Suzanne Earley

Moving, an update

Rearranging things

Mark and I have been sleeping in our new bedroom for about a week now.   All of the furniture is now in place and I finally finished moving my clothes up yesterday.  We’ll still be using the master bedroom bathroom, so I’m going to have to get used to having my clothes on a different floor, possibly even planning ahead enough to bring clothes down with me to the bathroom.  Luckily, I have a nice robe, so I won’t be running around naked.

The bedroom is in desperate need of things on the wall, a situation that will be remedied as we bring things home from the shop. Two main pluses for our new bedroom:  we aren’t directly on top of the furnace anymore:  when it kicks on we can barely hear it!  And the second is a plus now, but will be a minus this summer:  the room is SO much warmer, I’m able to sleep with fewer clothes on.  (Some nights I needed a sweatshirt on top of my flannel pjs.  Now I’m down to just the flannel, and could probably go with shorts and a t-shirt.)

I’m working on finding homes for all of my stuff in the new studio, a process that will take a sharp right turn in the next few weeks as I fill it up with everything from downtown.  I’m already trying to mentally prepare for a new way of operating:  a  place for everything, and everything in it’s place.  Every square inch is going to be in use, and it’s going to be interesting…

Shop Update

Apologies to those of you who have seen this either in the MQResource forums, or will be getting an e-mail newsletter…

The fabric at the shop is looking much thinner, but the yarn.  I’d still like to get rid of some more yarn, so, I’ve now got it all marked down by 40%, to maybe tempt some more shoppers.  I wish I had more sock yarn for all of you sock knitters, but one of the main things I have is 51 colors of Cascade 220 wool.  It’s great for felting, and felted bags are a great beginner’s project.  I also have a bunch of other stuff, and at 40% off…maybe I can get rid of some more of it.  I can only knit so much…

The fabric is all now marked down to 40% off as well, and I’ve listed bundles of fat quarters and fat 8ths in various combinations at crazy low prices, check them out if your stash could use some enhancement.

Most of the quilting and sewing patterns and books are marked down by 20% as well as some of the notions that I carry.

In Other News

I’m not sure I’m going to make it with the sock.  I’ve run completely out of steam.  I’ll keep going, and maybe I can pull out a miracle.

Lastly:  I actually turned on a sewing machine for the first time in something like 2 weeks.  Crazy.

Picture me banging my head on the wall

Since announcing the sale at my shop, I have sold a ton of fabric.

Seriously. A ton.

But hardly any yarn, and I just haven’t been able to understand.  I thought it was a pretty good deal, but…maybe it wasn’t a good enough deal.

Well, tonight, I had an idea in my head and I wanted to check on a yarn color, so I toodled off to the online shop to look at what I have.

And there was only like 2 yarns in that category.  Now, I’m pretty sure there are more yarns in that category in the shop, because I stare at it every time I’m in the shop, so I decided to poke around the rest of the yarn section to see if maybe the yarn I was looking for was misclassified.

There was barely any yarn in ANY category.  Seriously.

Color me mystified.

So, I went to poke around the admin side of hte shopping cart.  Yup, there was all of the yarn in the list…why wasn’t it showing up in the shop????

*Bad words*

Somehow, nearly all of the yarn had gotten marked as having Inventory Tracked, but the product quantity was…a big fat zero.

*Bad words*

This is not something where Suzanne accidentally checked a checkbox — we’re talking over 150 individual products.  I suspect I know when it happened, but I can’t explain exactly WHY.  Exactly why or how doesn’t really matter, but oh heavens.

Here I sit, imagining the people who have clicked through from Ravelry, or from the Google ad, or from the sale notification, wondering why I’m touting the yarn I sell, when it didn’t appear that I actually sell any yarn besides a few skeins of Opal sock yarn and Black Cascade 220.

*Bad words*

So!  If you are a knitter, or know a knitter, or want to just look at some pretty colors of yarn, guess what!  The yarn is now showing on my site!  And it’s 30% off!

