Craft Blog » Site News

And Finally The Chaos Comes To An End

Fern — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:58:22 +0000

The last month has consisted of:

A visit from my globetrotting mum… with three days notice.
Custom quilts, custom slings, custom everything and me spending far too long bent over my sewing machine.
Preparation for my first ever market.
Disappointment on the lack of attendees to my first ever market.
My youngest (FINALLY!) learning to walk.

Throw all this in with running around like a madwoman after a three year old and a 20month year old who’s suddenly discovered his legs, dealing with psych visits, hospital visits, attempting (hah!) to keep my house clean and having two years worth of gossip to catch up with from my mum, and CraftBlog has once again been pushed to the back burner.

(sorry CB, please forgive me!)

Now things have calmed down a bit and I am getting back into the swing of things, with the aid of my handy dandy new daily routine, that goes something like: Wake up, make the kids breakfast, check emails, WRITE ON CRAFTBLOG BEFORE I ARRANGE FOR SOMEONE TO BREAK YOU KNEECAPS, make the kids lunch…. and so on. I’m hoping this tactic should work!

So what have you all been up to during my month long unplanned sabbatical?

Happy New Year From CraftBlog!

Robyn Jade Treacy

Fern — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:27:25 +0000

If you’re a regular reader of CraftBlog you’re probably aware that I was pregnant and expecting our third child, due on the 19th of March.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t meant to be. At exactly 36 weeks gestation my baby’s heart stopped beating in the early hours of the morning. I was induced and delivered a baby girl on Friday the 19th at 3:15 in the afternoon, weighing 6lbs, 13oz and measuring 50cm long. She shares a birthday with her big brother.

We named her Robyn Jade Treacy.

As of yet we have no answers as to what happened, I had a relatively complication free pregnancy, there were no cord issues and the placenta was healthy. I’m hoping that the autopsy results will give us some idea as to what happened.

The next week is pretty full on as we lead up to the funeral. I’m still in a state of shock, and I’m hoping the funeral will at least begin to give me, and my husband, the start of the closure we need.

As for CraftBlog, it’s certainly not going anywhere, crafting is my therapy, my escape, and I need it more than ever right now. Right at this moment though I know I need to focus on my family, my husband and our two beautiful sons, so the posts may be sporadic as I make my way through the healing process, but CB is my love, and I need it, and the wonderful people that read, comment and send emails, more than ever.

Thank you for your patience over the coming weeks and months.

If you are interested in helping the research and awareness of still birth, please look into donating to the Stillbirth Foundation.

With love and thanks,

Fern Treacy

New Year – New Look

Fern — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:13:28 +0000

I’m welcoming in the fresh decade with a new look on CraftBlog. I’ve been chipping away at this design for ages now and I finally feel like it’s ready to be launched.

This is the first time the design has gone live to this level of traffic, and on a brand new spanking server, so if you see any bugs or errors, I would love it if you could drop me a note and just let me know. I am ironing out kinks as I discover them, so just bear with me for the first couple of days!

You’ll also notice the advertising in the sidebar, after two years of being asked I have finally opened CraftBlog up to advertising. I will be offering both the leaderboard and the 125×125 squares available for advertising for your craft related business, blogs, directories and handmade stores. I already have a waiting list of people who have contacted me previously about advertising, but if you’re interested in promoting yourself or your business via CraftBlog, once again, please contact me (or DM me on twitter) and I will email you a .PDF covering the statistics and advertising rates.

Any advertising sign ups during the month of January will be offered at half price, so get in there quick if you’re interested.

I think that’s about everything covered. I have some awesome plans for the site in the coming year, there’s a lot to be excited about. I know I said it in yesterday’s post, but thank you very much for all the support, links and comments over the last two years, and I’m hoping we can have a superb 2010 together.

Happy New Year From CraftBlog!

Fern — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 06:38:04 +0000

Here’s looking forward to a fresh year filled with craft, inspiration and beautiful design. Thank you everyone who has visited the site, the businesses that have participated in giveaways, everyone who’s linked to and written about CB and everyone that has commented and sent me emails. Your support is awesome, and keeps me going when the last thing I want to do is even try and think of a tutorial or take photos of what I’ve made.

I’ll be migrating servers, upgrading software and bringing in a new site design tonight (what better way to ring in the new year!?) so just a heads-up that there may be a brief period of downtime whilst everything shifts over and CraftBlog settles in at its new home.

So Happy New Year, here’s hoping that 2010 brings us all everything we wish for!

