Doing Some Housekeeping at State of the Craft

For decades, I've had this recurring fantasy that I somehow end up with a dilapidated, cluttered, abandoned house, and it's my responsibility to explore it, sort everything out, and get everything neat and tidy again.  I wonder if this is a common quilter daydream.  After all, it has a vague similarity to taking a heap of fabric scraps and going throwing a lot of more or less satisfying labor into it until it becomes attractive and functional.

So here I am now, breathing a little life into a long-abandoned quilting blog.  I started by just establishing a presence -- posting a few posts -- but it's time I started cleaning up the joint, too.

First off, I had to moderate the vast backlog of comments that had accumulated since 2012.  It turned out there were seven of these.  Four were spam.  Task Complete!

Then, I changed the labels to correctly show that "Unquiet Dreams," a quilt I finished in January 2011, is finished.  Task Complete!

The Ghost Blogroll

Next came the "blogroll," the list of other people's quilt blogs implicitly recommended on the sidebar.  Since blogs never had a very long half-life, even when they were popular, I feared the worst.  And indeed, a lot of my blogroll is moribund:

• Quilts Galore -- Last entry: September 2010
• CraftyPod (Crafts in General) -- "As of January 2016, this blog is no longer being updated."
• Manxgirl from Ramsey Town -- Is no longer in Ramsey Town, but is still making quilts!
• Sarah's Stitchery Saga -- Last entry: September 2014
• Dordogne Quilter -- Site no longer exists
• Quilty the Libster -- Quilty signed off in 2013. She's all happy and married these days.
• Rebel's Work In Progress -- Last entry in June 2011.  Reb still quilts, though!  I went to the Sisters show with her last week!
• Exuberant Color -- Still in operation, and still featuring terrific work!
• The Calico Cat -- Still going, sporadically!  Probably!
• Welsh Quilter -- Last post, December 2013
• Indigo Mouse -- Last post, March 2015
• Pam's Pages -- Last post, January 2015
• Jovali Quilts -- Last post, January 2013
• Feed Dog -- Still going, sporadically!

So, only 4 out of the 14 blogs I've got listed over there are still active.  But you know, I bet if you took a random sample of blogs from four years in back, you wouldn't have anything NEAR 28% of them still in operation.  So in a goofy sort of way, this survival rate is a testament to the robust resilience of the quilting community.  Or something.  Task Complete!

Continuing Down the Sidebar...

I will have to similarly Konmari my honor list of quilt shops, which will be interesting since I don't know that I've been in a quilt shop this decade.  And eventually, we'll see how many dead links I've got in the "Other Places to Ogle Quilts" list.


But the interesting one is going to be "Shows I've Been In or Have Aspirations To Be In."  Because, I don't know.  Do I have aspirations to be in shows?  I might!  And looking at that list will kind of put that to the test!