Some of This, Some of That

I feel good! Yesterday I completed my top, now called Raspberry Rumspringa (it's the second quilt in the Rumspringa series. I just love that word. Rumspringa, rumspringa, rumspringa.) And no, you don't get to see it.

We had sunshine and I got out a bunch of quilts to take better photos of them. Not great photos, but better. While I had the camera out, of course I had to take a pic of baby Pokey:

You know how I showed you a pic of Nancy's quilt that she made at Gwen Marston's retreat? Well Nancy has now started her blog - woohoo! It's called True Blue Quilting Nana. She's got pictures and a story from retreat, so go say hello and encourage her to post even more!

[edited to answer Clare's question: No, this isn't the Nancy who's antique quilts appeared in Liberated String Quilts. I still hope that Nancy starts a blog too!]

The Priority Hope Challenge is going great - come on over and check out some awesome little quilts. There's still plenty of time to make one of these yourself.

I'm cogitating and plotting another class. I'll fill you in soon (and if I don't, jab me with a stick).

The rest of this post will be about photos and space limitations on Blogger.

I have been posting over three years now and have only used up 16% of my alloted 1GB of space on Blogger. But, having said that, I resize my photos BEFORE I upload them to Blogger.

In Picasa, I edit my photos and SAVE them. I name them and then go under FILE and choose the option to Export Picture to Folder. It gives you the choice of what size to make the photo. For snapshots and almost every one of my pics, I now choose 480 pixels. That's a nice size. For pictures of quilts that I want you to be able to see the detail, then I'll go to 800 or 1024 pixels. Very rarely have I gone about that.

So I choose a size and send my photo to a folder called Websize. I only upload to Blogger from THAT folder.

I put my pics on my blog using blogger itself. I click the little square that looks like a landscape and it pops the Photo Upload tool. I choose the browse my computer option and always have my photos in the center and LARGE.

Now Picasa and Blogger will take the full huge megapixel photo and resize it to fit the screen properly, but they don't resize the number of pixels. So you're still taking up all that allotted space. How do you know how big your photos actually are? Go to your blog and click on a photo - if it comes up huge, bigger than your computer screen then you know you're loading big photos. Click on the pic of Pokey up above. When that photo launches, it won't be much bigger than how you're seeing it in the blog post.

Some other things to know. As soon as you've uploaded a photo into a blog post, that space counts against you even if you choose to delete it and never publish it in a post. Space gets used by UPLOADS. So going back and deleting old blog posts? Won't work. No point in going and resizing photos either. The space is already counted against you.

So the moral of the story is, you have plenty of photo space for your blog. Just make sure that you resize your photos and make them smaller before you send them into a blog post or the Picasa online photo album.

And I just hope that none of you have the terrible time loading photos that Giraffe Dreams Carol E. had (has?). That's how I learned that it's uploads that count against you.

Good luck. Did that answer the questions?

I'm editing this post to answer a couple of questions.

How do I know how much space I've used? Click on that little landscape icon when you're editing a blog post. The Photo Upload Tool will pop up. At the very bottom, next to the orange button it will tell you what percentage of your space you've used up. Mine says: You are currently using 161MB (15%) of your 1024MB.

OR you can follow the directions here - but my way is a lot faster. It also says that if you have to buy more storage space it costs $20 USD per year for 10 GB.