"Things I Want To Keep Track Of"

Since returning to this blog after a number of years, I've been amazed at what I'm discovering. Because I use this blog as a journal, I find I have a lot of informative posts on things I've studied and what I've experimented with. It's information I want to refer to, but as is the way of the internet, good information gets pushed to the background by new material, until it's either lost or forgotten. For example, my crackle study series. I find myself referring to these posts every time I weave crackle. But now, I have to dig around to find them. I have to hunt through the months and years of my blog archive. Using labels helps, but sometimes it means a lot of posts to scroll through. My "Related Posts" at the end of most blog posts helps too, as long as I get them all updated (which doesn't always happen). 

I've been thinking about a way to organize information, so that I can find it again more easily. What I've come up with is to make a link list in my sidebar. To start, I'm calling it "Things I Want To Keep Track Of," and I've made a beginning. I've created some index pages for this link list which list the links to the relevant blog posts, maybe with an introduction, a photo, and a few notes. 

I'm still going through and organizing posts, so this is a work in progress. Hopefully, it will be an ongoing work in progress. I hope I'm always studying something new and adding to this list for years to come.

"Things I Want To Keep Track Of"

 © June 2024 by Leigh at Leigh's Fiber Journal

Sad State of Affairs

I've taken my fiber journal temporarily offline. It seems that a weaving teacher helped herself to some of my images without asking and has been using them in her workshops. But the internet makes for a small world, doesn't it?

I've always been more than willing to share with anyone who has the courtesy to ask, but taking without asking is not just discourteous, it's disrespectful. I know it may be a surprise to many folks, but just because something is on the internet doesn't mean it's free for the taking. It has copyright protection.  Unless it is specifically stated to be public domain or has been granted a Creative Commons Copyright license, everything on the internet belongs to somebody. That means that without the explicit permission of the copyright holder, the use thereof is legally considered theft.

I'm not that hard to get ahold of. "View my complete profile" is easily visible on my right sidebar. My email address is on my profile page and I'm contacted that way regularly. It is current and still in use. Failing that, a comment on the blog seeking to ask a question could be a last measure. Just because a blog hasn't been updated in awhile doesn't mean the blog owner doesn't still get notifications and comments.

As it stands now, this teacher was given an alternate way to contact me. I'm going to wait and see if she has the integrity to do so. 

How To Watermark Photos With GIMP

By Leigh

Originally this was supposed to be a weaving post. But then I remembered that I promised to tell Trek how I put watermarks on my photos with the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). Being a visual person, I realized that I could do this easier with photos, hence a post appeared!

Including copyright information on your photos helps identify you as the owner. True, a copyright or watermark can be cropped off, or erased by someone with some skill with a photo editor. However, many thieves steal entire posts, photos and all. In these cases the copyright is left in tact and may be the only way to trace your material back to you. I learned this when I had my own blog content stolen.

The photo I'm using is what I had on the loom exactly one year ago. It is an advancing twill sampler, and will make a good example for this tutorial.

My instructions use the Linux version of GIMP, but you should be able to figure it out in the Win or Mac versions as well.

Simplest Way to Watermark a Photo

First open the photo in the GIMP. You can click on any photo in this post to enlarge it for a better view.

From the GIMP tool box, open the layers dialog box (file > dialogs > layers)

Select the text tool and click on your photo in the approximate spot you want your text to be.

Type your copyright message in the text box, don't close (yet).

In the GIMP tool box, click on the color bar (black by default) and a text color box will open.

Change color to white. If white isn't handy on your palette, type "ffffff" (6 f's) in the HTML notation box. (ffffff is the html code for the color white.) Click OK.

If you want, adjust size of font on the GIMP tool box.

You can change the font if you want, too.

Move the text box if you need to, by clicking the move icon in the GIMP tool box. The trick here is the cursor symbol when you hover over the text box. If it shows the move icon (big blue plus sign) and the hand, the entire photo will move. To move text box only, you have to get the cursor in a spot where only the move icon shows. Go to edit > undo, to correct move errors.

If you need to work with the text again, double click it to open the text editor again.

Now click on your layers dialog box.

Make sure your text layer is highlighted, and move the opacity slider until you get the look you want. Your photo will preview the changes for you.

When you're satisfied, save your image and it's ready to upload to your blog or website.

Getting a Little Fancier

You can also bump the image out to give it a 3-dimensional look. To do that follow all the steps above, but do the following before you save it.

