Photo by Aussiegall

I’m back. Did you miss me?? I know I’ve been neglecting you all recently but it’s been for a good reason…

Over the past few months I have been working hard on a new and improved list of sewing blogs. I am hugely thrilled and humbled by the success of the current list. Maintaining the list and the blog in my limited spare time became a constant struggle and in the end I didn’t do either.

Sewing-blogs.com is much more than just a list. It allows you to comment and tag all of the blogs. The sewing world is an amazing community that I am privileged to be a member of. My wish is that Sewing-blogs.com can become a small corner of that community where people can find new and exciting blogs to read and can strike up some conversations in the comments.

If your blog isn’t listed there is an easy form to add your blog and once approved you will be part of the list.

When you next have a spare hour to get lost reading the many amazing blogs on the list can I suggest you check out sewing-blogs.com, create yourself an account and help to extend our fabulous community.

how can I help??

There are a number of ways you could help:

1) spread the word – please tell all your friends about this blog post and sewing-blogs.com

2) grab a badge – if your blog is listed then help tell the world and put a badge on your site

3) get involved – the way sewing-blogs.com becomes truly helpful is when there are lots of people tagging and commenting on the blogs

4) subscribe – lastly I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog, I promise to write more frequently now the new list is up and running!

The Big List of Sewing Blogs is growing longer and longer, so I was wondering about how to format it? I thought the best thing to do is to ask the people who use it – so what do you want me to do?

Keep it as one long list?

Move it into pages – if so how many blogs per page?

I have a huge backlog of blogs to add – so if you’re waiting to hear back or you’re waiting for your Technorati rank to be updated, then please be patient – I’ll get there!

I will also write up a few posts that I’ve had on the back burner – if I tell you about them I have to writ them up :

How I taught myself to knit using the internet

A tutorial on transferring patterns to fabric for embroidery

and pretty pictures from a recent course in silk shading at the Royal School of Needlework and of a workshop in Blackwork embroidery.

Just surfacing from an amazing holiday

I’ve been back for a couple of weeks but laundry and life have gotten in the way of my blogging!

I returned to 800 unread blog posts, around 70 blog submissions for the big list and a huge pile of work at my day job.. So apologies to those waiting to get added to the list – you’re all on the database now, just waiting for me to republish the list.. but that’s not working at the moment, so while you’re being even more patient here are some photos from Tanzania:

Sorry folks – I was away for just a few days and had a technical glitch with the list! A few of the blogs disappeared off the list – thankfully it’s all fixed now, but if you spot any more probs – just drop me a line!

I’m often asked how my list of sewing and craft blogs is generated and what the numbers mean so I thought I would try to shed a little light on the matter. Basically it all boils down to magic! Sorry wasn’t that what you wanted to hear?

Firstly, the list has been generated two ways. I added a lot of the blogs that I read on a daily basis which got the list going. Since then people email me asking to be added to the list. I’ve tried to ensure that all the sites I’ve added are blogs that are updated regularly, relatively non commercial and talk about sewing or crafts. I hope this keeps the quality of the list high, and makes it a valuable resource for you. If you aren’t already on the list of sewing blogs, please feel free to email me with your site, and I’ll get you added.

The numbers that are assigned are taken from technorati. They rank blogs based on the number of links from other blogs. I’ll post in future about how you can increase this number. You can read more about this on the technorati blog.

So, the list is hand generated by me (aren’t I good ) but the score is based on technorati.

If you have any questions please leave a comment. If you are on the list and haven’t already added a sewing badge, I would certainly appreciate you helping me spread the word (and increase my technorati rank ). And if you aren’t already listed on the site, then please drop me a line.

Have a good weekend.

I had time to kill in Wimbledon on Saturday and went browsing in a bookstore – a favourite habit of mine I always make sure I go check out craft and sewing books and I happened across this book

It’s now high on my wish list!

The author has a blog – yarnstorm which went straight in at number 5 on My List of Sewing Blogs!!

Check out the beautiful photography over at yarnstorm. My lack of photography skills is the reason I still haven’t posted my take it further challenge piece for january .. I’ll get Duncan to give me a couple of lessons with the camera!

In the mean time, I hope you all had a good Pancake day yesterday – we had to get inventive with fillings as we had no lemon for my favourite lemon and sugar(!) Banana, honey and whisky was particularly scrummy!

I’m heading off to a rehearsal for the Man of La Mancha now and have a supply of Valentine’s day cards to sell – stage one of suzical store, sell to friends..

I just received an email from Feruzan over at LimonVerde and was very excited to see her tatting – it’s a skill I’ve yet to learn from my Mum!!

I added the 100th blog to my big list of sewing blogs this week!

Check it out! I received the link direct from Rebecca of Miller Campbell Designs.

She’s an Appalachian artist and makes beautiful dolls, like the one pictured here – have a look at her gallery.

If you’re not on the list, do drop me a line and if you are on there check out my badges.

I can’t believe I’ve got 86 blogs on my list now!

I know it would be very easy to Google sewing blogs and just spend a few hours adding them – but I made a bit of a personal rule to add blogs that I have either stumbled across or someone’s recommended/sent to me – partly to make it more of a challenge and mainly so I can have a good browse around them all as I add them!

One of my latest additions is iHanna’’s blog. Hanna sent me a gorgeous bookmark for the Bookmark swap organised by Crafty Daisy – here are photos of other bookmarks in the swap – there’s some great eye candy and it’s a fabulously diverse group!

I didn’t really expect to see so much movement within My big list of sewing blogs, certainly not so quickly – but 43 blogs have had an increase in their Technorati score in the last week.

The reason I realised was Sew Mama Sew moved up into the top 5. It’s obviously been a good week for them as they also made the top 1000 blogs on bloglines! I’m guessing the main reason for all this activity is the Handmade holidays series they’re running- a set of themed tutorials for Christmas gifts everyday throughout November. It’s certainly how I found the blog and I’m now fully subscribed..

New blogs on the list this week include some fab eye candy and beautiful fabric from Pink Lemonade Boutique, Indigo Blue and Arty Lady’s blog.

If you’re on the list why not show off with a badge, if you’re not on the list please leave a comment or email me..

Thanks to Susan D for sending me the following links to be added to the Big List of Sewing Blogs:

Art of textiles and Art of stitch Both are sites recording Susan’s beautiful embroidery, and following her progress through a City and Guilds course..

I also stumbled across i have to say yesterday, when looking through a list of links to tutorials, which I can’t find anymore, but think it was on whip up. The tutorials on this site look really easy to follow, I’m certainly going to try the band of colour tute!

and a search for sewing blogs turned up the wittily named Behind the Seams!