbox. I won for participating in the Schnibbles parade last month on Sherri/Sinta’s Another Year of Schnibbles, and had sent off my mailing address so they could send my prize. And What A Prize:

A bountiful harvest of Moda precuts from Avalon by Fig Tree, Simple Marks by Malka Dubrawsky, boho by Urban Chiks, Double Chocolate by 3Sisters, La Belle Fleur by French General, Maison De Garance by French General (those last two were layer cakes), 200 Blocks from Quiltmaker Magazine (a book), and a lovely hand-written note from Ms. Schnibble herself: Carrie Nelson. I was overwhelmed by her generosity and stunned that I even won at all! I have now lots of fun fabrics for lots of fun projects–all thanks to Miss Rosie’s Quilt Company. I feel richly blessed to be a part of the quilting community, as well you know, because I say it over and over and over. And even if I never win anything more again in my life (which is very likely), this one time, hey, I did.

Textiles & Fabric

Spoonflower’s Geeks

May 11, 2013May 9, 2013 Elizabeth E.4 Comments

Last year Spoonflower had a contest titled Fabric 8, in which they selected 8 contestants to design a line of linked fabrics. I loved following that group and reading about their choices. This year’s theme is Geek Chic, and while the semifinal voting closed May 9th, I felt like an expert, since I am married to a very nice geek. Most people think geeks are nerdy, but they are not the same thing. And while Nerdy always includes tape-on-glasses and stacks of books with out-of-fashion clothing, Geek does not necessarily include those symbols. And I was especially please to see some inclusion of science geeks strewn in among the computer geeks!

Here’s what I voted for:

But this one made me laugh out loud, but only after I looked at the title of the design: Old School.

It’s this artist’s illustration of “off” and “on,” in other words the string of 1s and 0s that run our computers today. It’s the virtual hamsters on their wheels running like crazy in the background behind our graphics and colors and text and quilts and blog posts.

I’m really lucky to have two geeks in my life: my husband, a science guy, and my son Peter, who writes code for a living and is getting his grad degree in computer science. If this one goes to the printing phase, I may have to get some to make him a cover for his recent tablet purchase (hint: NOT an Apple). I hope he gets the joke!

Quilts · WIP

It’s Wednesday, so WIP on

May 8, 2013May 8, 2013 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

Finally! I have a use for my phone app, purchased so long ago and hardly used. Anyone else like that?

Yep, it’s Wednesday so that means I’m thinking about my works in progress.

Well, today, it was Schnibbles. I really had fun making last month’s quilt and although I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to keep this up, winning a prize for my Schnibbles certainly helped my motivation. It hasn’t come yet, so I can’t tell you what it is, but Mr. Random Generator Number HATES me, so I was pretty surprised when Sherri emailed me with the news. But as I lay in bed the other night, listening to the night sounds and thinking about if I should do this month’s pattern, all of a sudden I knew exactly what I wanted to do. It involves old sheets. But not vintage floral sheets.

Long before Martha Stewart ruled the linen universe and long before everyone’s beds looked the same, you could go down to the department store and there’d be all kinds of sheets in all kinds of patterns, mostly percale, but a variety of eye candy for the bed. One day in Wisconsin, in their department store, a set of Porthault knock-off linens were in the marked down bin.

Porthault? I was stunned, and snapped them all up: pillowcases, top sheet, bottom sheet and an extra sheet. The cool part was that the top sheet and pillowcases had a gentle scalloped edge that was taped with blue linen tape. Verrry classy. Well, I wore out the bedding, but still had that extra sheet. Some years ago, I cut it into large squares to use as table decorations for something-or-other, and I knew I still had those lovely lily of the valley pieces of sheets. Somewhere. I rummaged through the boxes in the garage last night and found them (you don’t have fabric in the garage? Really?), and went to work today making my Schnibbles. I have a set of papers coming in on Tuesday when I enter the Grading Galaxy, hoping to return just before my sister and her husband arrive for a week. Now you know why I thought I ought to get busy and get this done.

Here’s the second iteration. The fabric has two-toned blue lilies of the valley and yellow mini-tulips with green stems and little red dots here and there. So I added some red thread and some green thread to two of my spools, along with some yellow spools just for interest.

Here’s a close-up of the fabric. I have my row tag on there, ready to sew up the blocks into the top. I have enjoyed digging into the stash for this quilt, pulling blues from all sorts of different kinds of fabrics. I do like sewing with one line of fabric, I guess, but I always seem to sneak an extra bit from what I have so as to break up the quilt. (I guess that means I don’t really like sewing from just one line of fabric.)

I cut strips of my Porthault knock-off sheets into strips for the first border, and angled the ends to help disguise the seams–I have a lot of seams because I’m cutting from those squares from long ago.

First inner border with cornerstones is on in one of those dreaded nighttime photoshots. I stopped here for the night, and will figure out the outer border in the morning. I was able to slide in three blue blocks made with fabric from my very first pieced quilt (#3 on my 100 quilts list, never blogged about). I like using this fabric in quilts here and there. I like tying both ends of my quilting life together like this.

Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced. For sure, I will be at the end-of-the Linky list tonight!

And here’s the only picture I could find of the sheets on the web. Sorry it’s so teensy!

I just went and looked up Porthault *online* and a sheet set is going for about two grand. Yep.
Of course, it is the real thing, and not the knock-off. Makes quilt fabric look like a bargain.