First make sure that your text is selected in your layers dialog box.

Find the "Filters" menu at the top of your photo. Select Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur

Change the numbers to 0.5 for both. You can play with these and see if you like different numbers better. When you're satisfied with the preview, click OK.

Next, go to Filters > Maps > Bump Maps

Different tutorials suggest different numbers here, but I just use the default settings. Do make sure that the offsets (both X and Y) are zero, or our watermark will be off! Click OK

That's it! Anything you don't like can be undone (Edit > Undo). Of redone (Edit > Redo). Save your photo and it's ready to upload to the Internet.

Questions? Comments? Other suggestions? Let's hear 'em!

Posted 7 Jan. 2009 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Related Posts:
Stolen Content
Update on Stolen Content (& a little more info)
A Note About Watermarks

Warm Holiday Wishes For My Readers

By Leigh

I have to admit that I didn't get many fibery things done over the weekend. No knitting progress on my Shetland Sampler Cardigan. On the weaving front though, I did start to measure a new warp to replace the yucky one I cut off my loom .

Actually, the entire week ahead looks to be busy with holiday traditions and their preparations. I may not get much blogging done.

Our holiday tradition in December is Christmas, though we've made some changes this year. We went "green" with our Christmas tree (see Catzee's report on that right here.) Some things are long outgrown (see Rascal's report on one of those things here.)

We've also declined to get caught up in the shopping frenzy. Christmas as a retail holiday just doesn't cut if for us. This year we put a spending limit of $5 per gift. Rather, we choose to celebrate Christmas as a birthday, with the focus on the gift that can't be bought.

So, at this time of reflection as the year draws to a close, I want to thank you, all my readers, for visiting and commenting. You are such an encouragement to me. And I want to wish you the very best of whatever holiday and tradition you choose to celebrate. Or not celebrate.

And last but not least, Catzee and Rascal want to share their holiday greetings with you. Just click on their pictures below.

Clickety on me!

Me too.

© 22 Dec. 2008 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

SSC Shoulders

By Leigh

Progress!

Front and sleeve steeks are sewed and cut, and the shoulder seams are finished.

I used the "knit and bind-off technique"on the shoulders

Front and back of shoulder are placed on needles one size smaller than those used for body of knitting. Using a needle of the larger size, the front and back shoulder stitches are knitted together. Right needle through both, then knit together.










After two stitches, bind off one and continue until seam is complete.

Someone else can probably explain that better than I, but hopefully you get the idea.






Here's a view of the inside of the finished shoulder seam....

And here's what it looks like from the outside.....

I didn't plan it to look this way, but I'm not dissatisfied. At least both shoulders turned out the same!

One thing I didn't do was shoulder shaping, as I don't have a clue of how to do that in the round.

© 19 Dec. 2008 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Related Posts:
Sewing & Cutting the Steeks
Shetland Sampler Cardigan Complete!

A Note About Watermarks

By Leigh

Thank you to everyone who responded to my question in this post about the watermark on my photo. Personally, I don't like them. I find them annoyingly distracting, so it was interesting to me that some of you never really noticed it.

I had an interesting chat with Dorothy about that photo, and she showed me how easy it is to obliterate a watermark from a photo. Mine was fairly small, but with some skill and a clone tool, even a large one could be removed. As she said in the comments, "(The) best way to protect pictures is keep them off the internet." However, that would defeat the purpose of a fiber and textile blog!

If I had my own website I might be concerned about another type of photo theft called "hotlinking" or "inline linking." This is when someone steals a photo by linking directly to it's original location from their website. The image shows up on their site, but it uses the bandwidth of the original website (bandwidth theft), which is paid for by the owner of the photo! You can read more about this here. Any sort of watermark would be helpful in this case, as the photo is never tampered with by the thief.

My personal experience however has been having entire posts (including photos) taken by a scraping website (post about my experience here.) Posts and photos from dozens of other blogs had been stolen and reposted there too, some with copyright notices and watermarks still intact. Unfortunately scraping is very common. It is also somewhat indiscriminate, as it is based on keywords rather than actual content.

Because scrapers essentially just copy and paste entire posts and articles, these are rarely edited to disguise the actual author. For that reason I've taken measures to not only let readers know that my posts are copyrighted, but to always include links back to myself so they know where the posts came from. For this same reason I plan to leave a small, unobtrusive watermark on my pix. If the post is scraped, then the watermarks will be another clue back to me. If someone really wants to steal individual photos they will crop out, or clone over the watermark regardless of its size or prominence.

