hooks are still missing

...but maybe they'll be lured out of hiding by my new blog banner?

probably not, but i downloaded way too many fonts today and really needed to do something with them.

go figure

tonight's the first time i've had a) the desire, and b) the time to crochet in months (literally, months!) and wouldn't you know it, my hooks are nowhere to be found. nowhere! i'm thinking (hoping) they're at my parents' house-- i guess i left them up there at christmas, maybe?-- but if they're not there then i have no idea. i turned my apartment upside down and saw nary a sign of them (and i moved in less than a month ago, and don't remember seeing them during the subsequent unpacking, now that i think about it).

boo!

oh well. once they're located, i'm starting on some granny squares, probably to be made into a pillow for my bed and/or couch (hooray studio apartments), but in preparation for the much larger eventual tackling of a full-sized granny square afghan. maybe. eventually. if i can find my damned hooks.

madeye: still alive, and on sale to boot

hello out there!

it's been about a million years and i'm sure everyone thinks that i have forgotten all about madeye/hats/crocheting/craft-land/you/etc. well, that's kind of true. since i last wrote, i've finished up my last semester in college, finished my undergraduate honors thesis, graduated from college, gotten and started a "real job," moved apartments... and not once picked up a crochet hook. i didn't even realize until today that all of my etsy listings had totally expired!

to solve the immediate problem, everything in the etsy shop has been re-listed. i've also put everything on mega-sale: from $40 down to $15, from $30 down to $10. some of those hats have been sitting around for over a year! not that they're any less worthy of your precious little heads, but hey man, i'm getting kind of sick of them and i'd love to see them go to some nice, appreciative homes.

as far as where madeye is headed in the future, i'm not entirely sure at the moment. for one, it's just too hot for me to think about hats right now. (god bless you, georgia summertime. oh wait, it's not even summer yet... crap, we're all gonna roast alive). for two, well... like i said, i haven't picked up a crochet hook in months, so my creative gears are a bit rusty. however, i'm sure that once i get settled into my fun new "grown up" life that madeye will come back in some form or fashion, so don't forget me completely! you can join the mailing list by entering your email address on the main site or add this blog to your google reader (or what have you) to keep in touch.

thanks, vickie howell, for completely obliterating any chances I had of getting my homework done tonight! cannot stop watching knitty gritty marathon! Must not bust out the yarn and needles... must not... must resist...! GUH.

hats hats hats!

all of the hats are finally up at etsy!


that's one of my favorites. i think i'm going to make more like it sometime soon. it's probably the least girly hat i've made in a while!

also, here i am as an m&m:



i've never actually made an orange hat with a pom-pom, but i think i want to now. also, i want some ice cream. weirdly, i don't want m&m's, which i think is the point of the site. oops!

radical lace & subversive knitting

this exhibit at nyc's museum of art & design look so cool! i think i am going to have to finagle my way up there sometime before june 17th just so i can see it and do all the other new yorky things i've wanted to do since going there once in 11th grade.

(i just blogged about janet echelman, one of the featured artists, over at my personal blog, if you want to read it!)

also, museum of art & design = mad museum! i love it.

i love etsy!

for real, i do. i haven't sold anything yet but i am so glad that i made the switch. i am still at home for my winter break so i'm using my parents' computer which has super-slow dialup, so i haven't been able to explore all that much, but i am slowly (sloooowly) looking around and finding a lot of really cool people.

who are some of your favorite etsy folks/things? maryink and mwilson (esp. the "morphism" prints) are some of my recently favorited new discoveries.

in other news, i bought a ton of yarn and i am crocheting again! i'm planning to do valentine hats again this year (people seemed to like those last time!) so i got some nice pinks and reddish colors, which is a change from the summer/fall when i was really into earthy stuff like brown and gray and green (not that you can tell from what's in the shop at the moment, though). i just have to pace myself so i don't burn my hands out. whoops.

happy new year!

finally!

today was the first day in what seemed like forever that i had absolutely nothing planned to do, so i gathered up all the hats i've been working on since the summer and went out into the backyard and photographed them and i've been working on putting them up on etsy ever since.

