I discovered LibraryThing a couple of weeks ago, and I’m in book lover’s heaven! I could instantly see major potential here, and I’ve already started to get a couple of long-term goals accomplished. Ever since I started writing at Quilt Epiphany, I’ve wanted to make a Library page, showing all the quilt books in my collection, and either linking to my review of the book (if there was one) or to the book at Amazon.com, or both.

I do have a Worpress plugin called Amazon Media Manager (AMM) which makes it possible to insert a pretty picture of a book or product into my posts and have it linked directly to Amazon where readers can buy it. Oh, and the veritable river of cash that flows from the Amazon Associates account into my wallet is staggering, as well. However, while AMM works great for one at a time inserts, or lists of two or three books or CD’s in the sidebar, I just couldn’t see spending the amount of time it would take to input 140 quilt books into my AMM list, and then program the thing to display them on a separate page. Never mind.

Here’s why LibraryThing is such a killer app. I made a free account at LibraryThing (a one step, two word process, believe it or not), and added a couple of books to my Library. It’s a simple process, since you can either enter the ISBN of the book, or search by title or author, and then select from a list to add the book to your Library. You can see the contents of your library, add tags, write reviews, share your profile with other users, see what other users are reading, etc. This is social networking for book lovers, Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m so excited! Electric Quilt is finally releasing Version 6 of the software, just in time for the holidays! I’d been kind of wondering about a new version for a while now. I went to the site this morning to download the free palette for EQ5 (see this post), and saw the news about EQ6. The best part: preordering for shipment in late November gets you a special reduced price on either an upgrade from Version 5, or the full version of EQ6. Wow! They’re giving you at least a $25 discount if you preorder! This one is a “wrap it up and stick it under the tree for yourself” gift. You could even say it was from Santa.

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Okay, I realize this is not your usual quilting type tool, and no, I’m not taking up carpentry along with all my other hats that I wear. This tool is a borderline “must have,” though, even for us quilter types, and it definitely saved me the other day as I was finishing up my latest quilt last week. I’ve never really had problems putting on the hanging sleeves and getting them straight. I’ve always just pinned them on parallel to the top of the quilt and it’s been fine, and the quilt hangs straight.

Well with this latest quilt, the top edge was scalloped, and even though I measured from the tops of the scallops to position the sleeve evenly across the top of the quilt, when I hung it up on the quilt stand to take a photo, the sleeve was obviously out of whack somewhere. It was really bad, with a great big wave in the bottom. I could tell by looking at the quilt hanging there that the sleeve ended up with a big curve in it somehow as I sewed it on, but I really couldn’t tell by looking at the sleeve itself.

So I removed the sleeve to start over again, and that’s where the Stanley Laser Level Square comes in. Read the rest of this entry »

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