‘Tips and Advice’ Posts

How and Why You Should Give Twitter Lists Another Go

May 15th, 2012
twitterlists-title

Should I give twitter lists another go?

It’s a question I aksed myself towards the end of last year, as my twitter feed grew and grew with no real signs of stopping. After a little bit of pondering I thought that the Christmas/NewYears break was a good chance to bite the bullet and do it. So here we are, a few months down the track, and I’m here to share my experiences with re-looking at twitter lists.

My main motivation for trying to use lists again was the fact that I follow two types of people: There were people I follow, who make my feed interesting, and there are people I follow that I am actually friends with, and communicate with regularly. People who, if you miss a tweet, you are missing out on a part of that person’s life you care about, and you also loose the momentum of the conversations. These are people who I care about and therefore want to see everything that’s happening to them. I realised I was missing tweets from these important people, and I wanted a way to make sure I always saw their tweets. Twitter lists seems like the easiest way to do that.

This is the process I went through to give lists another go:

  1. Delete all previous lists
  2. Start from scratch and make the titles for new lists. Try to make them specific & meaningful.
  3. Go through ALL the people you follow and asign people to lists (good chance to cull people you’re no longer interested in following as well!!)
  4. Go through your @ mentions, to check you have assigned all relevant people you talk with
  5. Add lists to a list keeping tool

Things to remember before you start:

  1. Lists don’t have to be definitive. And by that I mean that just because you have a list called “People I’ve Met” doesn’t mean you have to have every person in your twitter feed who you’ve met in real life in that list. It’s your list, and you can make it however you want. I originally used lists as a way of categorising people. Every person I followed was in a list, and really that seems good if you things to be just so, and if you want to read about certain categories (it would be quite useful if you used twitter for multiple reasons and needed to keep track of different pars of your online life). But for me, this wasn’t important, and so I needed to break away from that thinking, and remember that the list doesn’t have to be ‘complete’. Some people will be listless, and some people *could* be in lasts, but aren’t.
  2. Your lists are flexible- they should (and will) change over time)
  3. Not everyone has to be in a list

Step By Step:

These are the new twitter lists that I created. I chose just a few topics that covered the people I MOST wanted to stay in touch with. For me I chose “Crafty” for the people who inspire me with ideas, “I’ve Met You!” for people I’ve met at blog meets etc. “Local Tweeps” is for people that live in the same area as me, whether I’ve met them or not. “Collaborators” is for people who I work on blogs/websites/jobs/etc with. “Friendly Peeps” are just people who I seem to have regular converstations with on twitter who don’t fit into any other category. And finally, “IRL” is obviously just people I know in real life! I save this for close friends, not just people I’ve met before.

After I’ve created the lists I’m happy with, I start going through the people i follow. I had got myself to a stage where managing my twitter was too hard, so part of this process was CULLING people who I wasn’t interested in anymore, or who posted annying stuff like just links etc.

When you’re going through the people you follow you will most likely have the problem of deciding what to do with people who fit into more than one list. What you do is up to you, but I decided to put people into no more than two lists. So if someone lived close to me, was a friend in real life, and posted lots of crafty things, I wouldn’t put them into all three (four really!) lists. I might choose “IRL”, and “Crafty”. If they didn’t post crafty things that often, I might JUST put them in “IRL”. Remember that the point of this is to streamline your twitter reading. You don’t want to jumble it up and read one person’s updates many times over!

Once I’d gone through all my followers and either unfollowed them, added them to a list, or left them alone (yes, you CAN leave people who don’t fit into anything!!), I had to set up a way or viewing them. On my mac I used Tweetdeck to follow each list, and the Twitter app to follow my whole feed, mentions, and direct messages. How you decide to use it is totally up to you, I just found using the two apps worked best for me.

So there you go. That’s my pretty simple guide to how and why you might like to use twitter lists again!

 

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Original Ideas in an Inspired World

April 7th, 2012

This is just a rant. A rumbling of thoughts. It’s not necessarily logical, or thought out- I’m just… wondering, thinking ‘out loud’ as I write. Writing out loud I guess.