There are no real answers to this type of problem. I want to take measures, but one thing I don't want to do is to have so many security checks as to take the joy out of blogging!

So there you have it. I appreciate everyone's honest feedback. You all are the best!

Posted 4 Oct. 2008 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Related Posts:
Stolen Content
Update on Stolen Content (& a little more info)

Weaving: What's Next?

By Leigh

When I first started this blog, I had a couple of goals in mind: to keep a record of my fiber and textile activities, and to begin a serious exploration of weaving. This coincided with having my youngest child leave home to join his sister at university, giving me more free time than I had enjoyed before.

My record keeping has been fairly consistent though my projects are somewhat sporadic: weaving, spinning, knitting, dyeing, plus a few other fiber activities, as well as occasional miscellaneous content. The biggest problem I've had has been finding posts again, once they've become buried under the ever-increasing pile of more recent entries. Blogger's addition of labels has been helpful here, but if you've clicked on any of the links in the above list, you have discovered that I use Delicious.com to try to organize my posts. This is also what I used to create a blog index in my sidebar.

In regards to weaving, I had previously worked my way through some plain weave, twills, and overshot, and had taken a class on double weave. In starting this blog, my plan was to work my way through Deb Chandler's Learning to Weave, and experiment with structures and effects I hadn't yet tried. I had a lot of fun exploring Log Cabin, but after that I diverged from Chandler. Why? Because Log Cabin seemed to lead naturally to Shadow Weave.

Next I participated in several Online Guild weaving workshops, including lace weaves, Huck, and Summer & Winter.

When I got my Glimakra 8-shaft countermarche loom, I started my 8-shaft adventure by returning to something I understood, twill. With that I did a series of afghans, enjoying with wider width of my new loom. I finished these in time to take another Online Guild workshop, Advancing Twills.

I started experimenting with M's & O's thanks to the WNCF/HG's Winter Project. This led to a self study on Multiple Tabby Weaves. Most recently, I've revisited waffle weave for a towel exchange within the same group. All that's left with that is to cut and hem the towels.

So what's next? I could continue exploring weave structures I haven't tried yet, but at this point in time I feel a need to dig deeper. Being a member of Complex Weavers offers that, through one of it's many study groups. Since Summer & Winter interested me the most so far, I have recently signed up for the Tied Weaves Study Group. Summer & Winter is a 2-tie unit weave, so this study group will allow me the opportunity to continue exploring not only S&W, but related weaves as well.

So that's the plan. The study group officially starts in October. Not sure what I'll do on the loom in the meantime, but I doubt it will sit idle until then.

© 4 Sept. 2008 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Update on Stolen Content (& a little more info)

By Leigh

Yesterday I checked on the status of my stolen blog posts. This is what I saw:


What a relief. Since mailing a formal complaint to the site host, I have been checking the site every day.

Prior to filing that complaint, I had contacted the site's owner. Even though they never replied, after several days I found that "View text" links had been added at the bottom of all the stolen posts:

What this did, was to link back to my original post, though you wouldn't know that from the name of the link. The "Add Favorite" linked back to the offender's home page, while "Close" did nothing.

This type of link back is a popular scraping technique, in hopes that the author of the original content will think, "Oh well. At least they linked back to me. Maybe I'll get some traffic out of it." However, it doesn't give proper credit in regards to authorship. Sometimes they will use the author's name as the link back. Whether or not this is acceptable is up to the original author.

If you own the content you have the right to choose if and how it is used. Creative Commons has several licensing options, whereby you can choose how you want to allow your work to be shared. I've looked these over, but still, I would like to be asked first, especially considering I don't know where my content might end up. For example, I don't want my posts or photos being used on a site which sells viagra or promotes adult only content. Actually, my preference is that they just say that the content exists and give a link to it.

Even though the site which used my posts has been suspended, I was advised by the host that

If a Counter DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is submitted, the site will be reactivated & it will be up to the two parties to figure this out.

In other words, if the thief can provide "documentation" that the content was originally theirs, then I have to find another course of action.

When I first discovered the splog, I spent a lot of time tracking down and contacting some of the others whose content had been stolen. Some of these were interested in doing something about it, others didn't care. I figured that if several people complained rather than just me, we could permanently shut down the site. Hopefully that is the case.

