Tempus fugit, indeed.

Greetings! Yes, this blog has been dormant. BUT! I’m still quite active on Twitter and Facebook, both as Joelle and as sparkle j designs, so fear not! If you’ve received a business card from me in the last few weeks at Temple Con, Arisia, etc., please know that I am alive and well on the internet despite the sparse postings here.

Greetings! And welcome to what has become the redirecting hub of sparkle j designs!

The shop is ready for your Cunning Jayne hat orders, and I’m restocking consignment shops as fast as I can. I hope to have additional stock to list in the Etsy shop if you’re not lucky enough to buy my wares in person.

If you’re snowed in along with the rest of the East Coast USA, I hope you’re staying warm and safe. Cheers!

Spring Anew!

Happy March, everyone!

Since last Spring, I’ve been on a very crafty adventure. I’m now building a wee business for myself and doing sewing work by contract. (Ahem, do you need something sewn? I may know someone who can help!) It’s been quite an adjustment. Working from home has it’s ups and downs, of course. It turns out I wasn’t so good at time management at first; not without the usual 9-5 routine, anyway. I’m still not tremendously good at it, but I am getting better. The commute is just right, though.

Building the business bit by bit has made me feel more like an adult than anything else I’ve ever done. Taxes, and accounting, and all the organization required. It makes my head spin a bit, and sometimes I’m not really quite sure what I’ve gotten myself in to.

I still sell my wares on Etsy, but I’ve also started consigning at TL6 The Gallery in New Bedford, MA, and selling at conventions (where my goods are sold by other vendors). This summer I plan to vend at fairs and craft shows as my own entity. Thrilling, and a bit terrifying. I’ve set a goal of two events. I have yet to actually sign up for them, but I will as soon as I have more photographs of my work. Many shows are juried and I don’t have quite enough to show just yet. I spend most of my sewing time on contract work to pay the bills, but I’m working on building stock in every other waking moment.

To launch the new era of sparkle j designs, I’ve had the blog spruced up a bit. What do you think? I plan to have a patterns and tutorials section. Keep an eye out for clothing alteration tips, toys and oddments, and lots of other fun things.

Here’s to a new beginning! Cheers!

“But I don’t like spam!”

My apologies to anyone who may have found this blah blah blahg via le Tour de Fleece and who may have tried to leave a comment; I had to delete hundreds upon hundreds of spam comments due to a recent influx of the little devils, and I may have accidentally deleted a real comment. So, if you’ve posted and don’t see your comment, please feel free to post again.

sparkle j dot com is 5! Sort of.

In the summer of 2000 I decided to have my own website. I used some cheesy, annoying template from earthlink and put up some goofy photos, crafty ideas, and a few “essays” on various topics that amused me. In this state it sat with little or no updating for three years until the winter of 2002 when I registered sparklej dot com. It stayed pretty dormant until March 2003 when I finally built some structure and put up some content. Hooray for basic html tutorials and notepad! I started a blah blah blahg and in April I found some bloggish software for to keep track of archives and comments and what not. Then a couple of years (?) later that broke (and crashed the whole site), and I went back to hand-coding in 2005… I think. Here my memory is a bit fuzzy. After that got way too tedious for words, I installed Word Press. This was 2006, judging by the archives list on the side bar over there. I uploaded some old posts from 2003, but I never got around to uploading all the other ones. Those are still on the old hard drive waiting for me to do something with them.

I’m not exactly sure what I want to do with them, or any of the old archives, but I think it’ll involve printing out most of them to keep for posterity. The diaries and letters of manuscript collections are always the most fun. Well, maybe not always, but usually. The point is that they exist and you can get a good sense of the personality of the people in question when you read their own account of their lives. If my computer or server goes kaput then I’ve pretty much lost the last several years of my life. Not the end of the world, no, but it would be a sad loss for me, even if most of my entries are about me being stressed out with all the stuff I have to do. Especially the posts from the end of every semester. Annoying or not, it’s my own account of my life, and it’s important to me. And no, I don’t expect my personal papers to be of any use to any historical collection, I’m just saying that having personal accounts are important. And if I have children, and if they have children, then someone somewhere down the line might be interested to know what I was like.