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An issue people talk about a lot these days is copyright. About original ideas, stealing ideas, copying, crediting ideas, crediting inspiration, crediting… everything. People are concerned about where ideas and inspiration come from. They’re concerned with their ideas being copied, and people making money from them. This isn’t really a new issue- people have been copying other people for centuries. For probably as long as people have been making stuff, other people have been copying them.

Maybe the problem is just the internet? If I go to France and I see an awesome idea for a necklace, then I come home and making something similar to sell at my local market, or in my online store, that French seller can see what I’ve made because of my blog, or facebook, or other people posting on their blogs or facebook. If I had of done that 20 years ago, that seller in France never would have know.

There’s the question of “should copy other people’s ideas or not”, and then there’s the question of “can we even HELP but copy other people’s ideas?”.

What is an original idea? Something you’ve thought of yourself, right? But what about ALL the things around you that might possibly contribute to your idea? The sky is an awesome shade of blue today, so you mix some colours and put it on your canvas. Your colour choice wasn’t completely your own, was it? Even if you thought the colour of the sky was a nice blue, it just needed a touch more green to make it perfect, you’ve still taken the sky colour and changed it. You’ve added onto something that already exists. I know this seems like a bit of a silly argument, but I feel sometimes like things are getting this way.

When does something move from being one person’s original idea, to such a widely used technique that it’s fair game for anyone. This question is kinda a big deal in nearly ever field I imagine, but particularly in the areas where you have to create things, and particularly in the crafting world, because so many people are online sharing ideas.

To put all of this into context, here’s an example:

I’ve recently been working on a scrapbooking layout that uses concertina folds to hold heaps of photos (see photo below).

Is this an original layout? I certinaly thought about it myself, and came up with it. Originally I had planned to do a big grid, but when I ended up with too many photos for the grid, I tried a few other techniques, until deciding on this one. The concertina idea I first did here, as part of an online challenge. As with a lot of challenges, I scrap-lifted the entire page. That’s what we were meant to do. But once I’d done that was the technique mine to adapt, change, and use? Or was I scrap-lifting that part of the layout again? All over the interwebs now there are dozens of concertina style scrapbooking pages. Was this an original idea from the person who created the challenge?

When I first started this layout, before I started thinking about this, I considered this conertina style a tool in my scrapbooking toolkit. It’s a technique that I plan to use over and over, because it’s an effective way of including way more photos than you can normally fit on a page. But as I started to think about copying etc. I wondered if this was an okay layout. Okay for my personal album, sure, but okay to show on my blog? Okay to submit to a magazine? To what point should I give credit for ideas and inspiration? This layout is considerably different to the one I first saw this technique on. Are techniques okay to copy? At what point does it happen that so many people use this technique it can’t be credited to one person anymore. And like I say above, do I even know that the person who created the layout I saw it off had the original idea? Maybe they saw it on someone else’s page, who knows?!

I guess none of this is important if it’s just in my own album, but when if someone admires this page, and asks me to teach the layout at their local scrapbooking shop. So I go there, and I get paid to show everyone how to make this layout. Should I give credit back to where I first saw the concertina idea, where I first saw a page with four blocks, where I first saw little strips of paper on the sides of photos, where I first saw someone ink the edges of the paper? What if that source isn’t online? Should I saw I learnt about inking edges from a lady, I can’t remember her name, her taught us some cardmaking about 5 years ago?

Or is this page far enough removed from the original layouts I saw all those techniques on that I can safely call it my own. Who’s to say as well that I didn’t just think of this idea myself? Say I did, and I submitted this layout to a magaine, and I didn’t credit anyone. I just made up every single element myself. Then someone sees this and thinks “Hey! I have a layout that has four conertina boxes on it! You must have copied my layout and just removed one of the boxes!”. Umm… no. But who’s to know who created the original idea. Who even cares?