Yarn at Knots & Bolts

Sports themed window display

Two weekends ago was the Winding Stairs Festival here in Traer, and the theme was Tailgate on 2nd Street.

I decided to go with more of a sports-themed window display, rather than tailgating, and this is what we came up with:

I will take credit only for the quilts, and maybe a few suggestions, tweaking the display:  the boys were in charge of these windows.  They hauled in their sports stuff, and were the ones that thought of making sure they had lots of sports represented, and they did the arranging of the items.

They also did quite a bit of work for me in the shop prior the Festival — and I’m going to miss their help when they go back to school.

Which is TOMORROW.  Where did summer go????  It just barely got here…

I live to serve

My sister called me this morning to tell me I needed to post something on my blog.

I haven’t much felt like blogging lately, but since both she AND my mother asked today, I thought I’d comply.

First up are the pictures from this week’s photography lessons.  It’s about aperture and depth of field.    If you know more about photography than I do, please don’t laugh if I explain this stuff wrong.

I used my new 50mm f/1.7 lens, and mounted the camera on my tripod.  I also had to try to figure out how to shift my focal point so that it actually focused on the doll.

First is with a wide open aperture of f/1.7.    That meant a short depth of field, with only the doll in focus, and you can’t even tell what’s in the background.  Isn’t it cool how blurry it is?  That effect is called BOKEH.  Bizarre word.  Some people pronounce it bo-kay and some people say bo-kuh.

Of course, all of YOU know what that is in the background because you’ve only seen a million pictures of it already.

The next picture is with a closed aperature of f/22.  This is where the tripod was so important:  to compensate for the low light and the closed aperture, the camera used a much longer shutter speed.  Without the tripod the whole picture was blurry because I couldn’t hold the camera still enough.  In fact, I even used the timer so that after I pushed the button and let go, the camera waited about 2 seconds before it took the picture.

Longer depth of field, more of the picture is in focus.  Much less interesting picture, too.

I was taking pictures last night and tried to get one of Mark.

That’s great, dear.  Thanks.

Oh, my sister also told me that I needed to add back in the abillity to add posts to social networking sites, so, I did.  I know you’ve been missing the opportunity to Digg me, so, go forth and Digg.  Or Stumble.  Or Facebook.  Or whatever.

Or not.

Holy Yardage, Batman

I have cut and shipped something like a 80 bazillion yards of fabric over the last few days.

And I’m feeling every yard of it in muscles I didn’t know I had.

Not that I’m complaining, it’s wonderful to clean some bolts off and get ready to welcome some new stuff later this week.

And I am so not complaining about the weather:  it might be cold, but at least we didn’t get snowed in like the East Coast.  Sorry guys!

I think I’m going to try to get caught up on my daily photos, I’m a week behind in editing and posting.  I can’t believe it is MARCH already.

TTFN-

Suzanne

No more bison

Or buffalo either.

How about a shop window, instead?

I’m finding it hard to get good pictures of the windows, perhaps I’m not trying the right time of day?

Plus, the dark red quilt hanging in the background does not show well at all, it’s just too dark, and the reflections in the window make it even harder to see.

Oh well, it’s red, and that was the idea for the February window.  As you can see.

For some previous posts, with much better pictures, you can go here: red wholecloth.

That carpet

The one thing I like the LEAST about my new studio is that carpet.  My first quilting machine started on carpet, then I moved to painted concrete, then to hardwood floors, and now back to carpet.  I hate it.  But then, I’m not a big fan of carpet, period, so I might be biased.

For one thing, dropped pins are likely to get themselves shoved into the pile of that Berber.

For another thing, this particular carpet is in desperate need of a really good cleaning.  Yuck.

It’s kind of fun to take and then post pictures of my surroundings that I haven’t “staged.”

Do you ever “snoop” at pictures that people have posted, wondering about the “stuff” that they left in the frame?

