#52 #FF

For those that don’t use Twitter #FF means Follow Friday, to be honest less and less people seem to be doing Follow Fridays these days, in fact haven’t seen anyone do it for a while . . . . but as I’m sitting here waiting for the contents of my video camera to download and I realise I haven’t done a #52 list this week, here are my top people to follow on Twitter (and if you’re not on Twitter I highly recommend it, I personally think it’s far better than Facebook, which I only really use for work, I found Facebook too diversified from its original intent, too many games and way too many ads, in a way I think there is too much information on Facebook whereas Twitter, the 140 character limit makes it easier to skim each tweet and you can concentrate on the stuff you really want to concentrate on*).

(Following list is in no particular order and is just me scrolling through my following list backwards)

• Wil Wheaton @wilw – Mr. Lacer got me into Wil, I will still not deliberately watch Tabletop (which the rest of the family adore) but I think it’s funny if I do catch it and I like Wil’s tweets about his cats and dogs.
• Tom Daley @TomDaley1994 – ok, ok, he’s less than half my age, but sigh, those swimming trunks. I actually follow a number of London 2012 athletes and Tom is probably one of the more interactive ones.
• Nigel Slater @realnigelslater – although he’s not as enthusiastic as he originally was when he first joined twitter a little while ago, he tweets gorgeous pictures from his garden.
• Larry the Cat @Number10cat - a spoof (of course) account from the Number 10 cat, can be scathingly funny, particularly about Nick Clegg.
• Nigella Lawson @Nigella_Lawson – warning, following this account makes you hungry.
• Alastair Campbell @campbellclaret - brilliant comments on the current government plus great campaigning on mental health issues.
• Neil Gaiman @neilhimself – follow him even if you don’t like his books (why? why? why?), as this is a man with one interesting life and he tweets some great links.

There you go, from that list I’m obviously a left leaning foodie with a thing for cats^, fantasy novelists and ahem divers˜.

* I can’t remember where I read this but I read an article once where the writer was talking about how when Twitter first became popular its 140 character limit was a bad sign because it was encouraging people to read less, whereas it actually turned out Twitter encouraged people to read more, as so many tweets contain links to articles and sites that if the tweet interests you, you then go on to read.

^If I ever show the kids anything on twitter their first response is “Is it a cat picture?”, yes the twitter sterotype is true and I am a little predictable.

˜ Sorry, no craft accounts, lots of crafty people do use Twitter and I follow a number of them but more as friends than for the craft content, I think maybe the craft community is more active on blogs, so I follow my crafty favourites that way instead.

 

2010 in review

Just had a nice e-mail from WordPress, although I think all it really shows is how this blog is bizarrely popular with the Google images search function, never mind. I thought it was fun to see what my most popular posts were, this is the e-mail below.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 5 days for that many people to see it.

 

In 2010, there were 349 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 1596 posts. There were 359 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 330mb. That’s about 7 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was December 4th with 1,138 views. The most popular post that day was Bring back Iggle Piggle!.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were feelingstitchy.com, en.wordpress.com, flickr.com, google.co.uk, and search.conduit.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for iggle piggle, sportacus, dexter, cursive writing, and beowulf.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Bring back Iggle Piggle! March 2008
8 comments

2

Chasing Sportacus March 2008
23 comments

3

I hate diets, says she eating her third packet of Monster Munch today February 2008
1 comment

4

Nigella’s Sticky Cocktail Sausages December 2007
20 comments

5

Bill Granger Fest February 2009

New menu thingys

Just a quick post to draw to your attention that this blog now has a little menu thing at the top (just under the header picture), where you can click on one of the four topics I pretty much always write about (family, craft, food and gardening), if you just want a dose of say food for example (not that I’m writing much about that at the moment – sigh), you can click on food and skip all the embroidery and stuff.

Now if they’d had that menu feature when I split this blog into two, I don’t think I would have and now I’m tempted to bring Lacer Writes back into the fold (hmmmm). I don’t know, after writing Lacer Writes for a while now (and all I ever really do on it is talk about Doctor Who), it still doesn’t feel quite like me, whereas this place does. We’ll see.

In other news I have just been shopping and spent a relative fortune on things from the supermarket that had chilli or ginger in . . . anything to try and blast out this head cold.

Edited to add: I’ve just imported Lacer Writes over here and I’ve added three more menu categories; writing, TV and books. So if you’re interested you can see what I’ve been reading / watching recently (hmmm Doctor Who like I say).  I’ll keep Lacer Writes going, at least for a moment though.