my parents have dial-up so it's taking forever, but slowly and surely they will all be posted! i am so excited. take a look at the shop here:

http://madeyedesigns.etsy.com

i will probably wait til they're all up to start advertising the new shop in a big way, just to give myself some breathing room and to see how things go. i am hoping/thinking that being on etsy will mean more traffic and also way less time needed to maintain the site. (seriously, if i was going to be putting everything up on my own site like i have been, this would still be in the works and i probably wouldn't be able to get it all done for weeks!)

guys, let me know what you think about madeye moving to etsy, and about the new hats! (i posted some of them here over the summer, but others are making their web debut!)

an idea

i am thinking that the next version of the madeye shop to go up (whenever that is) will be hosted on etsy, rather than run through my own html site.

thoughts? comments? if you use etsy, what do you think of it? pros & cons?

i signed up when it was in beta version, but never really listed anything. now it seems like such a great resource for buyers and sellers that it would almost be silly to mess with doing my own site, especially since that takes up so much time (which is one of the big reasons i haven't posted anything new since the spring!).

http://madeyedesigns.etsy.com

hello, i'm not dead!

hi to anyone still reading!

you might be wondering where i am and what's going on with madeye. well, i certainly would not hold those thoughts against you. it's been almost three months since my last post here, and way longer since i update the site.

well, here's the story:

i'm about to wrap up my second-to-last semester in college, so i'm busy with school work and freaking out about the future (you'd be suprised how much of my time that occupies). i'm in charge of my school's newspaper, although my amazing co-editor is going to be taking over a lot of those duties for me in the spring. i've also got an editorial internship at a really awesome magazine, so i'm also busy with listening to awesome music and writing about it and going to the post office and all that stuff. oh, also... i've been watching a lot of six feet under (thanks, bravo).

so, my life is like exploding with stuff right now, and there just hasn't been a lot of time for stitching! but that makes me pretty sad, so i am trying to get back into things; i also have a whole ton of hats that i made before my life got so crazy, and they are just waiting to be put up on the site. but, for now, things are still pretty slow, so i just wanted to let anyone who might be curious know what's going on over here in madeye-land.

say hi if you miss me!

when idioms attack

i stuck "get them while they last!" onto the banner advertising the sale as almost a joke... not that i didn't expect a few of the hats to go, but i didn't really think it would be at any great speed. however, they really have been going... and fast. so if you're sitting on your butt, sit no longer! run! go! let your fingers fly over the keyboard to madeye-designs.net and snatch up those hats before someone else does!

big big sale

kraftduh

so of course i forgot to print out my fancy photoshop-ified business cards for kraftwork, and wound up handing out little paper squares with the website address written on them by my roommate karly (who came with me last night) and myself. d'oh! it was also a pretty slow night and i didn't sell a thing, but i did do a pretty great trade with tracy from debrifield!

still trying to figure out what to do about all the hats from the past year. i'd love to sell them (of course) but i feel like they're dead weight on the website and i'd rather get most cleared out before i put up all the new stuff (whenever that happens). i'm considering donating them to a group that provides hats for chemo patients, not just to "get rid" of the hats but because i've been thinking about that for a while and it seems like a good time and opportunity. still thinking... i'll come up with something eventually.

so glad it's friday, especially because we're having a craft night at my apartment this weekend! YES!

preparing for the working of the kraft

so i finally installed photoshop on my laptop last night and, after fumbling around miserably for ten years, managed to eke out a new business card design for madeye:



it's so lo-fi! it's to be printed out on colored cardstock today afterwork, then cut into the appropriate sizes, and handed out at kraftwork tonight. maybe one day i'll get real business cards IN FULL COLOR or something novel like that.

it's been so long!

so, my life has taken over... well, my life. i haven't posted at all lately and i've been crafting even less. but rest assured, the fall collection is on its way. it may actually be here before fall itself!

in case you missed me terribly, come and visit at Kraftwork this thursday, september 7, 7-10 PM! madeye WILL be there!

ooh, and there are birds...

the first issue of what you make it is out and i really dig it. it's a fun look at a few DIY crafters/fashionistas with some really neat art smattered throughout. i'm totally a softie for interviews & pictures of crafters in their own workspaces so the copacetique piece sucked me right in. take a look!