September Round-Up

Fern — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:24:27 +0000

Although I’m running a little late with this one, I wanted to get back into them again, it’s a great way to keep up with how things are changing on CB and highlight some of the long forgotten tutorials!

Septembers most popular posts have been…

Most popular links this months have (again!) been tutorials; Lolly Chops’ Owl Pattern, Olly The Owl on Cut Out And Keep, and Everyday Mom’s Self Binding Blanket Tutorial.

And thank you to our top three referrers of TipNut, Free Quilt Patterns and Make For Baby for telling people about my little blog.

October promises to be awesome, I’ve finally got access to the CB twitter account again so expect more daily digests of links to tutorials and sales I’ve found online, we’re also a little more settled into our new home so I’m going to try and roll out some fresh tutorials – although I’m still drawing a blank on anything Halloween themed, hopefully inspiration will strike sometime before the last week of the month!

I’ve also been making the finishing touches on a new layout which will finally include advertising slots, more details of these will be coming in the next week or so, so if there’s any shop owners out there, keep your eyes peeled.

Hope everyone in Australia is enjoying the start of spring and is as excited as I am about the pools opening and not being able to go one weekend without seeing a sign for a Sausage Sizzle.

Holidaaaaays!

Fern — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 05:38:15 +0000

I’m off, with kids in tow, for a week of fun and games with two of my sisters, my brothers in law, niece and feotul nephew.

I shall leave you in the capable hands of my husband, chief of moderating comments and answering any emails that come in, and Ethan Watters will also be making a guest post just to keep the fires burning.

When I return I’m hoping my wonderfully crafty sisters will have pumped by brain full of ideas that I can share with you!

Back For Good

Fern — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:03:10 +0000

Not a huge post, but I wanted to update everyone and say that I am finally back online, woohoo! My life has entered its own little personal hell, in the last two months (personal blog post here if anyone is interested) but now I have the interwebs and connections to all my online friends and of course online fabric shopping so things are looking up a bit.

Hope everyone is well Now it’s time to get back to business!

Services Will Resume Shortly

Fern — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:05:36 +0000

Turns out my laptop is officially KO, so the lovely hubby is building me a desktop, hopefully services on CraftBlog should resume within a week, this computer free time has lead to some awesome ideas which I’m very excited to share with you.

Once again, sorry about the downtime, this thoroughly sucks

No related posts.

2008 Round Up

Fern — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:45:08 +0000

What a year! As we head into 2009 I would like to say thank you to everyone who has commented, linked to the site, added us on Twitter, played S&T, stumbled on the posts, contributed links and posts, added photos to the flickr pool, subscribed to the feed and everyone for being generally wonderful.

I have some HUGE plans for CraftBlog, as well as branching out a bit into a couple of other sites which I hope to announce later in the month. 2009 will bring some changes, more ongoing projects for readers to keep up with, a higher number of guest posts and contributors and more of my personal crafting coming into the mix.

When I started the site almost exactly six months ago it was just a pet project, I’d noticed the tutorials on my personal blog were popular and wanted somewhere dedicated to that, never did I imagine the friends I’d make and the community that would be formed, nor that hundreds of thousands of people would visit the site and read the posts.

The most popular posts for the year were…

You guys sure like the tuts

My personal favourites were…

Trick Or Treat Tote Tutorial – My little Halloween bag, I use this to hold my selvedges now, it’s still my favourite tutorial I’ve put up!
Tutorial Review – Watercolour Flowers – I still love this technique, and the canvas now sits proudly in my hallway, for such little work (and artistic talent!) it’s so effective.
Adventures In Paper Piecing – Ack, the start of my downfall and obsession with paper piecing, if only I’d known everything this little gnome would lead to!
Hot Or Not? Multifunction Scissors – Looking at these still makes me laugh, I hope to have more polls in the future, they’re lots of fun

2008 was great, but now I am one year older, one year wiser and my family is one bigger, so this new year is looking to pretty good as well. I wish everyone a happy, healthy and superbly crafty 2009 and hope you all hang around to see the new things I have in store for CB!

Calling All Crafty Twits

Fern — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:17:40 +0000

CraftBlog is now officially on Twitter! We can found at…

http://twitter.com/craftblog

At the moment I’m using it primarily to post links to great tutorials or crafty sites, any sales that I find and announcements of new posts on the blog, feel free to follow “craftblog” and keep up with the goings on!

And if you’re not “Tweeting” yet, I highly recomend it, my husband finally twisted my arm a couple of weeks ago and got me to sign up with a personal account (ferntreacy if you’re interested) and I have to admit, it’s addictive!