I guess all this thinking out loud leads me to the conclusion that when we make stuff, we need to accept that there are no original ideas. Someone in the world has probably aready thought of it and done it before. It may be an original idea to you, yes, but to everyone? Maybe not. Maybe we’re too worried about copying and copyright and crediting people. On the other hand, maybe I’m not taking this serious enough. It’s okay for ME to say that it doesn’t matter- my creative ideas aren’t my livelyhood. What about the person who rellies of people buying their unique products so that they can pay their bills, and eat.

Is there a happy medium? Is there a line in the sand so we all know when what we’re doing is acceptable, and when it’s not acceptable? Maybe a percentage?

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What To Do If You Don’t Really Like a Handmade Gift

December 12th, 2011
handmadegifts

This is the final installment of the handmade gifts series where we’ll deal with that awkward scenario where you really don’t like the gift you’ve been given! Not liking a handmade gift isn’t the end of the world, just remember to keep the following things in mind…

1. Say thank you anyway

It should always be your first reaction to any gift, but just in case you forgot, say “Thank you”! And you know what? Even if you have already said thank you once, it definitely can’t hurt to say it again! Saying thankyou reinforces in your own mind that you are thankful (at the very least) for the effort, and time ther person has put into making this, even if it’s not something you particuarly want or like.

2. Remember its the thought that counts

Sometimes remembering why we should appreciate handmade gifts helps us to remember that it’s the thought that counts. The time, energy, thought, and creativity that have been put in are all worth something, and are as much a part of the gift as the item itself. Spend a bit of time remembering that those things are all part of the gift, and things won’t seem so bad!

3. Put yourself in their shoes

Have a think about WHY they might have made this for you. Can this give you some sort of valuable insight into who you appear to be to others. Also, perhaps you can think of other imporant factors relating to the gift. Is the gift not in a colour you like? Maybe that colour means something to them, or has special significance? It also can’t help to ask (in the nicest tone possible) why they chose that colour, shape, size etc. Something along the lines of “Oh that’s an interesting pattern, did you find that fabric while you were overseas?” Then they might proceed to tell you about how the fabric was from the op-shop and they were trying to reuse things this year, or they might tell you about how it use to be a really ugly colour, and they tried dying it themselves and it didn’t work out quite how they planned!

4. Think of an alternate use for the gift

So you don’t like tea, and you got given a handmade clay teacup. Not a problem! Maybe you can use it as a coin collector, for special hot chocolates, or even for storing buttons! There’s (hardly) ever just ONE use for something. Try to get a bit creative and see if there’s a way you can ‘up’ or ‘re’ cycle it into something you will use more often!

*** Note: I’m not recommending that you ALTER the gift you’ve been given, just find a different purpose. People might get offended if you ‘recycle’ the painting you gave them by painting your own over the top! ***

5. Forge a better friendship with them so they know what you Like or next time!

No one’s saying that this person isn’t a good friend because they don’t know what you like, but friendships can always be improved! Try to spend some time with them doing things you enjoy, or lend them something you really love. Next time you’re getting a gift they might have a better idea of what you do and don’t like.

 

Read about why you should appreciate handmade gifts here, and how to appreciate handmade gifts here.

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How To Appreciate Handmade Gifts

December 5th, 2011
handmadegifts

Well, it’s another week in our handmade fits series! And now that you know WHY you should appreciate handmade gifts I thought I’d share with you a few suggestions on how to appreciate those gifts. Ob course, this isn’t a definiteive list, so I would love to hear your suggestions of other ways to show your appreciation in the comments below!

1. Say “thank you”

It seems pretty basic, but it really is the most important thing to remember. A sincere thank you will show that you appreciate the time, thought and effort gone into the gift. Adding a “Oh, this must have taken forever, you’re so clever!” to the end doesn’t hurt either!

2. Use and Display it

Nothing beats going round to a friend’s house and they’ve got something you made on their wall or mantel. Even if you only put it up for a short while, it’s a really simply way of showing the gift maker that the ‘thankyou’ you professed before wasn’t just lip service!

3. Show it off/recommend their talent!

Similar to the above point- you’re over at someone’s place for dinner and you mention to everyone, “Did you see the placemats JoJo made me for my birthday?” if JoJo is there then she’s super embarrassed (in a good way!), and if she’s not then who knows, your appreciation might be passed along the grapevine! I’ve taken to showing a picture or two on facebook or twitter. Just remember to take a photo when you’re using it!

