Signs of Amsterdam

A variety of signs, old and new, from my trip to Amsterdam in December.

Me standing in the "I amsterdam" sign. If sign is the right word.

We're leaving on Tuesday for Florida. I'm feeling kinda sick and panicky. I've told you before I don't like moving, don't like changes. Doesn't help that my allergy meds have failed me. Massive headache - eeeek.

I've been asked how I'm getting it to say Lazy Gal Quilting on my photos. I've explained before how I use Picasa to get my photos ready for blogging. When you choose the Export Picture to Folder option it pops up a thingie and asks what folder to send the new pic to, what size to make it and at the bottom, Picasa3 now has an option to Add a Watermark. Just choose that and what words you want and it will do the rest.

To get my mind of all the things I should be doing right now, here are some links for you:

Lynne at The Patchery Menagerie is making a wonderful alphabet sampler. She's making rapid progress so I don't want to single out a post, but try her January archives. I love reading about her decision making process what to put in, how does it look?, try something else.

Holly posted a fun inspiration for making wordy quilts. Too bad my text messages are all so boring.

Amy a la Mode is posting some wonderful antique family quilts. I love the Double Wedding Ring with orange and the Wagon Wheels baby quilt but there are many more to see.

Jacquie of Tallgrass Prarie Studio is hosting Project Improv to encourage quilters to try exactly that: improvisational quilting. Whee, it's going to be fun to see what everyone comes up with. She also just finished piecing a wonderful top called Bloom.

And last but definitely not least I am so proud and thrilled to see the fabulous Home quilt that Tanya just completed. She started it in my first ever online class and it is just so wonderful.

Ooh, and speaking of finishing quilts, I put the last stitch on my Bed Quilt. woohoo. It's way too big (and too dark in this apartment) to get a good pic of it, but here's one from awhile ago. Eek, look at the date on that post - Bonnie finished her amazing machine quilting job and mailed it to me way back last March and it's taken me this long to get it bound. Bad quilter, bad.

I'm back to the salt mines now - getting prepped for my move. Ya'all take care.

Croque Monsieur

I'm on a diet. Ha ha ha. Let me try that again. Theoretically, I'm on a diet. But temptation is everywhere in Paris and I keep telling myself, well, you won't live here forever you have to treat yourself while you can. sigh.

My sweetie and I had lunch in Montmartre this weekend. I mortified him by taking out the camera so I could show you what exactly a Croque Monsieur sandwich is. We call them Croak Monsters and they're basically a ham sandwhich with cheese on top that gets all bubbly under the broiler. Yes, I know I could have skipped the frites, but that's all part of the experience too, right?

My husband got the Croque Madame, which has an egg on top:

We ate outdoors at a cafe called Le Chinon - very sweet friendly waiters always happy to speak english. I haven't tried anything but the Croque Monster, but I'm sure the rest of the food is excellent as well. It's on the corner of Rue Audran and Rue des Abbesses. I'm probably mangling the spelling of that...

Now to answer a quick Blogger question that Anna raised. I highly recommend that you set your blog up so that your comments come into your email. Do that by going to your SETTINGS, then choose the Comments folder. At the bottom of that page there is a space for Comment Notification Email. Add your email address there.

Your email address won't appear anywhere on your blog by putting it there. It just means that you will receive every comment posted on your blog in your email. Then it's a very simple matter to reply to comments at least from fellow Bloggers or those who've set up a Blogger profile.

Unless they're no-reply. If Bloggers want their email addy to show up, then they need to go into their profile and add it. That's the best way to interact.

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.

Identitiy Theft and Blogging

I just learned some scary information about how easy it is to hack into someone's email or other online accounts. As bloggers (or Facebookers, College Alumni) etc we put a lot of information out into the ether that someone malicious could use against us or our family.

In a Scientific American article How I Stole Someone's Identity, author Herbert H. Thompson writes about just how easy it was to gain access to accounts just by knowing a few items about someone such as their name, hobby, and where they work. EEK. Getting an email address can provide even more info.

You can listen to the author on the Talk of the Nation radio show on September 23rd. Here's a link to get to the show's blog, look for the post entitled It's a Hacker's World Out There. The audio is available there (and on iTunes). Listen to the show and read what they have to say.

For instance, lots of online security measures ask for things like Mother's Maiden Name, Name of First Pet.

I've seen lots of that in people's blogs, along with exact birthdates and places. And even more information than that. And I've seen that information about people's children.

There are some good preventative tips in the article and I loved the suggestion that one caller made: never give out your mother's REAL maiden name as the answer to a security question. Use a made up word from your childhood that is easy to remember but has never ever been on the web. Like Schnorgleplatz or something. Lie on those questions, just make sure you know what the answer is.

Talk about these things with your kids - they need to know too.

Sharing Work and Blogging

Wow, I think I hit a nerve on that last entry about posting photos.

Nancy gave me permission to post pics of her own work on this blog, but I'm just going to show you one of them, since I'm hoping she's going to start a blog herself (woohoo!) This liberated log cabin houses quilt contains little pink squares from Nancy's grandmothers stash. Makes it even more special.

And since I was compiling links for her, figured I might as well share them with ya'all. Blogs are a great way to share your love of quilting.

Here's a video tutorial for beginning a blog on Blogger. There are other tutorials that may help as well, such as adding gadgets.

