Recaptcha is driving me insane
24 Feb 2012 5 Comments
AAAAAAAAARGH. And breathe.
I’m being driven round the bend by blogger’s recaptcha spam prevention c**p technology. If I want to comment on the majority of blogger blogs, I’m having to jump through a warped two word hoop to “prove that I’m not a robot”.
Any guesses what this says?
Or this?
Or how about this?
I spent 15 minutes just now trying to comment on a blog and failed miserably. The other night I even had to grapple with Hindi, pi and fractions. How, pray tell Mr Google, am I meant to enter that?
I am not a robot. But right now I’m not able to be a commenter on blogs either, and that sucks.
Week Off Work Week: Day 1
14 Nov 2011 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: crafty club
Yay it’s Monday and I’m on holiday 
OH and I christened this Week Off Work Week back when we first booked the time off and it’s been loooong anticipated and much mispronounced (Work Off Week Work is my usual one).
As I’m at serious risk of spending all my time sneaking around and fireballing evil doers in Skyrim, I set myself a goal of doing something crafty every day.
Today’s fun was some girly crafty time with Anna and Sarah. We also had some male company in the form of Sarah’s super cute son Peter, who was a total cutie and even napped a bit to let us do some crafty stuff. First up was a bit of shopping for assorted crafty goodness followed by some making. As I’m in the frozen north there is zero precious little daylight at the moment so photos of said goodness and making will have to follow tomorrow. But it was a good day – the perfect start to Week Off Work Week!
Blog hopping
07 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: colour
It’s been a bit quiet over here, but life has been a bit busy. My brother got married and as well as the wedding, there was the pre-pre-wedding dinner, the pre-wedding dinner and the post-wedding BBQ. So much fun but man was I stuffed after that lot! The wedding itself was lovely though. The sun shone (pretty impressive for Scotland) and there was lots of dancing, family and fun.
Lately I’ve not been doing much crafty stuff. I’ve been fairly focussed on houses (and houses for sale in particular) but I’m finally realising the market isn’t great and selling our flat is just not going to happen so there’s no point looking for something bigger.
So in the interests of trying to avoid house websites, I’ve been pinteresting. A. LOT and came across a couple of great blogs. {design seeds} and photo card boutique both take pictures and break out the main colours. I’m totally loving the way colours go together right now and these sites are providing loads of eye candy!
Here are some of my favs from {design seeds}:
And some from photo card boutique:
Holiday subway art
15 Jul 2011 2 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: subway art
I think I’m kinda late in jumping on the subway art bandwagon, but I’ve been seeing it around blogland and thought it would be a fab way to capture all the fun bits of my recent holiday. I put in places, dates, ferries, in jokes. All the bits I was in danger of forgetting and really, really don’t want to…
I used this tutorial which was really easy to follow although putting it all together took ages because of all the positioning and sizing that was required but it’s totally worth it. I love it and am trying to work out a way to print and frame it.
The hardest bit was finding the right fonts. All the subway art out there has fantastic fonts but nobody really mentions which ones they used and there are thousands of free ones out there so it’s hard to narrow down.
I used:
- You’ve been lucky with the weather – Andalus
- butter mintoes – Segoe Script
- 20 minutes up – Impact
- single track road – Calibri
- Lonely Hot Pie – Edwardian Script ITC
- Scotland – Aharoni
- Clachaig Inn – Andes (love this font – I used it on my wedding invites!)
Most of the above came with Windows but any that aren’t there can probably be found at urbanfonts.com which has bazillions of free fonts.
It’s been a bit quiet over here
30 May 2011 2 Comments
I’ve been spending way to much time on places like here and here, and oogling rooms like this
and gardens like this
and consequently not doing much of this
or this
Normal service will resume at some point, if only I can just. stop. looking. at. houses.
26 Apr 2011 6 Comments
Have you come across Pinterest yet? It’s an awesome site where you can set up online pinboards which you can “pin” pictures to. Before Pinterest I starred interesting posts in Google Reader, but now I’ve started tracking that kind of thing in Pinterest instead. It’s just sooooo visual. Here’s my “Quilty Inspiration” board (full of, funnily enough, inspiring quilty pictures)…
It’s soooo much easier to find that interesting tutorial you bookmarked two years ago from a picture of the finished item than from a blog post title or a bookmark name.
I’ve now got all my favourite quilt, yarn, Dear Jane and general crafty inspiration moved over and I’d definitely recommend giving it a play if you haven’t already!
You can also follow other people’s boards and other people can follow you (I’m here). Although I think I’ll probably be using it more for the picture bookmark aspect than the following lots of people thing. Now I think I’m off to do some more pinning…!
Continuing with the pink obsession…
09 Apr 2011 4 Comments
I’ve been doing a bit of a spring restyle over here in whatktmadenext land and I’ve got a nice new theme all set up! My last one was okay, but it never really felt like me. In fact none of the WordPress themes really felt like me. So I decided it was time to do something myself!
I don’t know how it works with Blogger, but with WordPress, you can customise a theme by adding your own CSS (the bit in charge of fonts, layouts, colours etc) to an existing theme. You can’t change the structure of the theme, so I can’t change the wording of buttons etc, but it’s still pretty powerful. To see what I mean, take a look at the Koi theme. That’s what my one’s based on. I’m still amazed by how different something can look given they’re the same thing behind the scenes. It’s totally cool, but that’s probably my geeky side coming out!
Anyway, I loved the date format in the Koi theme. It’s funny how such a small thing swung it for me, but that’s the way it was. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been changing fonts, colours, backgrounds etc. But it really came together this morning when I made the header image. I love, love, love it. It’s my absolute favourite header and was totally nothing like my original plan. But hey – have I mentioned I love it?!
And the pink. Ahh. So me. I bounced the design off Anna this afternoon and she did say it was too pink, so I toned it down a bit. And if you’re thinking that it doesn’t look like it’s been toned down, then you should have seen it about 6 hours ago!
So this is my new theme. I hope I’ve worked all the kinks out, but you never know. If you see something funny it would be great if you could let me know so I can sort it out.
2010 Round-up
10 Jan 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Crochet, embroidery, goals, quilting
Back at the start of 2010, I set myself some goals for the year ahead. Well 0.5 out of 3 ain’t bad, I suppose. I managed to try lots some new things like crochet, paper piecing, applique and inserting a zipper. But I pretty much failed at everything else!
I’m ok about the lack of FMQ. I’m happy with straight line quilting at the moment and am going to work on improving that before I try FMQ. I’m also ok about not making something from every craft book or not making a bigger quilt. These things will happen in time.
So instead of focussing on my failures, here’s my highlights:
- I bought a new awesome sewing machine and made some cute pincushions
- I did more embroidery and joined embroider-bee
- I started learning crochet and inflicted a lovely wonky heart thingy on my hubby for Valentine’s day
- I made some baby quilts and have made the Pointy Quilt of Torture my longest WIP
- I started a Baby Jane quilt. A very, very pink one
- I joined Bee Europa and got to make loads of different blocks that I’d never have tried otherwise
All in all, 2010 was a pretty good year. I could have done more over the second half, but that’s not something I can change and I had my reasons. Looking forward, there’s lots I want to do in 2011, so I’m going to get off the PC and go start doing it…