in other news, i bought yarn today. and next week i go on vacation. to roasting boiling broiling hot florida. where i plan to spend most of the daylight hours inside, catching up on work, and churning out some hats. hopefully once i get settled back at school at the end of the month i'll have time for a site redesign, some photo sessions with the madeye mannequin heads, and then the fall 06 madeye collection will be ready for its debut. hopefully?

d'oh.

as is probably quite obvious, you can no longer access the website via madeyedesigns.net! this is because i stupidly let my subscription to my name hosting service expire, and some robot ad spam site statched madeyedesigns.net up! needless to say, this makes me pretty sad, and i'm totally mad at myself, but i'm trying to fix the problem as best i can.
so, please use either madeye-designs.net or madeye-designs.com-- they both should work.

if you know anyone that might have been a past and/or a potential future madeye visitor, please let them know about this! i certainly don't expect anyone to, but if you could even blog about this little change, then heck... that would be awesome.

also, if you have a website that links to madeye, could you please change your link accordingly? either the .com or the .net will be fine, though i think i'm going to favor the .net just because it's closer to the old address. (the .com was bought mainly so no one else would snatch it up and cause even further confusion!)

thanks & sorry for the inconvenience!

oh noooo!

so i inadvertantly let my ownership of www.madeyedesigns.net expire. i should have renewed it last week when i got all of the reminder emails but i was busy and it just got lost in the shuffle. i thought it wouldn't be a big deal but when i checked tonight to make sure it was okay, i discovered that the name seems to have been bought by some kind of robot ad site. you can see it by just going to http://www.madeyedesigns.net.

while the site is still accessible at its actual url, http://www.brightandbeautiful.org/madeye (madeyedesigns.net was just a referrer url), i still obviously want my domain name back since it's on all my business cards etcetera, and also is the url that i actually give people and that is linked to by most websites that link to me, and all of that jazz. also, as i discovered last summer when i first wanted to buy the name, madeyedesigns.com is actually taken already. this means all of my visitors are going to be hitting this robot site AND that i don't have any better options for other names to buy, if this one can't be bought back.

basically, i need some advice! if this has happened to you or anyone you know, what did you do? what can i do? what would you suggest? i emailed the address that came up on the "why am i seeing this site?" link on the robot page, but haven't heard back yet. if they can't tell me anything or refuse to sell it back to me, what can be done? (i already checked on one of those sites where you can "place a bid" to buy a domain name from someone that has it, but the minimum bid had to be $200 and i just don't have that kind of money!)

i appreciate any help i can get. i know this is all my fault for letting it expire, but i want to fix it asap! i feel so clueless and ridiculous for letting this happen. argh.

www.madeyedesigns.net is going to be down for a bit because i am a complete idiot and failed to renew my ownership of it.

please go to http://www.brightandbeautiful.org/madeye to see the site.

update on this ridiculous situation coming soon, hopefully...

ruffles of much frustration / formerly naked animals

here's the most recent hat i've finished, the one with the ruffles as previously mentioned. yeah, i do think i might try them again. this is pretty freaking cute, i think. oh well.



here's a woefully yellow detail of the applique. (man, my camera is apparently quite tired of taking pictures of hats these days, and appears to be refusing to take decent shots in rebellion.)



between the two of those, you might be able to discern the actual color of the yarn. i really like it, but it's quite subtle-- moreso than i'm used to, anyway. here's perhaps a better take of it:




i do think i'm going to carry the bird / disc / ruffle thing on over to some pins that i've started on lately. i really like making pins but doing flowers got soooo infernally old, so hopefully this will be a nice change.

---

here are some non-madeye crochet projects i've done recently... very small ones, very simple, but the end product is so cute that i just want to share:



they're bare bears! pamela barsky makes them. they're nudie muslin bears that you can decorate however you want. these were gifts from my boss / the owner of the store where i work, to the staff, for us to decorate for display in the store. mine is the one with the hearts (the love rash, as i like to call it) and the green scarf (which i made and now want a big version of for myself). the other is by my friend & coworker denise... he's on team zissou! i made his hat. it matches his painted-on red speedo! he is spectacular.