4. Make something for them

People who like making handmade gifts usually like receiving then too so have a go yourself at making something. At the very least you’ll have a new appreciation for the effort they’ve put in!

5. Smile

A big smile when you first receive the gift says it all. You really do like it. Don’t forget to smile!

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Why You Should Appreciate Handmade Gifts

November 28th, 2011
handmadegifts

This is a series I posted back in April on my old blog. As we near to Christmas I thought it was worth revisiting, in case you’re given something handmade this year.

A lot of people keep saying that this year they will be aiming to give handmade gifts whenever possible. That’s what I tried to do in 2009 but I found that my experience wasn’t particularly positive. I found that people didn’t really appreciate what a handmade gift meant. That’s why I’ve started this three part series. So if you’re sending off handmade gifts, maybe send them these links first so that you’re not dissapointed!

In this series we’ll have a look at WHY you should appreciate handmade gifts, HOW you can appreciate handmade gifts, and also what to do if you really DON’T LIKE the handmade gift!! But lets start at the beginning…

You should appreciate handmade gifts because…

1) They take time to make.

People spend approximately 1/2 hour choosing and buying a gift for someone at birthdays and Christmas. On average, a handmade gift takes about 2 to 3 hours to choose, buy supplies and make. That’s 5 times longer! I don’t know anyone who has tons of time to spare, so making a gift yourself is a bit of a sacrifice.

2) They thought about what they thought you would like.

In my experience of both giving and receiving, handmade gifts are far more personal. I can buy an iTunes giftcard for anyone, but in making you something I’ve thought about the colours you like, what would look good in your house, and what I know about you as a person!

3) At the end of the day it was probably more expensive then just buying something.

We like to think that making things ourself is cheap and thrifty. It CAN be those things, but a lot of the time, it’s not. You can get mass produced items so cheaply now-a-days that handmade items are really quite expensive. Remember above how I said it could take over 2 hours to make? Well if somone’s time is worth $25 an hour, your gift already costs $50, and that’s without the cost of the supplies, or their expertise!

Even if you take time cost out of consideration, lots of crafters can’t help but add extra embelishments, buttons, and special fabrics to gifts for friends and family. All those little bits add up!

4) It’s personal.

I started to touch on this in point 2, but let me re-iterate it again. This gift is made expecially for YOU. The person who made it was thinking of you wearing/looking/loving/using this particular item when they made it! That’s a pretty special thing in today’s world!

5) It’s the thought the counts.

Everyone shows their love in different ways. Spending time making something special is this person’s way of saying “I LOVE YOU!”. It might not be the way you receive love, but when it comes to relationships, we’ve got to be flexible and appreciate the person for who they are!

Gary Chappman’s 5 Love Languages are a good place to start if you’re interested in such things.

BONUS
6) They didn’t just do it ‘because they had to’.

Have you ever felt that becuase you bought Alice a gift, you really should buy Lucy one too? Well handmade gifts are too precious and time consuming for this to be the case (or at the very least it doesn’t spread very far down the friendship line!). Remember that this gift has been given to you because you truely are a special friend or family member. It’s not just something someone picked up from the impulse isle and thought “This’ll do!”.

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Scrapbooking Question- The Past

November 18th, 2011

Scrapbooking question:

Source: google.com via Biz on Pinterest

 

If you’re going through and scrapbooking your life, and you come across some photos from a time of your life you’d kinda rather forget (maybe you had a run in later on with those friends, or it just wasn’t a super fun time of life, or whatever), what do you do?

Do you…

A) Include the photos (at least just a page of them) anyway, because you’re a stickler for a ‘complete’ album.

B) Just include all of them- they were a part of your life, embrace it.

C) Ignore them.

 

To put this into context. I use to be friends someone who I spent a LOT of time with, in a time of my life when I would take 100-300 photos EVERY time we went out somewhere. We’re not really friends anymore, so I’m not sure I want to fill up pages and pages of my scrapbook with memories of that person. I DO however want to remember the scenes/places/events we went to. I guess the fourth option is to just include pictures of me/other people, and keep the photos of those people minimal?

