Sunday, March 18, 2012

weekend sewing and blog tweaking

Oakshott diamonds quilt wip

I'm suffering from a bit of insomnia lately, leaving me lots of extra time in the really, really early morning hours to think of things I want to do-- baby projects, home improvements, spring cleaning, etc. The list goes on and on. But in the meantime, I have bee blocks to catch up on and I don't want to stop playing with my new Oakshott shot cottons, paired with some neutral-ish fabrics from my stash.

Oakshott quilt in progress

I cut out my fabrics using Tri Recs templates. Once I calculated that I'd need 196 triangles and 392 half rectangles, I started to freak out a little. I'm not patient with cutting. But it wasn't that bad! And now I've pieced quite a few blocks. Things are coming together nicely and I'm enjoying the process. Phew. The Oakshotts are a dream to work with.

Oakshott diamonds quilt wip

One thing I'm going to be slowly tweaking over the next couple of weeks is my blog design. I'm trying to clean things up, change out graphics, and maybe add some extra pages. I wasn't very good at organizing and tagging when I first started blogging, and I'd like to make it easier for readers to find information. I started with a new blog header for spring that has some of my favorite quilts.


Also, a very kind reader emailed recently and informed me that the photos in my posts are so big that they're crashing her browser! I started linking my photos from flickr a couple of months ago because I was having issues with fuzzy resolution. At the same time, I stopped using picasa for editing and was just pretty much uploading photos as is from my camera, then tweaking them in Picnik. The sizes were huge. HUGE. Like 6MG per photo. Ack. I just assumed that they got downsized when they uploaded to flickr, but that was very wrong! Anyway, I'm fixing that. I'll be editing all photos and saving them for the web in Photoshop Elements before I upload them. Everything should load much more smoothly from this point on. If my blog has been crashing your browser, I apologize.

16 comments:

Nicky said...

Love what you are doing with the Oakshott!

Aunt Marti said...

Krista, I so appreciate you re-sizing your photos. The big ones don't crash my server but they make the load really slow! My son told me to resize photos so the largest side is 1000 (usually turns out 1000 by 750).

Kadybug said...

Beautiful! I am loving your new quilt and header. I hear you on the insomnia! Ugh!

Svetlana said...

Love your Oakshott project. And your new header looks very nice, springy, and pretty.

Julierose said...

I love your new header--really neat. Julierose

beth said...

the header looks great. i haven't a clue how to change mine!

Amy Friend said...

LOVE the new header Krista! Very nice! I hope you can get some sleep soon. Insomnia is the pits.

Heidi Grohs said...

Love your header! I need to take a look at my photos..they are probably HUGE too! ;)!

randi--i have to say said...

oh, i am loving the quilt so far! and you came up with a great header!

Anna said...

it's amazing krista, you are so talented. I love those colors. and love your new header.

Cathy Tomm said...

Glad to hear you will be down sizing your photo size. When my internet is slow I can not visit your site as it take to long to load. I have trouble with a few others.

Lucia said...

Krista,

You don't have to downsize your photos before you import them into Flickr. In fact, I think it's better to keep them since for me Flickr is one way that I am backing up my photos.

In order to have web-friendly photos show up on your site, you just need to pick the right size to use. When you are on a specific photo's flickr page, click on "share" above the photo. Then from there select, "grab the HTML/BB code". From that, you can pick what size of the photo you want to use (small, medium, large, etc.). I tend to use the medium 640 choice. I copy & paste the code displayed into my blog post (HTML version of it) and that's all. The photo in the blog post will link to the flickr photo.

Hope that helps!

felicity said...

Love the new header! What program did you use to create it? I'm thinking about an update of my own...

Sarah said...

Oh my!! Absolutely love this design, the contrasts!! Probably not for a novice to try :) - but it's sooo pretty...

Erin M. said...

I was having problems with your photos as well. I had just subscribed to your blog in the last month on google reader, but then unsubscribed because of the 15 min wait it was giving me. Glad to hear that I can subscribe again because I like what I see. Keep up the good work.

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