October.

 Yay! An update! I keep meaning to do this and meaning to do this but it never seems to happen. Grrr! I lost a bit of time there in September due to a vacation week and - even more importantly - a BRAND NEW COMPUTER. I am no longer computing like it's 2006, people! 

My old computer actually wasn't in terrible shape, aside from being nervous of a hardware meltdown happening at any time because, you know, that stuff wasn't built to last forever and 7-8 years is asking a bit much of it. *ahem* The bigger issue was that more and more things weren't working with Windows Vista now that it's no longer supported so, rather than upgrade an old computer, we just got a new one! (A Windows 7 machine though because, MAN!, have I heard horrible no good things about Windows 8.) I was dreading moving everything over but apparently things have changed a LOT since I last bought one of these dang machines and it was actually pretty easy. *blink*

ANYWAY. I'm in a good mood today (mostly) because tomorrow is the Stitches East show and I looooooooooooooooooovveeeeeeeeeeeee the Stitches East show. And now it's here and I'm excited, even though I haven't been knitting much lately. I did so much knitting over the summer that I decided to take a break from it for a little while and get more stitching done. 

Turns out when you work on stitching a little bit each day (or most days) you actually FINISH THINGS UP. I know, right? It's miraculous.

These finishes here are the L*K Song of Spring kit , the rabbity 'small' that comes with that and the 2nd part of the BBD Honeybee Hill. (I haven't had occasion to use that sparkly green linen before and I quite like it here with Mr. Rabbit. )

I finished another piece as well but that may/may not be a gift so I don't want to post it and I have a big Plum Street piece 'in progress' that I am plugging along on. I can't go to the SE show without something on the needles though so stitching progress might be halted for a bit while I get my sock knitting on. :)

Relatedly, that new iPhone x-stitch app making the rounds is quite brilliant. An online/device accessible detailed accounting of everything in your stash?  YOU KNOW I had to snap that up immediately because I *LOVE* a good spreadsheeting, organizing, finger snapping, alphabetizing project. 

I went through pretty much everything I have pattern wise, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap and.......

Honestly, it's not AS BAD as I thought it was going to be! Of the 315 patterns I own, about 75-80 have already been stitched. Now, that is still more than I can probably REALISTICALLY finish in the years I have left to me (or have left in my eyesight/hand dexterity). And it doesn't take into account that I own 14 years of the JCS ornament issues which, well, have a lot of stuff in them. But. It's STILL not as bad as I thought. I would have guessed I had no less than 500 patterns to get to, so, yay? Buy more? ;)

(Also not counted: the patterns I have given away over the years. I gave away a GIANT stack of used Shepherd's Bush/misc. patterns at some point, a fact I am a little bitter about, to be honest, because REASONS. Things did not turn out well on that one. *sigh*)

After the patterns were done, I did my hand dyed threads but not my DMC. (Because I own ALL OF IT so I don't need a stinking list for that. ) All of the info is in that mysterious Cloud thingy now  and I can open it up on my phone or Mini so I have NO EXCUSES not to keep up on it. The app is really great and I wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone with Apple devices and a wish to have an easily searchable database of their stash.

OH well. I probably had a million other things to say but this will do for now, right? :)

BTW - those little guys at the top are the new Mummy beads I posted on Etsy/my site this week. Cuties! :)

New item up in the Bead Shoppe today.

Or rather - an old item that I haven't offered for a long time but it's getting some new attention because there is currently an article featuring Lori Anderson of Lori Anderson Designs in the current Bead Style magazine and one of the pictures in her article has these lil guys in it. It's been fun doing them up again! I never stopped doing them because I didn't like them - I just felt I had a lot of holiday beads that were redundant so I cut my catalog down a bit the last couple of years. (You know I'm always happy making things with little beady eyes.) Be sure to check out her site even if it's just to bask in the glow of the eye candy. :)