 

I would appreciate your thoughts on the question in general, and also to my specific context…! Thankyou. :-)

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How I Release My Creativity

October 16th, 2011
drawing

This post was originally written on September 5th, 2009. While some of the statments about a) working, b) being creatively drained and c) drawing lately aren’t completley true or relevant now, it’s still a good reminder for me to get the pens out and draw- after all, you can’t release your creativity too much, can you?


I come from a creative family. My childhood involved a lot of painting (on paper, ourselves, and the veranda), dress-ups, collage, and projects with boxes. We had a box in the cupboard which was always full of old cereal boxes, egg cartons, toilet rolls and other handy bits like ribbon and paint. Each christmas we’d make things to decorate the house, and at the start of the year we’d make covers for our books.

Despite all this creativity, I was never good at drawing. I still did it though. Sometimes. But Rhys was the drawer. In fact, I think he was generally considered to be the creative one even though we all had our creative quirks.

I’ve always liked art. Painting mostly, and now I’m also into ‘crafts’- which is good, because I can learn so much of that from Nanna. It’s been a while since I painted. Despite the encouragement from my husband- I just haven’t had time. When I finish work I want to crash, not be creative and alive. Lets face it, being creative makes you alive. At least it does for me.

A few months ago I realised I’ve been feeling more then a little creatively drained. I can’t think of anything in particular that has drained me, but I think that exhaustion/busy-ness is what’s stopped the creativity flow through me. I was feeling dead. In the last few weeks though, I’ve been slowly, slowly increasing my creative levels, and in the process, my happiness. I’ve done this through drawing. :-O

I’m not a particularly good drawer. I can see things, and put them onto paper, which I guess is drawing… But I’m best at copying. So what I’ve been doing, is forcing myself, every 1-2 days to draw/copy something.

Sometimes I scan the inter-webs for cute pictures, and I copy them. They’re still a little bit of me- and I get comfortable with the way pictures work, and I trust myself to draw cute things. The first time I did it, the other week, it was the most amazingly crazy experience. As in, my world was thrown upside down and my brain was going crazy- like it hadn’t in so long. I may have been drawing things that other people had thought of, but I was still utalising that Right side of my brain!! It was indescribably. I guess (I don’t know) it would be something like being high… My work was spinning, and there were colours everywhere, and the words people said were beautiful typography… oh wait, that’s just normal life…

The point of all this is to say, if you’re feeling a little creatively drained, then pick up a pen, draw some squiggles (even if they’re of nothing), and let the creativity flow!

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What To Do When You’re Lacking Creative Motivation

September 16th, 2011
planning

Image source

It’s unfortunate to say that more often then not I lack the motivation to finish projects I start. Often they’re just too big, or other things take priority. Either way, I have a huge pile of unfinished things that will quite possibly never get done. So what can we do when that motivation lacks, and it looks like our projects aren’t going to get finished.

Lets use my bookshelf project as an example, because I’m definitely lacking a bit of motivation to finish it at the moment.

Reassess and Fall In Love Again

I think it’s important, when you’re lacking motivation to let yourself take a break. Sometimes when we have unfinished projects (due to motivation) the time we spend not doing it, we spend thinking and feeling guilty about it. So stop. Give yourself some guilt-free time away from the project. And when that time is up (make sure you set the time before you start- a week is good), start dreaming of how lovely the FINISHED project will be in your home!

Project Bookshelf?

Check Where You’ve Come From

Checking where the project started, and how far through you are can be a big motivator.

