Blog Detention

I know, I know, I should be sent to blog detention.

It has been quite awhile since I have had time to sit and write a post. Things have been very hectic around here. Don't worry, I have plenty of excuses. I should probably start with the computer mentdown that required the pruchase of a new laptop. A laptop with Vista as the operating system insead of the next edition of Microsoft 7. MY computer had to breakdown a month before the new version becomes available. That way I have to learn a whole new way of doing things and download a zillion printer drivers just to be able to function for 30 days. Then I get to do it all over again when I upgrade to the new system. I swear I could hear my old hard drive laughing at me just before it died. You may have heard bad things about Vista. You may have even said bad things about Vista. It is all true. Just my opinion.

I also learned that all Geeks are not created equal. If you live in the Pittsburgh area, I whole heartedly suggest that you avoid gthe Geeks in the North Hills Best Buy location. Take the additional 20 minutes and drive to the Cranberry store. Once you are there, bow down to the Geekiest of Geeks on the planet. They are truely miracle workers in my book. They saved my technological life after the North Hills Geek pronounced my hard drive "deader than dead". If I were not so busy with other things I would take my extreemly sharp Ginger sewing shears to the North Hills store and use them to snip that Geeks little black tie right off! Do I sould bitter? I shouldn't. Thanks to the Cranberry Geeks I have all of my info back, a new shiny laptop, a cute little travel laptop, a back-up drive and a much smaller balance in my checking account.

That is just one small part of my list of excuses for not being up-to-date here on the blog. Anothe one is that I spent the entire last weekend on a sewing retreat with customers. Work, work, work. Yes, it was an all sewing weekend at a wonderful retreat center. Yes, we have prepared meals in the dining room of the mansion. Yes, the comapny is fun to be with and we laugh quite a bit. But I sew for a living, so it still counts as work! Someone has to do it.

My new fabric line arrived just before I left on retreat. I hurried to find coordinates to take with me and managed to finish one quilt top and a good size tote bag over the weekend. When I returned home I realize that I took the wrong fabric and ended up having to make the tote bag all over again! That took a whole day. Because it is my fabric line I had to make several samples. Including the large table runner and smaller purse. That seemed sufficient considering that the whole line consists of just 2 pieces. Large and small butterflies.

If making the samples before Market were all that needed to be done it would be easy. BUT, once the sewing is finished I have to write the instructions, photograph the item, create the pattern front, make a UPC code (that involves adding every other number, multiplying by three, adding the other numbers, adding those to the first total and rounding up to get a check digit. Now you know what those engineers did before they created Vista). When everything is finished I have to print, print, print. Then fold and bag..... speaking of bags, I have to pack one. We leave for Houston and International Quilt Market in the morning. Market is earlier than usual this year. That moved deadlines up by 2 weeks! Excuse #23987.

I just returned from shipping the box of quilts to my hotel (to save on additional baggage fees). That means I am finished, done, period. Except for packing, and hemming my pants, and updating this blog.

NEXT week I will have to work myself out of blog detention and find time to tell you about all of the wonderful things we find at Market!

Back To Work

Wow! That re-entry after vacation is pretty bumpy! I wake up each morning and before I open my eyes I cross my fingers and hope and pray that what I see will be aquamarine blue water, a sandy beach and a few palm trees sprinkled here and there. Moments later I am staring out at a mostly brown crunchy lawn, a garden full of weeds and I have to make my own coffee.

Oh well.

Getting back to work was hard enough, but I've been playing the Karen version of "Nothing in Life is Easy" all week. Because I had 10 wonderful days of vacation, I dropped my sewing machine and my laptop computer off to be serviced while I was gone. I have to say that my machine obviously enjoyed it's time at the Amy Baughman Sewing Center and Machine Spa because it is purring so quietly and clipping threads, winding bobbins like it was brand new out of the box. Ahhhh.

The laptop was entrusted to the Geeks at Best Buy. I love those geeks. They told me that it would have to be sent out to be cleaned and it would most likely be 2-3 weeks. (They have to send it out to get ALL the lint out. I doesn't have as much fuzz in it as my sewing machine - but it is close!) I could live without it for awhile. All I needed to do was transfer some info to the new shop machine and save all of the "important" stuff to a disk. Done. I’m cool.

Ha Ha Ha.

What I didn't realize is that the shop machine doesn’t have all of the fonts that I use. The first time I went to print out a pattern (so incredibly proud of myself for actually saving, finding and being able to print it from a different machine) I realized that not only were the fonts missing, but all of the UPC codes were being converted from their little black lines to a row of numbers. I had to find, download and install that info.

Hours later, when the software was accomplished and I pressed "print", the wonderful Xerox color printer offered me two options, black and white or “Enhanced”, the color option that should be called "Sucks up ink like a sponge". I very naïvely called the Xerox help line. Ill spare you the details, but it took 24 hours, 3 phone calls, 4 emails and some stern words to Toby before I was able to print in “standard” format. I beg to differ with the words “award winning” when used in reference to their service.

Meanwhile, the machine was eating ink at an alarming rate. This fancy schmancy machine uses solid ink crayons that we order directly from Xerox. If the machine THINKS it is out of ink, it stops running. Three of the “crayons” I opened were cracked in half. That renders them unusable, unless you are willing to insert the “good” portion and then use a bent paper clip, T-pin and a chop stick to remove the unusable chunk when the machine stops. (If you work for Xerox service I have only heard that this is possible, I would NEVER stick a sharp object into my printer and void the warranty….) I HAD to print the items that we needed to ship orders. Quilters were waiting. Customer service was on the line. (Xerox doesn’t need to know about the paper towel crammed into the yellow ink slot to trick the machine into thinking that it had ink either.)

At the same time, the new laptop kept giving me this “warning” that the software was a “trial” version. Let me make this perfectly clear…… Bill Gates does NOT have a sense of humor when it comes to using his software. Once that man has decided your time is up – it’s over baby. I had to trash the trials, reinstall a very old version, update, update, visit the Geeks at Best Buy (whom I’m sure have great stories about the IDIOT that owns a quilt shop and doesn’t know squat about computers) I then keyed in yet another 25 digit product code which I calculated cost me about $6.76 per digit. There is nothing Visa cant fix.

But now we are back to normal. – whatever that is.