Some of you may have experienced problems when trying to access PlanetJune lately. I’ve been complaining to my webhost for months about intermittent errors that happen sometimes, for some people, and they haven’t been able to help at all – all they said was that there were no server problems. It’s been highly frustrating!

They finally admitted on Thursday (coincidentally, just after I renewed with them for another year – I hope they will give me a refund!) that my website is just too popular for them to handle:

You are receiving a very large amount of daily traffic to your sites and this is the cause of the long loading times and 503 errors. This kind of traffic is much too large for a shared hosting environment. I would recommend moving your sites to a VPS or dedicated hosting provider.

So, I’ve just signed up for a new and expensive VPS (virtual private server). This means that I won’t be sharing system resources with any other people any more, and I should have more than enough resources for PlanetJune.com pages (and FoldingTrees.com pages, incidentally) to always load quickly and without errors 🙂

I have another announcement and a new amigurumi tutorial for you, but I’ll save them until you can see them on the new server – there’s a waiting period until “planetjune.com” points to the new server (it takes a couple of days). If you’ve been having problems loading my shop or any other pages, these should all be resolved shortly – thank you so much for your patience!

A few little things for you today:

Discount on my book

If you haven’t yet got around to buying my new book and kit, Paper Chains & Garlands, I’ve got a sweet deal from Barnes & Noble for you: a discount for 10% off the highest-price item in your online order (only valid until October 19th, so hurry up if you want to take advantage of it!)

And if you’re doing that, an easy way to find my book is to search for ‘gilbank’ on the B&N site – mine is the first result!

Creativ Festival

The Creativ Festival in Toronto is fast approaching – it’s on next Friday to Sunday (16th-18th)! Due to a scheduling mix-up my class is on the Friday, not the Saturday, and I can’t make it for both days, so I’ll only be there on Friday October 16th. I’m really sorry if you were hoping to see me on the Saturday 🙁

If you are coming on Friday 16th, come and see me at A Needle Pulling Thread magazine’s booth; that’s booth #527. I’ll be there with a selection of my creations all day Friday except when I’m teaching, and I’ll have show special discounts on my patterns, plenty of eyes and stitch markers on offer, and a new cute PlanetJune business card for you to pick up!

If you’re interested in learning how to make amigurumi, there are still some spaces left for my class, A Whale of a Crochet, where I’ll be teaching how to make this adorable little ami whale! (And if you can’t make it to the class but like my whale, check back here after the show finishes – it’ll be my next donationware pattern.)

I hope to see you at the Creativ Festival – I don’t know of any show like it; it’s like heaven for crafters! Bring plenty of money though, because you won’t be able to resist all the tempting craft supplies. I wish I could attend as a customer, although my bank balance is happy I’ll be on duty there instead 🙂

I was in Chapters bookstore yesterday and I thought I’d check out the latest issue of A Needle Pulling Thread magazine:

As I flipped through, the Editor’s letter page caught my eye.

A closer look:

It’s meee! Wearing my PlanetJune T-shirt at the spring Creativ Festival! What a nice surprise, although I have to say it’s pretty surreal to see my own face smiling back from inside a magazine…

Thank you, Carla and John, for featuring me in your designers’ gallery 🙂

Hi guys, I’m back from the UK – did you miss me? If you want to keep up with more of my day-to-day life (both crafty and more personal), you can follow me on Twitter. Send me a direct message if you do, so I know who you are and can follow you back!

Now I’m back home, I can show you the little presents I made for my parents. For Mum (a pianist) a music-inspired needlebook with blue (her favourite colour) felt pages:

And for Dad (always hard to buy for), a set of marble magnets featuring pics of his dog (they look better in person; the glass was tricky to photograph without reflections):

While I was sorting through all my old stuff at my Dad’s house, I found a bag containing 4 skeins of beautifully soft kid mohair yarn, in this pretty purple shade. I’m absolutely at a loss as to how I acquired this – I didn’t even crochet while I lived in the UK! Anyway, I’m not complaining – free yarn is always a good thing, especially when it’s quality yarn like this:

I whiled away my hours on the plane by crocheting fuzzy orange tubes to be the legs for my orang utan. Just the body and feet to go now…

I managed to bring back my mammoth Animal reference book in my carry-on backpack (and I have a bruise on my tailbone to prove it – the book is seriously large and weighs over 5kg!) – no worries that I will run out of animal inspiration now I have over 600 beautifully-photographed pages to pore through!

I also brought back some gardening books, as inspiration for some new plant designs. I have a lovely idea for a new plant-themed series of patterns, but I don’t want to jinx it by revealing it just yet…

And I’m expecting to see the initial layouts for my papercraft book this week – so exciting! I’ll post some pics when it’s all been finalised.

Now, time to get back to work! I’ll post again when I have something new to show you, and in the meantime you can see me on Twitter, or check out my latest tweets in the little widget in the right sidebar –>

Phew, 24 hours of panic are over… Yesterday all my websites were suspended – I don’t know if it was a mistake or if, once again, I’ve grown too big for my webhost to handle (remember the disaster of last March when I had to switch hosts?!) Until yesterday, my new host has been fantastic, so hopefully all will be well from now on.

It was a scary day without my website, and not the best start to my new self-employed career! Thanks for your patience while I was offline, and I’m so sorry if you wanted to buy any of my crochet patterns while I was gone (for future reference, my Etsy store is a good backup for pattern emergencies).

I will leave you with some better news: a sneak peek at my upcoming pattern…

More details and pics to follow soon!

Sorry for the blog silence; Dave and I have just got back from our vacation in Hawaii! It was long overdue, and it was wonderful. It was a bit of a shock when we got back home though; going from this:

to this:

Winter really hit while we were away. And our snowblower is refusing to start up… 🙁

Nothing much craft-related to report; I crocheted half a sock on the flights to Hawaii, but was too exhausted on the way back to finish it. We didn’t really do much shopping there either, but I did manage to pick up some locally-crafted jewellery from a Farmers’ Market, some fabric and a book on how to make crocheted leis.

Those polymer clay flowers are just begging me to try to replicate them!

Really, we went to see the local nature and wildlife, and we saw plenty of that – stunning scenery, beautiful exotic plants and all sorts of interesting birds and animals. I won’t go into long-winded details here, but my holiday journal and photos of all the amazing things we saw will all be online if you’d like to live it vicariously through me. I’m still working on the write-ups for the last couple of days – check back there soon if you want to see the rest of the trip…

     

Now I’m refreshed and inspired and now I can’t wait to get back into making stuff, once I’ve finished sorting through the rest of the holiday pics. We had a wonderful time, but it’s good to be back home. Aloha!