I often come across friends and acquaintances who think that writing a craft book means I’m rolling in fat stacks of book cash and am having an orgy of unlimited spending and shopping. Not so. Not so by a long shot.
Right now I’m in the midst of the toughest part (besides writing) of [...]

I made the decision a couple of weeks ago to revamp the entire site. While I had planned on undertaking a restructuring later this year, a complete meltdown of my Wordpress backend bumped up my timeline by, oh, 4 or 5 months. I’m 1.5 weeks into it; 1 week longer than I anticipated and still [...]

DIYBride.com is up but not functional at the moment. I’ll be pulling it down soon and replacing it with a whole new site. The entire back end is FUBAR. It may be hacked but all of the indicators for the common ones aren’t there. I think it’s likely some foo that’s been festering for a [...]

I’ve nailed down my projects for ATR. I think there’s a good balance of project types, techniques, skill levels, and costs.
Right now my time is spent sourcing materials. As someone who hates to shop, this part of the process is one I don’t look forward to. I love the part of looking at beautiful ribbon, [...]

Last week I launched Plumage, a fashion and beauty blog for the plus-size bride. This is the second time I’ve created such a site; the first one was called BigBeautifulBrides and I operated it from 2001 – 2005. After I was approached to write a DIY book, I closed BBB to pursue a life of [...]

A few weeks ago reader amy8904 asked how craft book writers come up with the projects they put in their books. I’m sure that for every craft writer it’s different; I can only speak for my own process. My project selection criteria goes something like this:

The theme of the book. The first book was general [...]

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet but I signed a deal for book #3, another wedding craft book, to be published in 2012 by the Taunton Press (who’ve pub’d my last 2 books). Along with #3 will come two special-edition DIY Bride magazines in 2011 and 2012, something I’m out-of-my-mind excited about.
Here’s the [...]

I’m just about to abandon my Facebook account due to the egregious privacy violations they’ve sprung upon us. With social media comes great social responsibility; FB is failing their members.

via @chrisbrogan: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html
via @chrisbrogan: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html?src=tptw
Timeline of Facebook Privacy by Cory Doctorow: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/29/timeline-of-facebook.html
The Eroding Privacy Policy of Facebook via the Electronic Frontier Foundation: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

How about those predatory [...]

My email box has been an endless source of fascination and overwhelm for me. It started about 2 years ago when DIYBride started accelerating in traffic and about the time I got pregnant. Because I was hideously sick throughout the entire first 6 months of pregnancy, I was pretty much relegated to lying on the [...]

This week’s “I’m a Douchebag Spammer” Award goes to valotparty@gmail.com who posted the comment below to 25 posts on DIYBride. (I have to say that I really love Disqus for comment moderation.)
What I love about the missive from sumit_123 is that it tries to pass itself off as a financially struggling couple who used this [...]