However, because a thief can file a counter-DMCA, I'm not sure that copyright notices are enough. After all, blog post dates can be changed or the stolen content can be edited. That's why I finally decided to register with MyFreeCopyright. This free online service offers 3rd party proof that you hold the original copyright to your online work.

I registered my blog via my blog's site feed url. With each new post I publish, I am emailed dated documentation verifying my ownership of the material including publishing date, title, description, and a digital fingerprint which I can present as proof that I am indeed the original author. MyFreeCopyright keeps this information along with a copy of the original, so that I have 3rd party copyright proof. Hopefully I will never need to use it.

So that's what happened. In some ways I hate the bother of having to add copyright precautions to my blog, but on the other hand, I'm not willing to make crime easy for someone else.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm ready to get back to fiber and textile content! I've still got waffle weave on the loom, and I'm still spinning that cotton lint. More updates on those soon.

Posted 23 Aug 2008 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Related Post:
Stolen Content
A Note About Watermarks

Stolen Content

By Leigh

This post has absolutely nothing to do with weaving, spinning, dyeing, or knitting. But it is the reason why I haven't gotten much accomplished in the past several days.

The other day I checked my free StatCounter account, and was browsing visitor paths. This is often interesting as well as useful information. Imagine my surprise when I clicked on one referring link, only to see this (click on the picture for a closer look) -

Yup. It's my entire Computer Hex Code Dyeing 2: Wrestling With Recipes on another website, stolen along with about 4 or 5 other of my posts.

I took a look around this site, and quickly figured out that almost all of its content was stolen from other blogs. In other words it is a "splog" (spam blog). A number of the stolen posts showed copyright information and symbols, but this were stolen along with the text and content.

The question is, what to do? Evidently this is a fast growing problem, much to the frustration of folks like us, who respect one another's intellectual property and just want to have ours respected in return. Is it possible to try and fight back? Well, here's what I've been doing about it:

First I did a whois search at Network Solutions, to try to find someone to complain to....

This gave me the administrative and technical contact whom I emailed, asking them to remove my content. I received no response and neither was my content removed.

My next step was to contact the blog host to report the theft. Toward the bottom of the whois information is an IP address link -

From there, I found this -
This tells me who is hosting the offending website, and how to contact them with abuse problems. After emailing their abuse department, I received a quick response with instructions of what to document and where to send it. By law, they will have to remove it, unless the offender offers a counter claim. Then it's left up to the two parties to duke it out.

In the meantime, I have discovered Who Is Hosting This? You can type any URL into the search box and are immediately taken to that website's host. If the offender doesn't remove the stolen content upon your request, the host is the next one to contact.

Another possibility is to contact Google's AdSense, if that's what the splog was set up to take advantage of. Complete instructions of how to do that can be found at What to do if you're getting as sick as I am of having your blog copied by Ian in Hamburg.

In researching all this, I learned quite a bit. Some folks honestly don't understand about copyright. Others, like sploggers, do it intentionally, without regard to copyright. Sploggers often use hacking tools such as 1-More Scanner or Site Import for Dreamweaver, which find and copy content from all over the Internet. It appears that in my case, the scraping (content stealing) software searched the internet for text with certain keywords. The keyword in my posts was "recipe" (as in dye recipes), which is the category the filed my posts were under on that website.

The only reason I found out about it, is because someone clicked on one of the links in that post which brought them back to me. I have been purposely doing this with every post I publish, and for that very reason. Thieves and their hacking software usually just copy and paste, which leaves links intact (though I have learned that some hacking software can ignore the links).

While links back to yourself might alert a reader that the content has been stolen, they don't necessarily let you know about it. Another helpful online tool is Copyscape, which searches for duplicate pages on the Internet. They allow a couple of free searches a day, or unlimited searches with a subscription.

What else am I doing? Since most theft takes place from feed readers, there are two options.

1. Change the settings so that only a summary of the post is seen in the reader. This may be a minor nuisance for folks who like to read entire posts in their reader of choice, but it allows only the first paragraph or so of a post to be scarped. For Blogger, click on "Settings" then "Site Feed." Look for "Allow Blog Feeds" and choose "short". Then save settings.
2. Leave the blog feed setting to "full" but put a copyright notice in the post feed footer at the bottom of the site feed settings page. This notice will show up at the end of each post in the feed reader, which means it will be scraped too.
   

For the moment, I've chosen to do #2, being sure to include my blog url, http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com/ (in addition to my blog name, Leigh's Fiber Journal) in the feed footer. This is in case the scraper copies the text without their links.

