Red Instead BLOG

Archive for February, 2008

birdy art

Friday, February 15, 2008 @ 9:53 am
Filed under art, collage, painting

Hi! Are you a new or recent visitor to my blog? I hope you stick around and have a bit of a read. To make it easier to keep up to date with new content, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Of course, feedback is always appreciated and leaving a comment is a great way for me to come and check out your site.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any art or collage. I have been feeling the need to get out the paints and stamps again lately and I’ve been getting in the mood by reading (or re-reading) some great books and magazines on the subject.

Then yesterday I took a deep breath and got started. I ended up doing two canvases!

Paint, paper, ink, pencil, marking pen. One on 9 x 12″ and one on 10 x 12″ canvas with sawtooth hook mounted on reverse side, ready to hang.

It was fun and I think my style and technique has improved since I last had a go at collage. What do you think?

ps. These two are available to buy over at www.redinstead.com.au

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handbag love

Thursday, February 7, 2008 @ 7:43 pm
Filed under bags I have made, sewing

I have been busy making some new bags over the last couple of weeks, then this afternoon I sent them off to in.cube8r in Melbourne. If you’re in the area, you can see these bags, as well as my doily singlets and button jewellery at in.cube8r which is at 321 Smith Street, Fitzroy. Pop in and say hi to Isy!

I am planning to make some more in these same styles for my web store so stay tuned.

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Something Else

Wednesday, February 6, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
Filed under stuff n nonsense, those crazy kids

I have been a bit slack. You see, there is a new member of my family that you haven’t met yet. We have another baby but she has four legs and extremely big pointy ears! Yes, we got a puppy for Christmas!!!

Her name is Little Miss Something Else - but we call her Elsie!

She is the cutest thing and we all love her to bits! She is a Jack Russell, though I believe those incredible ears may give away that she isn’t purebred. We’re not sure about her exact parentage but we do know that she is extremely gorgeous!

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geeky WordPress stuff

Wednesday, February 6, 2008 @ 11:29 am
Filed under blogging, lovely links, site updates, stuff n nonsense, tutorial

I have been installing a few new WordPress plug-ins to my blog and doing a bit of behind the scenes fixing up around here:

I sorted through all the plug-ins on my blog and upgraded to newer versions and got rid of some useless ones. You can now see a listing of all the plugins I use on this site (in case you want to use any of them too) and you can use Viper’s Plugins Used plugin to make your own list.

I installed the very handy OneClick Installer plugin - this genious bit of code installs any plugin or theme without having to download, unzip then upload via FTP. Sometimes if the folder structure of the plugin is different to normal, this autoinstaller doesn’t do the job properly (in which case you just download, unzip, upload and install as before) but it works for the majority of plugins and is a real time and hassle saver.

I have done up a new people-friendly Site Map, that displays all the previous posts sorted into categories, using the Site Map Generator plugin.

I did a very quick upgrade of WordPress 2.3.2 to 2.3.3 just to be tidy. If you have multiple posters on your WordPress blog, you need this! Just for info, if you haven’t got yourself the Automatic Upgrade plugin then you are crazy. I used to dread upgrading my blog as I have customised it quite a lot but this tool takes care of everything for you, even ensuring you do all the necessary backups before you begin.

I improved my Contact Form. I used Contact Form with Spam Protection plugin so that it now blocks pesky robot spam.

I changed the Permalinks on my site so that for instance, www.jenleheny.com/archives/158 is now www.jenleheny.com/pillowcase-dress-instructions and I used a Permalink Migration plugin to ensure that no bookmarks or links from other sites were disrupted. This means that if you have a post of mine linked in the old format then you don’t need to update it - the magic of the plugin will still send people to the right place.

I added the fun CommentLuv plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenter’s blog just below their comment here on my blog.

I used the Dashboard Editor plugin to give myself a much more useful first page on the Admin side of things.

I set up a cool StumbleUpon-like random post link using the Random Redirect plugin - you can try it out here.