So, in taking my own advice, here’s what I’ve achieved so far with the bookshelf:

* All seperate shelves covered

* Top half of backboard done

* Started on middle shelf (attached)

* Started on inside of top half

Break It Down

The next thing I need to do is break the project down. The bookshelf is a huge task, probably a lot more time cosuming then I first anticipated, so I need to break down what’s left, and make it more managable. Lets look at that now:

* Trim off seperate shelves so they’re completley done

* Finish attached shelf

* Finish insides of top half

* Do back of bottom half

* Do insides of bottom half

* Do left side (outside)

* Do right side (outside)

* Do funny bit at the bottom

* Seal outside of shelves

* Seal outside of bookshelf

Assign Time

Now that we’ve broken what’s left into bite sized chunks, you can be a bit more confident to assign appropraite time slots to do it. Don’t be affraid to spread the project out for a week if it’s really monotinous. Monotny is the enemy of motivation!

So with my big, monotinous project, I’m going to assign one morning, and one afternoon session each free day until it’s done. Here’s how it might look:

Friday AM (3/4 – 1 hour) Finish inside of top half, Finish shelf

Friday PM (1/2 – 3/4 hour) Trim dettached shelves so they’re ready to be sealed, Do back of bottom half

Monday AM Insides of bottom half

Monday PM Left side (start at least)

Wednesday AM Finish left side, Right Side

Wednesady PM Bottom bit

Thursday AM Finish all sealing

Stick To The Plan

So you’ve got ‘work’ assigned to do for today, but you’re just not in the mood? Well skipping once or twice is fine, but there does come a time where, if you’re going to finish the project, you just need to get in a do it! Make sure you spend the allocated time really working on your project. Just think, the faster you get it done, the less days you have to work on it!

 

Do you have tips for when you’re lacking motivation?

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Memory Keeping On An Overseas Holiday

August 2nd, 2011
scrap-map1

Overseas Holiday? Well, I may as well let the beans spill that I’m off to Asia tomorrow morning! How crazy is that?! We’re spending a day and a half in Malaysia, and then we’re meant to be going to Seoul, South Korea. Unfortunately there are some major problems in South Korea at the moment, including floods, land slides and a cyclone! So, our plan is to spend our day and a half in Malaysia, and then re-assess from there! Lucky for us we have no return flights booked, so we’re really free as birds to explore Asia as we wish for the next week and a half!

So, back to the original question. How does a scrapbooker (or an memory keeper I guess) record the stories of a holiday. Two ways.

Physical:

There are physical things from your trip that you will want to keep. Travel tickets, entry tickets, maps, brochures, receipts even!

So I just get a bunch of envelopes. One for each day (plus a few spares). On the front of each envelope, I put the date. As we set off in the morning, I take that envelope with me in my bag, and fill it with tickets etc. as we go. On the front of the envelope I can also write down the places we stopped.

If I happen to have a map, sometimes I will trace out the journey for that day. It makes a great background in scrapbooking, and is a bit more interesting then a regular map!

scrapbooking with a map
scrapbooking with a map

Online/Computer Based:

We travel with our iPad. It’s handy because we can tether to it from our phones if we need internet on the go (and we have a local sim card), we can connect to wifi, and you can also just use it with no internet at all. We also download all our photos onto it, so that our SD card is free for the next day!

At the end of each day I force myself to write down the stories of that day. I say ‘force’ because some days you REALLY don’t feel like writing anything down. You’re tired, and it’s time consuming. But it’s worth it. When we went to Europe I spent time at the end of each day writing a blog post (sometimes it wouldn’t get posted for a few days though, because of lack of internet).  I think I wrote somewhere how ‘today I really don’t want to write this, I just want to go to bed’, but really, if I hadn’t of written that, I would have forgotten! And imagine all the other things I would have forgotten by now! Keeping a journal (the more detail the better), is invaluable on your trip. If you know you won’t be home till after midnight because of a show, and you’ll be tired, then start your journal during lunch. That way in the morning you only need to record the second half of the day!

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As you scrapbook your journey afterwards, you will have tons of information kept. Those borchures are great for re-writing facts about the place you went, and can make lovely backgrounds for pages. The journalling provides the stories, which, in my opinion, are sometimes even more valuable then the photos!

 

 

Luke and I will be blogging our holiday over at our personal blog, and Number 19 will be taking a short, 12 day break. But we’ll be back up and running on the 14th with an update on how our August Brown Owls meeting went!

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