You also probably noticed that I added "By Leigh" at the top of the post, and a posted date and "by" at the bottom. Both link back to my blog.

While there is no way to stop content theft, we can all take measures to protect our digital property. Here are some articles that have been helpful to me, so I'm passing them on to you:

5 Content Theft Myths & Why They Are False by Jonathan Bailey
The 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft by Jonathan Bailey
Fighting Scrapers With Your Left Jab by Darren Rowse
People Stealing My Content - Blah Blah Blah by TheLostGirl
How to deter thieves from stealing your images and server bandwidth by David Airey

If you do find that some of your content has been stolen:
What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content by Lorelle

Since most scraping takes place pretty quickly (sometimes almost instantaneously) after publication, adding all this to back posts may or may not help. I'm still trying to decide whether or not to add a copyright or watermark to all my photos. More bother.

Anyway, that's my tale of woe. I hope all of this will be useful to you!

Posted 17 Aug 2008 by http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Related Posts:
Update on Stolen Content (& a little more info)
A Note About Watermarks

I'm Getting Bored With This

This is the latest batch of multiple tabby weave samples, just off the loom. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels because I'm not achieving anything I'm happy with.

I tied on about a yard of 8/2s cotton warp in three new colors, using the same Fibonacci stripes as the last sample warp.

Of the samples shown in that earlier post, I liked the ones with the heavier, sport weight knitting yarn as weft best. I wanted to experiment more with this, using different weft colors. I thought that I had a heavier black cotton yarn to work with, but it turned out that it wasn't as heavy as I thought. I used it anyway.

I really had a lot of trouble with getting an even beat as you can seen in the above photo. The goal is an balanced weave with as many picks per inch as ends per inch. Quite disappointing.

Then I found a 6/3 cotton in a medium gray and used as weft with my 8/2 warp. I still had the same problem with getting an even beat. I did try though . However, you're going to have to tilt your head to the side to view this photo properly....

..... as Blogger insisted on rotating the photo when it uploaded it. I tried several times but couldn't get it uploaded the way it is supposed to be. I searched Blogger Help Group to see if I could find a solution for this problem, and apparently others have had it on occasion, but none of the discussions helped me. So there it is anyway.

Here is something similar in a different color weft (and not rotated)....

The weft packed in a little more evenly, though not consistently. I am puzzled, because the sett is the same as all the other samples, 20 epi. I'm not sure why I'm having issues this time when I didn't before.

And lastly I decided, what the heck, I'll just let it do what it wants, and beat it hard.

The weft is the same 8/2 cotton as in the yellow warp stripe. This was interesting because packing down the weft distorted the horizontal lines with washing. This sample has a little more potential than the first three, though I think a contrasting weft would have been better.

I've been thinking a lot about these samples, and why I wasn't happy with them. Finally I realized that I am disappointed because I was trying to see if I could get multiple tabby weave to imitate summer & winter, which has been my favorite weave so far. I still think the results would have been better with an heavier weft; such as the sport weight knitting cotton yarn. However, I'm just sampling from my stash, hence the limitations.

I'm not sure what I'm going to try next. Choices include:

1. Using a finer warp and the same wefts
2. Using the same warp and purchasing more sport weight cotton for a heavier weft.
   
3. Moving on to a totally different draft from Dr. Bateman's book.

While I'm at it, I may as well try a new threading too.

© May 2008 by Leigh at Leigh's Fiber Journal

Related Posts:
Multiple Tabby Weaves - the basics

My 1st Blogiversary

Today is my first blogiversary . I started my blog and made my first post exactly one year ago today. Not being a particularly sentimental sort of person, I would ordinarily let this event pass without mention, but since I started my blog with a specific goal in mind, it seems a good time to stop and evaluate how well I'm meeting it.

My original plan was to work my way through the lessons in Deb Chandler's Learning to Weave, focusing on weave structures that I hadn't tried before. The idea was to use my blog as a journal to record my progress. I started with the first weave I hadn't explored yet, log cabin.

Looking back, I see that I did not follow the book very closely. Rather, I have followed both inspiration and opportunity. Inspiration to try shadow weave flowed naturally from log cabin. Problems with warp tension led to learning a new warping technique. Opportunity enabled me to take advantage of Online Guild workshops to learn loom controlled lace weaves, and summer & winter with its variations. Not only have I woven lots of samplers this past year, but also dozens of scarves, dishtowels, yardage, and recently two small rugs.