I didn’t actually intend for this to be a post about my potential posterity, but there you go.

If you can read this, the site’s working

Been having some trouble lately. Don’t really know what’s happening. Some sort of error about the database being out of date, yet, when I update it, it only works for a few minutes, then I have to update it again. Weird.

It was working fine for a while today, so I decided to try to update the template, but then it broke again. So, yeah, if you can read this, then nothing’s wrong now, I suppose. (Though stay tuned as I try to find a lovely autumn colored theme template.)

MJ slippers again

I just noticed that my non-blah, blah, blahg pages are not linked on the main page. The template I installed aeons ago does not include those pages. Hmm. I’ll have to go into the files and put that in. But I’m lazy, and this is easier for the time being:

Here is a link to the page that has a link to the PDF of the pattern.

Woo! My first pattern actually written down!

Woah! The hell?

Um, if you’re coming to this site and wondering what the hell is up with the weird format and what not, or if things aren’t working right, and stuff… Um, yeah, I have no idea how to fix it.

It seems Word Press is resetting itself to defaults, and sometimes I can’t access pages (no permission, it says) and sometimes I can. Sometimes it says my database is out of date and needs to be upgraded (followed their links to do so, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t). Keeps going back and forth between working and not working.

Anyway, I’m on it. Or I will be on it tomorrow. Until then…

Comment spam

I’m still trying to figure out how to manage my comment spam. I have some software/plug-in thingie that I’m using, but it only seems to work in fits and starts. I had comments shut off for a while, just to see what would happen, but I could only change the comment settings for new posts, and not for old ones. So, the hundreds of posts prior to my having changed the comment settings were still getting a ton of comment spam. I decided it wasn’t worth having comments turned off. So, they’re back on, and I’ll just sift through the moderation queue to find the genuine comments.

The settings allow previously approved commenters to comment without having to be moderated, but any new commenters must be approved by me before the comment appears on the site. I, however, forgot that I turned comments back on the other day, and have since been deleting all comments in the moderation queue, thinking they were spam (without actually taking a look at their contents).

I hope I haven’t inadvertantly deleted real comments. Oops. If you notice a comment you’ve left that I have deleted, please post it again.

No comment

I keep getting comment spam (200 per day), but I can’t seem to do a blanket change on past posts to make them closed to further comments. I can make it so that all future posts are closed to commenting, but it seems I have to change each past one individually. I don’t have that kind of time, really. It’s just getting so annoying having to sift through each batch of comments to find the two that are actually my friends, and not someone trying to sell me penis pills.

I also keep getting hundreds of bounceback emails each day, which means that my address has been captured and is being used for spamming purposes. This is really annoying. 

If anyone has any advice, could you please email me? I’d appreciate it. And I’m not getting rid of my address. Why should I change my name, when they’re the ones who suck?

Grr.

old skool

I’m importing the archives into WordPress. It’s tedious, but I want all the content in one place (for reals, it’s crazy scattered now). It’d be easier to import if it were automated, but I can’t considering, some of them are still in Grey Matter form, others are in text files, and still others are in Word. It’s insane. But, it’s giving me something to do while I aviod doing research for my paper. I’ve done enough for now, and will start reading stuff on Monday, so there.

[edit to add] for some reason, WP isn’t allowing me to add anymore entries right now. It keeps giving me the same error message. I’m not doing anything different from what I had already been doing, but now it won’t work. Oh, well. I’ll try to figure it out later.

[another edit to add] Apparently, it’s only having a problem with one post. Oh, and I’m including comments directly in the old posts. I’m not going to do any crazy formatting or anything. This is already tedious enough, thank you very much.

[yet another edit] 2003 is done. Woo-hah!