Kimono Dress from Weekend Sewing

It’s mine and Mr. Lacer’s bi-annual big night out tomorrow (honestly the last time was Hamlet, that was ages ago), we’re going to see Derren Brown and when I learnt that the dress code was ‘dressy’, as it’s also one of the nights they’re filming for Channel 4, of course I had to make something. Cue the Kimono Dress from Heather Ross’ Weekend Sewing.

This is not the best of photos, this dress looks far better when I’m not trying to take a photo of myself, plus the only full length mirror now just happens to be in the darkest part of the flat.

I have to admit my main concern when planning my outfit was cost, we’ve had a very expensive start to the month this month and are now even more stony broke than normal, so the fabric had to be cheap and this fabric, a butterfly print in light cotton, cost me £5 a metre from John Lewis and the blue fabric cost slightly more, in total this dress cost less than £20, not bad for an outfit that’s meant to be ‘dressy’ (I’m not sure whether it is really, but it’s dressier than I normally wear). Much as I like the butterfly print, there was a downside to using this fabric as just the act of pinning it was leaving great big obvious holes and occasionally causing snags, I’d understand this in a fine silk, but a cheap cotton? I guess the emphasis there is on the word cheap. With the holes and snags from the pinning, I certainly knew that this fabric would not withstand me having to rip out any seams, so consequently there were a few places where if I were being a perfectionist I’d have wanted to redo, but didn’t for a) being a bit lazy b) the fear of what it would do to the fabric. I’m also a little worried about how well the dress will withstand being washed over the summer season, particularly as I didn’t use my serger for this (yep month 5 of the serger sitting unused in it’s box). I am also going to freeze tomorrow night, considering the weather seems to have skipped summer and gone straight to autumn, that cotton is thin.

As for the actual design, I quite like it, the bodice is strangely a bit big at the back and I definitely need the obi sash to keep everything together. This was the first time I’ve used elastic thread (which was used to join the bodice with the skirt) and I love it, will definitely be using it again (I was slightly worried my temperamental old machine wouldn’t like it, but it seems ok). The neckline was difficult to do, particularly at the back, now I either have problems with necklines in general or problems with Heather Ross necklines specifically, as I remember having neckline problems with her Kai shirt to.

I think the dress looks ‘ok’, you know, that sort of female ok loaded with hidden meaning that really says that the woman thinks it’s far from ok really. I do think the dress is quite nice and I will wear it (have to, I’ve got nothing else to wear tomorrow night), but I do think it makes me look a bit fat and matronly. Thank goodness I’ve managed now to lose half a stone on this no sugar, no dairy diet (I can’t tell you how desperate I am for a cheese sandwich but thanks to those awful antibiotics I’m still showing a bit of sensitivity), if this were me plus the extra half stone, shudder.

Spring clean

You may have noticed I’ve changed my blog template again, I quite like this one though, so don’t worry, it’ll be staying like this for a while (although I may change my header photo, I took it today and although I like it, it doesn’t have the resolution, a roundabout though does feel quite apt for my life). I also hold no guarantees that I’m not going to change the colours on the sides like a yo yo.

I’ve also spring cleaned my blog roll a bit, I used to check the blogs I follow from the blog roll itself (back in the days when RSS readers seemed to disagree with me), but since getting an iPhone and finding a good RSS reader for that, I’ve been following my blogs on my phone instead, so the old blogroll here has not been updated for a while. There is a lot that’s still there and some great new ones as well, so you’re welcome to have a nose if you want!

Fiddling

Every now and then I get a little bored with my blog theme (not the content – just how it’s presented in WordPress), so I fiddle with my options in appearance. I know this blog recently flirted with a black and white monochrome theme, but although I thought it looked cool, I didn’t think it read as well. So, I’m trying another one and I’m now worried people won’t look at anything other than my last three posts because they don’t know / won’t be bothered to click on the Archives link in the banner above, so I’d place money on me changing it back to my original theme, as soon as I get over my let’s metaphorically dye my blog’s hair blonde and stick it in a tight dress with clumpy boots stage (hmmm, don’t know where that’s come from, actually, yes I do, saw a rather cool dress in Uni Qlo this afternoon that makes me want to buy it and turn into a punk, but that’s another story).

Anyway, I’ll make this post sticky for a while, so IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE MORE THAN MY LAST THREE POSTS (honestly, they’re not all mad) PLEASE CLICK ON THE ARCHIVES BUTTON ABOVE, THANK YOU!

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have lovely holidays and eat lots of lovely food!

Thank you for reading!