White Threads

The Magic Flute and BATB classes

Last night we took our girls out for a huge treat (a treat for us too!). We went to see Opera Australia’s production of The Magic Flute at the Sydney Opera House. It was amazing! As you can expect, apart from the opera itself, I was transfixed by the costumes. Wow! Full of colour, shapes and pattern. It was fabulous! We’ll have two very tired little girls today, but they were so thrilled to be going, and really enjoyed the performance. Fortunately today is a public holiday (Australia Day) so we don’t have to do very much – no gymnastics training for one thing!

Now, if you’re wanting to do any classes with me this year, for Beating Around the Bush, the needlework conference being run in Adelaide at Easter time, two of my classes have changed. Beating Around the Bush is a fabulous event, and last time one of the things I loved best about it was simply being with so many other people who also love embroidery.

My one day class is now going to be an Elizabethan Strawberry Roundel, replacing the Hardanger class.

Replacing the difficult and unusual stitches class will be your first chance to do a class in Portuguese Whitework with me! We’ll be making the handtowel out of my upcoming book “Portuguese Whitework”.

The Mountmellick lily cushion class remains the same.

I would absolutely love you to join me for these classes! Bookings for Beating Around the Bush can be made at the Try Booking website.

enjoying Dreamweaver

I’m still plugging away at the website. I’ve been using Dreamweaver this time around, as I bought it since the last upgrade of the website. I must say that I am enjoying using it. Previously I handcoded everything, writing it in html. This was not the easiest thing to do, but I struggled through and had made a passable website!

But NOW… oh, how I love the freedom of Dreamweaver! It is allowing me to do things that I had previously only dreamed of (or never even dreamed of!).

I love the templates facility. I created my page, with its new header with drop down menus (oooh!!) and then converted it into a template on which to base the other pages. Then if you make a change to the template, you can also automatically apply those changes to the “child” pages as well. Wowee!

It is still slow going, but putting the old pages onto the new templates will hopefully mean that global website changes in the future are going to be a much easier affair.

I had hoped that the new website would be finished by the end of this week, but given that I’m now Mum’s Taxi, that won’t be happening! Maybe the end of next week, after the kids have gone back to school?!

working on my website

I spent Saturday working on the Vetty Creations website. I need to add information about the new book, and that’s going to require quite a bit of a re-jig.

I made some changes to some files, and on trying to access White Threads this morning I was told I was getting a server error. I realised that the “things” I had done while fiddling with my .htaccess file probably weren’t a good idea. Back to the file and deleted the changes, and voila, the blog works again!

Sorry that its been offline since Saturday…!

This week the husband is back to work, so I’ll have a bit less time working until the kids go back to school next week. But I’ll try to get the website redone as quickly as possible, so that you can all place your orders for the new book! 🙂

Harry Potter costumes

Its still summer holidays here, though school goes back in a couple of weeks time. Yesterday we went to see the Harry Potter exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum, here in Sydney. The oldest three of us are Harry fans, and the youngest of us – not much of a reader – knows just a little from what we have told her, and also from having had most of the first book read to her (we’re not quite finished yet!).

I really enjoyed the exhibition. There were quite a lot of the costumes on display, which was excellent to see. One thing about them really bothered me though: there was no technical information about the costumes. No information about the fabric, the techniques used, the designers and craftspeople. This information was not even included in the catalogue. For an exhibition that is being shown at a “design” museum, I felt that this was really disappointing and quite an oversight.

Three costumes, all displayed together, really stood out to me: two elaborate robes for the two different Dumbledores, and one set of elaborate robes for Professor McGonagall. Professor McGonagall’s robes were in a dark greeny-black-ish fabric, which had some really fabulous fabric manipulation. There was an interesting cross hatch of folds of the fabric, for the sleeves particularly, but also other sections. It was the same fabric as the rest of the unmanipulated fabric, and the contrast worked really well. I loved the texture and pattern created by the fabric manipulation. I would be very interested in learning the process behind it, but alas, that sort of detail was not included…

Because we had to stand a little way back from the exhibits, I could not really tell how the ornamentation on Dumbledore’s garments was done, but possibly there was some hand embroidery there. Once again, I’ll never know. 🙁

Loved the exhibition though.

For anyone who is thinking of joining us for our day out at the Powerhouse Museum to see the Love Lace exhibition on Thursday 2nd February, we’ll meet at the entrance to the museum, just inside the doors. That way if it is hot out, or wet, we’ll be sheltered. Please let me know if you’re planning to come, so that we can look out for you.

