Saturday afternoon was spent at Caitlyn’s house, where we both set up our sewing machines and worked on sewing our Amy Butler bags.

We had a surprisingly productive afternoon! I went from this:

To this:

In a matter of just a few hours!

The unlined Madison bag is a bit on the droopy side. Instead of using heavy iron-on interfacing, I used heavy canvas sew-on interfacing. Thus, the bag is not really structurally sound. I’m going to experiment with the lining, and add some iron on interfacing to the lining. Perhaps that will help stabilize things a bit.

Caitlyn also made some good progress on her Amy Butler messenger bag. Here’s an action shot:

It looks like there are a couple of new patterns on the AB site… take a look at the adorable Cabo halter top! I MUST HAVE that pattern!

And, finally, a bunch of people have commented on my header image. That’s a picture I took in my backyard last summer, when the bees were out in my purple coneflowers (aka Echinacea). I think this is one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken. Here’s the original image. I edited it using Photoshop Elements to get a properly sized header.

Well, the title says it all. The computer is lucky to still be alive. I have spent the last 4 hours (at least) trying to figure out how to get WordPress to e-mail me comments. Apparently comment email notification no worky in WP 2.0.2. At least not for me. And others seem to be having similar problems.

So, what do we do around here when something doesn’t work? Why, we FIX it! After hours of staring at lines of code that I vaguely understand (and by “vauguely”, I mean only that I can pronounce a majority of words on the page), I thought I found a work around. Turns out that someone has developed a SMTP email plugin that will replace WordPress’s native e-mail function. Whee! A plugin! We know how to use those!

And… I installed the plugin. And, it doesn’t work. Aaaaarrrgghhhhh! Apparently it hasn’t been updated to work with 2.0.2 yet.

I’m at a complete loss on this one. Either I teach myself enough php to rewrite the plugin to work with this version of WP (yeah, that will happen), or I give up on comment notification until someone else comes up with a solution. I’m not liking my options so much.

This silly web site is seriously cutting into my knitting time. At times, the geek in me really enjoys playing with it and learning new things. But, when things start going wrong, the engineer in me wants to stay up until all hours of the night figuring out a way to fix it. And that is just not going to happen tonight, or probably ever.

To top it all off, my web host turns out to be not-so-great, and has been unavailable for quite a while this evening. I fear that my problems are on the host’s side of things, but I understand so little about what my problem is that I’m not even sure how to ask them about it without sounding like the idiot that I likely am. Sigh.

In sum: there will be no e-mail responses to comments just yet. I’m still glad I migrated from Blogger. I wish I had a clue about php, css, and all the other good stuff that goes into a web site, but I think I’m starting to catch on a bit (very very slowly).

Any WP users have problems with this? How did you fix it? [nevermind, see below]

Edited to add: Holy crap! I got the plugin working! SWEET! I ROCK! Well, not so much actually. I was an idiot the first time I installed the plugin, and installed the individual files in the plugin folder, rather than copying the entire plugin folder over. Doh! I guess it makes a difference in the directory structure.��

Hello, and welcome to On Pins & Needles! This site is a work in progress, so please let me know if you notice anything funky going on. Please be patient as I get everything up and running over here. Normally, I would not go live with a site that wasn’t quite complete, but rather than give up blogging for weeks while I get everything perfect, I figured phasing things in over here would be a reasonable solution.

Over the next week or two, I plan to add more features to the blog. For now, I’m just thrilled to be rid of Blogger, hopefully for good!

For those of you who subscribe using Bloglines or NewsGator, please update your subscriptions! My new feed can be found here.

And, if you’re easily amused, try clicking on some of the pictures in my previous posts. Neat, isn’t it? That’s the LightBox plug-in.