In other news, my computer is now fixed..................maybe. The third thing I tried to fix it, a check disk thingy, actually repaired the stupid ntuser file causing all the problems, though it took forrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrever to do it. (Probably a good sign I need to clean my hard drive off a bit. I guess I don't need to save EVERY SINGLE picture I ever take ever ever ever.) So that was good but, ummmm, I've been too a'skeered to shut my computer off since then so I'm not sure what will happen when I do. lololol It may just be a temporary fix, you know? I know I'll have to shut it off at SOME point and see what happens, because there might be something still 'off' that will just REcorrupt that file but for the MOMENT I'm quite content to live in DenialLand. I've had a ton of orders lately which is a ton of emails, a ton of printing of receipts and shipping labels, etc. I can't be fooling with a 2hr repair job every day!  So for now I'm just putting it to 'sleep' at night. I might need a 12-step to get me to shut it off completely because it's turning into a bit of a phobia. OH NOES, COMPUTER TROUBLES IMMINENT, SAVE ME SAVE ME.

Gah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Emails, etc. may be delayed as my computer is totally totally FUBARed today.
(I'm currently on my husband's netbook, which is not set up for my email or printing - which is ok for internet browsing, not so great for doing my bead biz stuff. *sigh*)

My pc user profile was corrupted and I'm finding out now that having only one user account on your pc is a bad idea. Because if you corrupt your administrator account, well, you are in deep do-do. OH HAI THERE, YOU COULDN'T HAVE FOUND A WAY TO GET THIS INTO MY HEAD SOMEHOW LIKE YEARSSSSSSSSSSS AGO??????????
I thought having only one user account meant that my marriage was 'open' and very trusting because we had no need to hide anything from one another so OF COURSE we only needed one computer 'user'. My passwords are his passwords and la la la aren't we all modern and Share-y McShare-atons and shit? WHOOPS. BAD ME. Now I get to try and recreate everything from scratch from the last 2 years from when we bought this computer. *le sigh* (Because seemingly easy copy/paste/restore/backup functions don't seem to be working. Nothing ever goes as it should when it comes to computer problems though, right? That's par for the course. lol)

Oh well, I'm off to browse pretty stitchy/yarny pr0n blogs while waiting for a seemingly endless check disk thingy to finish in an attempt to sooth my soul before I have to start trying to repair stuff again. Wish me luck! :)

New for 2010

(Ignoring the fact that I'm a wee bit early here.....)

I've added an RSS feed for my bloggy bits. I've been loathe to do this for ages, for many different reasons, the primary being that it draws people away from your site, which is not really desirable when you are trying to sell products on that site, yes? To that end, I'll either have to change my blogging style to incorporate more links to my site (I know - waaaaaahhhhhhh! OH-SO-DIFFICULT-IT-IS) or I might end up posting a subject line only to the RSS feed as a teaser with a link back to the site to get the full entry. (A lot of food bloggers do this and I have mixed feelings on it. I find myself not reading them as much after they've done that but, from what I can gather, they also do it to drive more people to their actual site vs. just having a bunch of anonymous people skimming their stuff on Google reader. Pros and cons to it, I guess.)

I've tried to figure out how to embed a blog w/a feed on the main page of my site but, invariably, about 3 minutes into my research on it my eyes start to glaze over and I feel a coma start to come on from the icky-picky technicality of it all. (I'm not sure I have enough qualification on such matters to say that it's a difficult thing to do but I think the fact that I've yet to see a single Pappashop-hosted site with an rss-feed blog embedded on a page speaks for itself. Such sites probably do exist but I have to think it's pretty rare. It goes beyond your average click-and-drag html skill set, that's for sure.)

But I'm sure I'm not the only one who adores their RSS feeds so I guess I should get with the program and get one myself. I love love love love my Google reader. It's stuffed full of food bloggers, knit bloggers, political bloggers, everyday bloggers, tv industry stuffs, on and on and on. It's not unusual for me to open it up in the morning and have 100+ posts to dig through. Do I read it all? Hardly. I skim like a mofo. lol I treat it like a magazine. My own personally designed, totally 100% free,  magazine labeled ME. I read the parts that look interesting and skim through the rest. It's a good thing. :)