Random Thursday - a Week of Awesome

A snowfall in which every flake was composed of perfect crystals:

A Roman settlement, in the cold and windy wilds of Northumberland:

A rare red squirrel:

A walk on the Pennine way:

A magical contraption:

These are teasels, used to raise up the surface of a wool fabric - there are 3000 of them in this machine which stood in this position for 160 years until the 1970s:

Hmmmm.....

Lastly, the view I found on stepping into the garden this afternoon:

Linking up to Live a Colorful Life - click here for some lovely randomness.

Humblebrag

Whenever I make something I get very enthusiastic about it and take hundreds of pictures.

About five minutes after posting them I always have that feeling you get when you say something inane in a loud voice at a party at exactly the same time as the noise suddenly drops. So, I know it's sad really but I was very excited to have a quilt featured on In Color Order.   By the way have you come across the Humblebrag yet?  It so is a requirement for blogging;-)  Having learned the art of the hashtag from one of my favourite bloggers I will be now be using #humblebrag at every opportunity.

My quilt didn't place in the Emerald Quilt Challenge, but look at the winners - they are amazing.

Going off to be a slow blogger for a bit. Sewing machine is being fixed and we both need some RandR!

"Claiming Your Blog" - Don't Panic!

Yes, the plug is being pulled on Google Reader in July.   If you happen to use Google Reader to read blogs in one place, you will probably want to find another reader, but there's no hurry.   If you don't use Google Reader, carry on as normal!  Whatever the case may be your own blog is safe, and it's still at the same web address it ever was.

So don't panic when you read references to "claiming" your blog!     Claiming in this context is not staking out a claim, reserving a space, or anything like that.    If you do currently use GR to read your blog subscription list and happen to want to switch to Bloglovin, you may be curious to know who is reading you using Bloglovin.   If you have "claimed" it Bloglovin can send you info about who is subscribing to it, but your blog won't disappear if you don't claim it on Bloglovin and others can still read it on Bloglovin or anywhere else.

When Bloglovin talks about claiming, what they want is to be sure that you are the owner of that blog so they can send you stats on it.  You know if you subscribe to a newsletter by email, you enter your email address, and generally you receive an email in which you have to click a link to verify your email address and activate it - it's kind of like that.

When you follow their procedure for claiming you end up with a link in your post inviting others to follow you on Bloglovin. That doesn't mean that you now exist only on Bloglovin, it's just a clever bit of advertising on their part.  And if you see this link on a post by one of your favourite bloggers, you don't have to click it!  You can still find and read them wherever you like.

So take your time looking at Readers to decide which interface you like best for reading your own list.   That decision is the only action you have to take and you don't even have to do that if you are currently happily reading blogs some other way.   No decision you make affects how anyone else reads your blog.   You don't have to "be" on Feedly, Bloglovin or anywhere else!

Bloglovin vs Feedly

Like everyone else who uses Google Reader, I'm checking out the alternatives.

I've been having a poke around on Bloglovin, and so far the only thing I don't like about it is that compared to Reader, where I can scroll through full recent posts from the blogs I subscribe to, in Bloglovin you see a partial preview and then have the option of opening up the blog within the Bloglovin window.  

This seems laborious and time-consuming, and I think that anyone who has a Bloglovin readership is going to have to make sure their best pic is located in the first paragraph of their post as a hook to counteract any tendency for the reader just to move on to the next blog!

On the other hand, the transition to Bloglovin is very straightforward.

Given the number of mentions I'm seeing I suspect that there's going to be a mass migration to Bloglovin, but I'm off to look at Feedly next.  In the meantime, I found a comparison of the features of Bloglovin and Feedly here.

What do you think?

Bloglovin...

Excuse me while I just join the other bloggers testing out Bloglovin, since Google Reader will expire in July.   I have to post the following link in order to "claim" my blog on Bloglovin (ie to have Bloglovin verify that it is my own blog).

 Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Slow Bloggers Unite!

Time to invite all Slow Bloggers to celebrate their achievements small or large with a linky party. You can link up to show off a single project, or why not share something that inspires you, introduce yourself if you're new to the linky, or let us know what other adventures life has thrown at you recently.

Of course, if you have been having a very FAST month, you can celebrate it here too!  The last few weeks have been reasonably productive for me - it's just been great to have some time and mojo.

Tiny happy improv quilt: Pond Weed: Emerald: Curved improv mini: Emerald

Now my sewing machine has stopped working and a tag team of ill children means I haven't been able to take it to be fixed so I'm probably about to go very slowly again!   The point of the Linky is to take the pressure off when life gets in the way or that sewing mojo has gone walkabout.  If you worry about disappearing off the face of the blogosphere, you will always have a place to come.

So, if you are a temporary or permanent Slow Blogger do link up below (link now working)!  Spread the word by including one of the buttons in your linky post or sidebar, and please encourage other Slow Bloggers by visiting them and commenting since Slow Bloggers need all the support they can get:-)

In pursuit of a good quilt photo

They say that Scotland can have four seasons in a day,  but this is how much it can change in 40 minutes of walking up and down trying to take good pictures of a quilt:

11.59

12.26

12.39

There was an arctic blast of wind, and I kept pinning the fingers of my glove to various surfaces instead of my quilt.   And the quilt kept blowing away.

It's all gone today!