Moving, an update

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Suzanne

Rearranging things

Mark and I have been sleeping in our new bedroom for about a week now. All of the furniture is now in place and I finally finished moving my clothes up yesterday. We’ll still be using the master bedroom bathroom, so I’m going to have to get used to having my clothes on a different floor, possibly even planning ahead enough to bring clothes down with me to the bathroom. Luckily, I have a nice robe, so I won’t be running around naked.

The bedroom is in desperate need of things on the wall, a situation that will be remedied as we bring things home from the shop. Two main pluses for our new bedroom: we aren’t directly on top of the furnace anymore: when it kicks on we can barely hear it! And the second is a plus now, but will be a minus this summer: the room is SO much warmer, I’m able to sleep with fewer clothes on. (Some nights I needed a sweatshirt on top of my flannel pjs. Now I’m down to just the flannel, and could probably go with shorts and a t-shirt.)

I’m working on finding homes for all of my stuff in the new studio, a process that will take a sharp right turn in the next few weeks as I fill it up with everything from downtown. I’m already trying to mentally prepare for a new way of operating: a place for everything, and everything in it’s place. Every square inch is going to be in use, and it’s going to be interesting…

Shop Update

Apologies to those of you who have seen this either in the MQResource forums, or will be getting an e-mail newsletter…

The fabric at the shop is looking much thinner, but the yarn. I’d still like to get rid of some more yarn, so, I’ve now got it all marked down by 40%, to maybe tempt some more shoppers. I wish I had more sock yarn for all of you sock knitters, but one of the main things I have is 51 colors of Cascade 220 wool. It’s great for felting, and felted bags are a great beginner’s project. I also have a bunch of other stuff, and at 40% off…maybe I can get rid of some more of it. I can only knit so much…

The fabric is all now marked down to 40% off as well, and I’ve listed bundles of fat quarters and fat 8ths in various combinations at crazy low prices, check them out if your stash could use some enhancement.

Most of the quilting and sewing patterns and books are marked down by 20% as well as some of the notions that I carry.

In Other News

I’m not sure I’m going to make it with the sock. I’ve run completely out of steam. I’ll keep going, and maybe I can pull out a miracle.

Lastly: I actually turned on a sewing machine for the first time in something like 2 weeks. Crazy.

Picture me banging my head on the wall

Posted on February 11, 2010 by Suzanne

Since announcing the sale at my shop, I have sold a ton of fabric.

Seriously. A ton.

But hardly any yarn, and I just haven’t been able to understand. I thought it was a pretty good deal, but…maybe it wasn’t a good enough deal.

Well, tonight, I had an idea in my head and I wanted to check on a yarn color, so I toodled off to the online shop to look at what I have.

And there was only like 2 yarns in that category. Now, I’m pretty sure there are more yarns in that category in the shop, because I stare at it every time I’m in the shop, so I decided to poke around the rest of the yarn section to see if maybe the yarn I was looking for was misclassified.

There was barely any yarn in ANY category. Seriously.

Color me mystified.

So, I went to poke around the admin side of hte shopping cart. Yup, there was all of the yarn in the list…why wasn’t it showing up in the shop????

*Bad words*

Somehow, nearly all of the yarn had gotten marked as having Inventory Tracked, but the product quantity was…a big fat zero.

*Bad words*

This is not something where Suzanne accidentally checked a checkbox — we’re talking over 150 individual products. I suspect I know when it happened, but I can’t explain exactly WHY. Exactly why or how doesn’t really matter, but oh heavens.

Here I sit, imagining the people who have clicked through from Ravelry, or from the Google ad, or from the sale notification, wondering why I’m touting the yarn I sell, when it didn’t appear that I actually sell any yarn besides a few skeins of Opal sock yarn and Black Cascade 220.

*Bad words*

So! If you are a knitter, or know a knitter, or want to just look at some pretty colors of yarn, guess what! The yarn is now showing on my site! And it’s 30% off!

Yarn at Knots & Bolts

Sports themed window display

Posted on August 18, 2009 by Suzanne

Two weekends ago was the Winding Stairs Festival here in Traer, and the theme was Tailgate on 2nd Street.

I decided to go with more of a sports-themed window display, rather than tailgating, and this is what we came up with:

I will take credit only for the quilts, and maybe a few suggestions, tweaking the display: the boys were in charge of these windows. They hauled in their sports stuff, and were the ones that thought of making sure they had lots of sports represented, and they did the arranging of the items.

They also did quite a bit of work for me in the shop prior the Festival — and I’m going to miss their help when they go back to school.

Which is TOMORROW. Where did summer go???? It just barely got here…

I live to serve

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Suzanne

My sister called me this morning to tell me I needed to post something on my blog.

I haven’t much felt like blogging lately, but since both she AND my mother asked today, I thought I’d comply.

First up are the pictures from this week’s photography lessons. It’s about aperture and depth of field. If you know more about photography than I do, please don’t laugh if I explain this stuff wrong.

I used my new 50mm f/1.7 lens, and mounted the camera on my tripod. I also had to try to figure out how to shift my focal point so that it actually focused on the doll.

First is with a wide open aperture of f/1.7. That meant a short depth of field, with only the doll in focus, and you can’t even tell what’s in the background. Isn’t it cool how blurry it is? That effect is called BOKEH. Bizarre word. Some people pronounce it bo-kay and some people say bo-kuh.

Of course, all of YOU know what that is in the background because you’ve only seen a million pictures of it already.

The next picture is with a closed aperature of f/22. This is where the tripod was so important: to compensate for the low light and the closed aperture, the camera used a much longer shutter speed. Without the tripod the whole picture was blurry because I couldn’t hold the camera still enough. In fact, I even used the timer so that after I pushed the button and let go, the camera waited about 2 seconds before it took the picture.

Longer depth of field, more of the picture is in focus. Much less interesting picture, too.

I was taking pictures last night and tried to get one of Mark.

That’s great, dear. Thanks.

Oh, my sister also told me that I needed to add back in the abillity to add posts to social networking sites, so, I did. I know you’ve been missing the opportunity to Digg me, so, go forth and Digg. Or Stumble. Or Facebook. Or whatever.

Or not.