I sat down to listen to some podcasts last night, and tuned into the latest CraftSanity one (Episode #58), that is a recording of the “The Art of Crafts” breakout session at the Blogher 07 Convention.   There were some very interesting topics brought up, including copyright, intellectual property theft, making money from crafting etc.

“Great!” I thought, “Bloger’s going to give some reasonable coverage to this too!”.

Not a chance.

Blogher have relied on Jennifer Ackerman-Haywood to record the show and take the bandwidth hit on her website.  I’ve searched around the blogher site itself, and there’s one small reference to the breakout session, pointing to the craftsanity site. Why has no one on the site taken this forward?  There were some important questions and discussions held, and there’s no transcript, and no questions posed, or discussions had, to be shared with people on the blogher site.

Very disappointing

Well, yes I am still out there!

Not an awful lot of crafting going on recently and certainly nothing to show for myself, at least today.

I’ve nearly completed my second balloon on the Hickmott design, and will be posting a photo soon. I did start knitting a scarf for the Simon community in Galway, but decided that the wool/needle combination wasnt good enough to produce something warm and wearing enough, so I ripped it out. I may go looking for other wool on the weekend to see if I can find anything more appropriate. I have needles up to 5mm, so can take something quite chunky I think.

Found the following blogs recently Tanglledangel and Teaandcakes both from women on Stitchnbitchie. I am so jealous of the stashes they get!

My ipod died the other week, and I replaced it with a video ipod. Still on the look out for decent podcasts, and Isobel for one has a list of Knitting podcasts that I might check out. Always still on the lookout for cross stitch ones though!

Another round of tab closing….

I found a copy of “The Art of Embroidery: Inspirational Stitches, Textures and Surfaces” at a website called The Book Depository. UK based, many of the books are cheaper than the equivalent on Amazon.co.uk (they also do a comparison with Amazon), as well as offering free P&P. At £15.00, it’s a good £9 cheaper than Amazon are selling it for!

Cameoroze has a stitching blog here. I’m sure I’ve come across her years ago, but cant remember where – I think perhaps over at About.com. She also has a Stitcher’s Studio.

Speaking of about.com, I really did enjoy being on there – at least I used to. I even considered applying to be one of their editors back in the day. However, I spent some time there doing some research a few years ago, and my spam rate shot up like nobody’s business. I backed away from about.com, and after a few months and some hard work with the spam filters, the spam rate dropped back down again. Coincidence? mebbie. mebbie not. I haven’t spent an awful lot of time on about.com since, just the odd click or two, but I back away again as soon as I know where I am. I certainly don’t post there or do much navigation around the site, which is a shame as there is a lot of stuff there, including free charts.

I’ve found another podcast called CraftSanity, which has an associated blog. Each edition has decent length interviews with people within the Crafting world.

Episode 43 is an interview with Melissa Alvarado and Hope Meng who, along with their friend Melissa Rannels, co-own Stitch Lounge.

Episode 49 is an interview with Heather Holland-Daly, a cross stitch designer. She has her own website Monsterbubbles, and I was particularly interested in seeing how she presented her work, especially in light of the “How Much?” post I made last week. I found the website to be very pale – pink and green, whilst good for a logo (and I like the logo!), I think is a bit wishywashy. Her “Gallery” and “Stuff” is cluttered and out of date, and the pictures of her stuff makes me want to buy either the completed item, or the kit to do it with, I cant see any option of how to buy direct from her, or which internet/Bricks and Mortar shop I need to go to. (And the thumbnails in the gallery – just plain annoying! grrrr!)

Episode 53 has an interview with Carol Sauvion, the executive director of “Craft in America” which was shown on PBS recently. I’ve heard decent things about it, and wonder if it’s ever going to be shown outside of the US. (I see the DVD is available from PBS’s website – and, unfortunately perhaps for PBS – at Amazon.com for $8 cheaper).

Before I left Ireland, I set up StitchNBitchIe, the Irish Yahoo group for Stitch N Bitch. On the weekend, they took part in the World Wide Knit In Public day, and a summary (with pictures!) can be found here, thanks to Lien (who I’ve never met!)

Right, think that’s enough from me for the mo! (I’m getting tired and making more and more mistakes!)

When doing stitching I generally watch the television. However, there are some times in life where I recognise that tv sucks! I usually either read, or if I have a project on, do some stitching. However, if the latter, I get very bored sitting in silence for several hours, so enjoy listening to podcasts.

However, I’ve only found one podcast so far that I actually am comfortable in listening to, and that’s craftlit . Done by a woman called Heather Ordover, she spends about 20 or 30 minutes of the weekly cast updating you on things, and then the rest of the show is (usually) dedicated to the reading of a book that is out of copyright – we are currently listening to The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

I did try CraftBorg, downloaded episode 16, and disliked the presentation – it jarred me too much and I couldnt get past the noises to try and work out what the message was. I did try and download an earlier cast, but it took too long to download so I dont know if episode 16 was just a bad one off or not