Of course, being a spinner and knitter with a wide range of fiber and textile interests, I wanted to record those things too. This past year these have included exploring various forms of silk, a variety of other new-to-me spinning fibers, knitting several pairs of socks, knitting progress on my Samoyed lace scarf, and dabbling with modular knitting and woven crochet. Plus I've begun the journey of designing and knitting my Rare Breed Sweater.

Over the past year I've also done a little dyeing, made a number of greeting cards from my handwoven scraps, felted soaps, led a Computer Design Workshop for the Online Guild, attended SAFF, participated in a silent auction fund raiser for the Blue Ridge Handweaving Show, and re-joined the Western North Carolina Fibers/Handweavers Guild.

In starting my blog there were several things I needed to consider. One thing was to decide how I wanted to blog. How personal did I want to get? How far off topic did I want to stray? Did I want to include recipes and family photos? Did I want to include my other interests? From the beginning I determined that my blog would be exactly what its name said it was: a journal of my fiber and textile explorations.

One thing I realized early on was that blogging made me feel accountable to do what I said I was going to do. Even if no one ever read what I wrote, it was still out there for the world to see and hold me to! Many times I have been motivated to finish a project simply because I blogged about it.

Since I am a learner myself, I knew I couldn't consider this a teaching blog, yet I found that I tended to record what I look for when I'm searching the Internet: information. The reward of this has been receiving excellent feedback and suggestions from those more experienced than I, as well as sometimes helping and encouraging others who are learning as well. The exchange of ideas is stimulating! Questions from readers have made me think carefully about what I say and how I communicate. In trying to explain something in my own words, I realize how well I truly understand it.

During the year I found that I enjoyed blogging so much, that I started another one to show off my Dan's pyrographics, and later two cat blogs, one for Rascal and one for Catzee.

In evaluating my original goal, I can say that I have made progress, though I didn't specifically follow the lesson plan in Learning to Weave. Mostly I used this book as a resource, incorporating as many other resources into my studies as I could get my hands on. In looking over the Learning to Weave table of contents now, I see that the only lessons I have left to look at are the ones on double weave and honeycomb. So perhaps I've made better progress that I first thought!

To celebrate my first blogiversary, I've done a little tidying up and given my blog a new look. I haven't decided if I like the new template yet; it's not as reserved as I usually like to present myself. I will have to wait and see if I get used to it. Also, I'm including a little Leigh's Fiber Journal trivia:

* This is my 160th post.
* My first comment was from M.
* As of my last post I've received 738 comments.
* As of this posting I've had 18,978 visitors who have looked at 29,362 pages.

All in all, I have to say that I think it's been a fairly productive year. Even so, blogging does take a lot of time and I have to admit that I've sometimes wondered if it was worth it. Now, as I pause to reflect back over my first year of blogging, I can honestly say that I feel I've grown as a weaver, a writer, a computer user, and a fiber artist in general. And in humility. Not only are my successes out there for all the world to see, but my mistakes as well!

As a tool, blogging has been very helpful to me. I now have a written and pictorial record of what I've done and how I've done it. It has given me not only a sense of accomplishment, but of accountability as well. Best of all, I've made lots of new friends.

© 2007 Leigh's Fiber Journal

Beginning

By Leigh

Blogs have been rather slow to come into my awareness. I do spend a lot of time on the computer, but have limited my activities to email, fiber and textile email lists, web design, and of course a few favorite computer games. Then a spinning friend, Carol, sent me a link to her friend Valerie's blog and I was intrigued. I started to occasionally visit other blogs, but rarely found my way back.

It was M's blog that got me thinking, "I wonder if I'd like to do that too, to keep some sort of record of my fiber activities." However, I couldn't analyze the idea to the point where it made sense to have a blog: for what purpose, what would I say, who in the world would be interested, and what do I have to share that someone else couldn't do better?

I'm hardly a teacher. In fact I'm more the "professional student" type; after all, a learner can readily be excused for errors and imperfections, can't she?

However, it was Peg who suggested to me that a blog might be useful as a diary of my fiber and textile explorations. I had been lamenting the inconsistencies of my weaving education and had finally decided to go back through Deborah Chandler's Learning to Weave from the beginning and focus on the things I had missed. A blog seemed a perfect way to record this.

So ready or not (mostly not), here I go ablogging.

Posted 13 April 2006 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com