Where have I been?

Some months ago, in order to feed my budding interest in spinning, I joined the local Weavers Guild.  Since then, I’ve accidentally become more and more involved with the guild.

How does one become accidentally involved? In stages.  😉

It started out with me doing some tune-ups on the guild’s wheels.  Tune-ups that are still ongoing with some of the consumables being replaced.  While I’ve been doing these tune-ups, the questions naturally come about – why are you using this instead of that?  What about when this happens, etc.

Then it moved on to the talk of me teaching a class. 

What?  A spinning class?  No way!  I mean, I’ve been spinning less than a year!  So, not really a spinning class.  More a spinning-related class.  The topic of the class is spinning wheel maintenance.  Something that draws on my experience with working with the sewing machines and the wood cabinets and cases and applies it where it’s needed with these other somewhat more primitive but no less useful machines.  Add to that my experience rehabbing and repairing several wheels and building one from scratch and there’s a lot to learn in this class!

A Spinning wheel needs to be kept in shape to work well.  Just as a car needs oil changes and other maintenance at regular intervals, so too your wheel. Learn to maintain your wheel to make it last longer and spin better and more reliably.

The better you know your wheel, the better you can get it to spin how you want it to.

This empowering class will help you:

Recognize when your wheel needs adjustment and when it wants maintenance.

Learn some basic repairs that can keep it running when you’re away from home.

Learn how to recognize repairs and maintenance you can do yourself and what may need the help of your dealer.

Master your wheel’s mechanics to get the best performance out of it.

Coincidentally, this class falls on the 1 year anniversary of the day I took my first spinning lesson.  Weird, hey?  If this class proves popular, I will add it to the stable of classes  I offer here in the studio as well.

Teaching a class is not where my accidental involvement ended though.  When the position of Classes and Workshops Coordinator suddenly became vacant at the beginning of August, I was asked to take the position.  I accepted for the remainder of this year but had no idea the full scope of what I was agreeing to at the time.  Right now, it’s a very manual role that’s heavily dependent on humans to maintain the class registrations.  Luckily I’ve got the help of the guild president herself to get this role under control.  In the past few weeks and for the next several, my short term goal is to firmly pull the class registrations into the digital age and make the process more able to run itself.  (Needless to say, trying to keep up with my own business, AA stuff and the guild duties has taken up more time than I truly have to give but I expect it to be very temporary.)  In the meantime, that modernization has required some testing on my part. Edited: As of October 18th, I stepped down from this position.  It was taking too much volunteer time and there were some IT security issues that were violating my professional code of ethics.

Luckily, the guild uses WordPress for their website, just like I do here and the classes portion of it has similar requirements to AA hosting its own patterns.  So, AA has under-gone some changes in the past few weeks.

Wait, what?  AA hosts its own patterns?  That’s right –  as of today, if you’ve been interested in supporting AA and the information we bring you through the purchase of patterns I’ve written, you no longer have to join Craftsy to do it.

The shop puts all of the payment processing over to Paypal so no financial information is stored on AA.  Signing up here simply helps you re-download patterns should you need to.  I don’t even automatically add you to a newsletter if you create an account to shop.  Mostly because I don’t have time to do a newsletter either. 😉

If you want to check out the fledgling shop, it can be found at the top of the page under “Shop AA”.  I sure would grateful for any support you’d be willing to offer.  Our domain registration and hosting bills are about to come due and as always, any proceeds from pattern sales go first to supporting the site and equipment needed to make videos for you or to teach classes.  A while back, I wrote a page about why AA appreciates any support it receives.

Right now there are a whole 3 offerings.  2 pdf patterns (both of the patterns that were previously released on Craftsy) and a bundle of those first 2 pdf patterns.   I hope to be able to release the third pattern by the end of the week.   In the next little while, I also plan to add the paper patterns to the store as well.

I don’t currently foresee a full online store with everything I carry – that would be just too labor intensive to enter and maintain all of the items at this point but it does potentially open some options for some of the more common items people ask for being a little more available from me.  Maybe class gift certificates as well.

The other thing that’s changed and changing on the site is the captcha.  The version I was using was removed from WordPress and I need to test a new one.  Hopefully this will come without too much disruption or spam in the interim.  Please let me know if it does though.  If you can’t contact me about it via the site (if I break captcha but good!) you can find me on AA’s FB page or email me at tammi at archaic arcane dot com.

Today’s post title:  Never Mind – by The Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band.  I am on such a kick with this band right now.  For months, their albums have been the basis for all of my playlists.