Well, here you go.  Here’s the scoop on my stuff:

The quilt has since had it’s borders added.  Will is going to quilt this one for the Kids Can Quilt category at the Machine Quilter’s Exposition in New Hampshire.  Joe’s quilt is almost pieced.  These are the two quilts I’ve mentioned in previous e-mails.

The quilt is one of my own design.  I think this is my third version of it.  The pattern is almost written.  Pretty soon I’m going to be looking for pattern testers for a number of different patterns.  If I don’t keep getting sidetracked by a million other things.

(Did you notice MY handwriting in the picture?)

Mary Jo asked about the quilt you could see in the background of yesterday’s picture.  That one is a quilt that my friend Miki designed for me when I wrote my 2nd machine quilting book.  It’s called Gotcha Covered (the link takes you to Knots & Bolts).  The quilt on the pattern cover looks totally different.  *MY* version of the quilt is on the front cover of my book.

And somewhere, I have a picture that shows more of it…but where?

Well, this shows more of it, but you have to ignore the extra “stuff” in this picture:

(Though they are awfully cute stuff.  Anybody want them?  You can have them.  Two for the price of one, today only.)

TTFN-

Yummy

I thought this yarn would be here tomorrow, but whoopee!  The UPS man came today!

This isn’t even all of it, bunches of it is already priced and put away.  I’m sitting down to cast on a new project** for a few minutes before I get back to it.  This is not waht I’d planned for today, but sometimes we have to just roll with it.

TTFN-

Suzanne

**I HAVE TO.  It’s a store sample.  <——-my story, I’m sticking to it.

Ten minutes of fame

I mentioned in a previous post that I had done a radio interview, and I promised to come back and talk about that…

My county has an economic development group that presents recognition awards each year in a number of categories.  I was nominated (well, Knots & Bolts…) in the Small Business Development category.  Part of the honor of being nominated is the simple fact of some free publicity, including a newspaper article (or two?) and….a radio interview!

Shortly before we started the interview the host asked if I had ever been on the radio before.  At the time I said no, but I’ve since remembered that waaaay back, when I was a senior high school I was in the school musical (Once Upon a Mattress, I was Lady Larkin.  The lady-in-waiting that got knocked up…).  I don’t remember all of the details, but some of the people in the show got to be on the radio for some pre-show publicity.

I think.  We might have been on the radio for publicity for something else though, now that I think about it.

I digress.  (I do that a lot…)

I was told to be there at 8:30, my interview was at 8:45.  (I digress again:  most days I don’t even shower until 9, so this was a huge thing for me to have to do…).

When I got there, the host asked me to wait a few minutes and then:  at 8:35 we went ahead and did the interview.  Which was fine.  I think it went well, she was very personable and we just chatted like no one else was listening.  I guess I can only assume that they were.

Unfortunately, it meant that I was done by 8:45, which was the time when my dear darling husband tuned in.  He had not driven that day, but one of his coworkers lent him his keys, so he could go sit in a car in the parking lot and listen to me.  Drat.

So, what did we talk about?

Well, we chatted about Knots & Bolts, and how and why I chose to open it.  We talked a bit about how I got started quilting (and knitting…), and about the online marketing techniques I’ve employed to support the shop.  It was mostly based on a questionnaire I had filled out last fall, so none of it was really a surprise.

Of course, as soon as I walked out the door I thought of about 10 different things I wished I had said.

One of the question she asked:  What was your biggest challenge?

I told her, and I’ll tell all of you:  the biggest challenge has been, and continues to be, staying POSITIVE even as we are continually buffeted by such bad economic news.  Overall, things are going well, but some days are awfully darned quiet.  Thankfully, my interests are pretty diversified, so even if I don’t have a single retail sale on a certain day, I will have gotten lots of quilting done, or maybe taken care of some wholesale book orders.

Anyway, that’s what that was all about.

I still owe you a post on the NEW quilts I cut out and have been working on, but I think that 3 posts is probably more than enough from me.

TTFN-

p.s. the awards banquet is the 24th of February.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  My competition is a photography studio, and another small fabric shop/longarm quilter.