I love my printer

I got an email very late last night from the printing company that’s printing my book, querying four pages where they had found problems. One of the problems I had checked for already, so I’m not sure how it slipped through, but obviously it did!

The other 3 problems were things that I had not noticed and am very pleased that they picked up.

I love having such thorough printers. While I don’t want to have to rely on them to pick up problems like these, I am glad that I can!

The pages have been corrected and are currently resending. 🙂

Class proposals

Over the next few days I have to get stuck into some class proposals. I’ve had a few letters over the past months asking for class proposals, but just haven’t had the chance to do anything about them. Thankfully the submission dates have not yet passed.

These are for classes into 2013, which seemed such a long way off when we were in 2011, but now I guess its not really all that far away!

Elizabethan panel

I’ll be submitting a range of proposals, including Portuguese Whitework, Mountmellick, and do you remember the Elizabethan style embroidery I did for fun a few years ago? I’m also thinking of doing a small one-day class proposal using some of those techniques.

So this means that apart from sorting through projects already made for classes to see which ones I’d like to teach again, I’m just going to *have* to design and make a small Elizabethan project in the next few days. Oh what a dreadful chore! (wink!)

video preview under way

I spent a bit of time on Friday and Saturday working on a video preview of “Portuguese Whitework”. It’s been quite fun.

I have no idea about video – my brain designs better in two dimensions – even though I did some really basic stuff at uni when I did my design degree. At the time I decided video wasn’t really for me. However, I am enjoying the challenge of making the video!

My husband and I chose some music for it the other night. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed about the music, because looking for some royalty-free music to use was also something I had never done before. We found some websites where these sorts of things are available, and searched through the ones with “Portugal” or “Portuguese” amongst their keywords. Found some lovely classical guitar type pieces, and eventually whittled it down to the one that works best with my video. I’ll probably purchase the music today.

I also need to speak with my shipping agent today to work out when the books are likely to get here, so that I can set a release date. The printer has given me a shipping date, but I just need my shipping agent to give me an idea of how long it might take to get to Sydney, through the dock system and customs.

Its all happening here!

It is done!!

Yesterday afternoon my daughter and I drove to the Post Office (yes, drove! – that’s a new one for me!) and I posted off the printouts and files of “Portuguese Whitework” to my printers in Hong Kong.

Just quietly, it doesn’t feel as marvellous as I might have expected, to have it finished, possibly because I wasn’t feeling all that stressed about it beforehand. I was just working solidly to get it done.

However, I am sure that over the next few days and weeks I will really feel the difference of not having to rush off to my computer for every spare second to get more work done. I am looking forward to being a little more detached from the computer!

However, now I can get stuck into updating the website and putting it there so that people can pre-order it. But the thing I am really looking forward to, is making a video preview of the book. I’ve never done anything like that before, so I am looking forward to the challenge.

I’ll also have to decide which of my other book ideas is the best one to focus on next. Its a bit hard to decide! But the decision can just percolate for a bit yet. I’m happy to have a little break!

Thank you to you all for your encouragement, and for those who have let me know how much they’ve enjoyed hearing about the process of writing and publishing a book. There’s still more stages of the printing process to go through, so I’ll probably be able to tell you about them also.

maybe today?

I spent about 10 hours yesterday reading through the printouts of the book again. And finding lots more little things to fix…

At the beginning of the day I was thinking to myself “Oh, I’ll let that one go. It’ll be ok” but then I thought to myself “No! This is my chance to get it right! I am going to fix those things.” So fix them, I did.

I now have another set of printouts that I will read through today. Hopefully it won’t take me 10 hours again! So hopefully it will be posted today?

I woke this morning from a bit of a nightmare. I dreamt that I had travelled about 8 hours into the country for a class. I turned up for the class and in the few seconds before it was due to start, I realised that *I* was meant to be teaching it! As it was a Mountmellick class, I was supposed to have brought kits with me, and prepared a workshop. It was rather awkward as I stood there explaining to the class that because I had been so caught up in finishing off the book I forgotten to do it. Thankfully they were all very nice about it and because we were in a fabric shop, we made do with the supplies there and had a slightly chaotic class instead. I’m so glad it was only a dream!

Can you tell this book is just slightly weighing on me?!

Today might be the day

I am hoping to send off my files for Portuguese Whitework to the printer today. That will depend on how I go with reading through and checking the entire book. I’ve made all the changes that my husband found the other day and had it printed out again.

Hopefully I will find very little this time through.

I’m SOOOOOOOO close…!