Irene has nominated me for the Kreativ Blogger Award! How lovely of you Irene, and thank you!

The rules of the award are:

1. The winner may put the logo on her blog.

2. Put a link to the person you got the award from in your blog.

3. Nominate 3 blogs - it was originally 5, but Irene changed it to 3, and I’ll do 4.

4. Put links to the blogs.

5. Leave a message for your nominees.

Here are my nominations for the award:

1. Kristin overflows with creativity, on blog and off. Her theme interpretations for the Twelve by Twelve projects are amazing, and I’m green with envy over her blog photos which always look as if they belong in a magazine.

2. I’ve recently discovered Jodie at Vintage Ric-Rac, and if this gal isn’t Kreativ, then no one is. She sooo needs to be writing a book featuring her selvedge art. And again, her photography skills leave me green!

3. Kimberly is always creative, and she’s always so busy I don’t know how she gets it all done. Check out her free Mystery Quilt on her site; it’s one of many that she designs for various shows, magazines and workshops, and it takes some talent to keep coming up with awesome quilts, again and again!

4. It wouldn’t matter whether Jane Ann was a quilter or not, I’d read her blog for her Kreativ way with words. Her writing is simply beautiful, and regularly brings a tear to my eye, even when she’s writing about happy things—she’s that good. Her textile creativity is right up there with the best of ‘em as well.

Share This

I’m packing like a mad woman getting ready to fly to Houston for Quilt Market, and at the last minute, I’ve received some super exciting news! While I was in Des Moines, I submitted a book proposal to the executive book editor for AQS, and I was excited to read What a Great Show on the AQS Publishing Blog. The pertinent part of that post was this:

My week was spent meeting authors old, new and wanna-be, and every single one was delightful. We received interesting proposals and scoured the vendors for what’s hot and what will be The Next Big Thing. Too much fun to call it work!

I spent the time since Des Moines, and especially since reading that blog post, hoping that my proposal was one of the “interesting” ones. The editor really seemed very receptive to my proposal and ideas when I met with her, and very friendly and easy to work with. I left our meeting feeling pretty good about it all, but you know how things like this are; sometimes you have the utmost confidence that it will all go your way, and other days are the exact opposite! Writing a book is a lot of work (and a lot of quilting!), but it’s something I’ve been working on and toward for a number of years now.

After what has seemed the longest week and a half ever, the editor emailed me this evening to say that AQS wants to publish my book!!! OMG! Can you believe it? I almost can’t! We were out for a family dinner at Wingers when I got the email, and I was so excited, I almost bounced out of my chair! I don’t know when it will be out (it’s not even ready to submit completely yet, of course), and I don’t know what they’ll decide the title will be or anything yet, but I couldn’t wait to share the news! The editor wrote in her email:

Congratulations! Bet you fly to Houston on your own steam!

She’s sure right about that! I’m off to finish packing now, and then go to bed since I have to be up soooo early for the flight, but I just know I won’t be able to sleep at all tonight! I won’t promise to blog from Houston (though I will try), but I will try to take lots of pics and notes to share when I get back…See you on the other side!

Share This

Adding pictures to the posts on your blog is a good thing, providing interest and illustration and giving readers a glimpse into your quilty world. Sizing images correctly is a must though, since images that are too big for the layout of your page will cause other elements like sidebars to move around and end up out of position, and pictures that are too small are just difficult for readers to see. Here’s a quick tutorial (I use Photoshop Elements, but the theory is the same for any graphics program):

Open the image in Photoshop (or whichever graphics editor you use) and edit the color, fix red eyes or crop the image to delete any unnecessary background from the shot. Once you’re satisfied with the image, you need to know the size of the space where the image must fit, in pixels. That’s the important part here. Inches mean nothing, it’s all about the pixels.

I generally worry more about the width of an image, because that’s the dimension that will cause the layout of my pages to break if it’s too big. I use a tool called MeasureIt, which is an add-on for the Firefox Browser. When you have MeasureIt installed, you can click on the icon and then click and drag on your screen to measure an area in pixels, like this:

I’ve measured the width of my post area, and I know that my image can’t be wider than 491 pixels. I usually stick with about 450px, because I like to leave a little room around the image, and it’s an easy number to remember when I’m sizing the images in Photoshop.

In Photoshop, there are two ways to size the image properly. You can use Image>Resize>Image Size, and then enter the width in the Width field, making sure that the box next to “Constrain Proportions” is checked at the bottom, and that the drop down menu next to the Width field says “pixels.” Once you enter your desired pixels for the Width, the Height will change automatically if “Constrain Proportions” is checked. Click “OK” to resize the image and save it. Read the rest of this entry »

Share This