Here's where you go to start your Blogger blog.

Blogger has great tutorials themselves in their Help Center. Here's one showing how to upload photos.

I highly recommend that you also download Picasa, a free photo tool that helps you to get the image just right AND you can also work with it to upload photos to Blogger. I use Picasa to brighten and crop my photos making me look like I'm a better photographer than I actually am.

Help with Picasa can be found here.

Speaking of photos, here's my darling Lily:



Super-brightened Lily:

Etiquette for Posting Photos

I have a quick question for you all. Is there any established etiquette (or netiquette) about posting photos of other people and other peoples class work on a blog? I know I've seen (and really enjoyed) photos from classes and retreats posted on the net. Have you all asked express permission to post the photos online or just not worried about it?

My response is to say "No Problem - go ahead and post unless someone has asked you NOT to." For instance I can understand if teachers didn't want certain copyrighted classroom material published. Any thoughts on the matter?

My Stash

Victoria asked how I store my fabric. Hmm, do piles of fabric all around my work area count as storage? An aside: look at this, I'm willingly using brown fabric! eeeeek.

My real storage area is back in the guest bedroom. The plastic bins are full of scraps and strings (sorted by fabric into ziplock sandwich bags - I know, surprisingly anally retentive). I use a sheet to block out the light and dust. I used to have a beautiful Egyptian woven bedspread up, but the little cats love to sleep behind the sheet and then there's always combat through it... After a couple of snags I decided to be practical instead of pretty.

When I first moved in I did have a certain amount of organization, but as time goes by, I just cram fabric back in...

My favorite part of making quilts is choosing the fabrics. So generally I don't organize them into too many different piles. I always love going through almost every stack to select what I need. On the left we have "my colors" of blues, greens, pinks, purples. Still love those, but my tastes have changed (oh my).

Then there are/were piles of black and white; solids and hand-dyes; halloween; christmas; patriotic; brights: yellow, orange, lime green; and finally fabrics for backing and sleeves.

So there's that.

I've played with my blog sidebar. You'll notice the gadget for Followers. Fun to see who reads the blog. I think you need a Blogger profile (but not a blog) to play. If you call up my profile and scroll down you'll see a list of blogs I Follow. Believe me, that's not all of them.

Next, Bonnie figured out how we can promote Gwen Marston's new book. For you Blogger users, grab a pic of the cover (or take one yourself!) and save it to your computer. Then go to your LAYOUT, ADD a GADGET, pick the PICTURE gadget. Add the image for the cover. There's a link option there, so add Gwen's homepage. There's a space called CAPTION where you can add your own words to describe how wonderful the book is or how much you're looking forward to receiving it... I suspect there's something similar for bloggers who use other platforms.

It's exciting to see a post from someone who's already gotten their copy . For instance, Woolywoman started to work on a Gwen inspired quilt.

I was excited to get a comment from Lynn of The Little Red Hen. She just got back from her tenth (or should that be eleventh?) Beaver Island Quilt Retreat with Gwen. Wow, jealous. She'll be posting pics from the retreat in a few days, which I'm really looking forward to seeing. I have to live vicariously through you all. Anyway, Lynn said that Gwen mentioned my blog during the retreat. Wooohoo!

If any BIQR attendees are reading this, I'd love to hear from you. Do you have a place on the web for us to see the pics you took? If you'd like to email me pics, with your permission I'll post them in this blog so that you can share them that way.

Ooooh, there's sunshine out there in the world, I gotta get a move on. Ya'll take care.

How I Blogger Photos

Whoops, I accidentally deleted this pic from yesterday's post. D'oh.

This is how I get my photos onto Blogger.

First I edit my photos on Picasa, one of the best tools ever. It's free and I highly recommend it.

Next, I go to File (uppermost left corner) and choose the option "Export picture to folder." It's at that point I can choose what size to make the pic. I almost always go with the 640 pixel option, but I go bigger with complicated pics I want to really emphasize. Pay attention to the location of the folder that you are sending the pics to.

HINT: if you have many photos, name them the same and follow with a number, such as: Khorsabad 1, Khorsabad 2, Khorsabad 3 - it will make uploading them in a specific order much easier.

Create a Blogger post. On the row that has the font options, go almost over all the way to the right side. See the pretty picture of a mountain scene? Click it and you'll get the Blogger Upload Image box. In the upper left corner it says "Add an Image From Your Computer" - choose the browse option and go find the folder where you exported your pics to from Picasa.

Doubleclick on the name of the photo you want and choose your layout. I always put my photos in the Center, that way I don't get text doing weird wraparound things. For image size I generally leave it on Large. Click Upload Image and it will get sent to your blog entry.

Now this Upload Image function is quirky. It works in reverse order. So for complicated posts I write down the list of the pics I want in the proper order. And then I load them starting from the bottom of the list.

Load photos one of a time in this reverse order and you can load as many pics as you want.

Not to get confusing, but there is a quicker option. After you've selected one photo, it has the option of adding another photo. I don't recommend doing more than four at a time because the capacity is limited. These photos will go in the order that you select. BUT if you then choose to do another batch, they will go on top of this one, so you really have to pay attention to what you are doing if you want them in a certain order.

Also check out Blogger's photo help.

I hope all of this didn't confuse you further. Ask questions and I will try to clarify. There are plenty of other ways to upload photos, but this is how I do it.