(Previous stuff about my new puppet plans)

While everyone has been having a 5 day weekend (Aussies celebrate Easter weekend, but we also have Rememberance Day for WW I and II on the same weekend) I’ve been slaving away trying to get my latest book written. There were a lot of last minute problems and I ended up being 2 days off my deadline - but at least it’s done!

I’m now going to spend this week taking a bit of a break from SOP stuff - in terms of posts only. There is some news which I’ll be adding to the site, but other than that I’m going to take a breather from writing stuff, if only so I can get my head back in gear for… you guessed it, more patterns and tutorials. It’s now time to start migrating all of the old tutorials over, but seeing as how I’ll be redoing most of them, it’s going to be a tough slog. So instead of stressing myself out, I’m going to take a break, clean up my working space and slowly prepare for the next pattern.

I’m also hoping to continue work on the SOP web design. I have made excellent progress with the new drop-down menus, and it’s much easier to use; but I’m still stuck on getting a second level of drop-downs working for the tutorial categories. I’m hoping to at least fix that, and change the headers of every page; any additional design changes will be added later when I have more time.

But now to the reason for the title of this post: my new puppet plans are going well. Over the past week, I’ve sufficiently researched new materials to the point where I have a couple of good leads on inexpensive suppliers. I even have some on order and hope they arrive on Wed (when the post is back from its long weekend). I’ll spend some time at the end of this week trying out a few new methods of building and with any luck, have something to show by Mon. It won’t be product-perfect or for sale, but it will - hopefully - showcase the new designs that I’ll be working on.

And in order to begin preparations for the new style, I’m also playing around with my PIM web design. Nothing major actually: when I created the 2010 template, I made 2 versions. One white, one black. See that little light switch in the top right hand corner? You can flip between the 2 versions. All I’ve done is changed the default version from black to white. With the upcoming new puppets, it’s likely that I’ll stick to a white web design… but I’ll probably make some improvements to the current one so that it matches the products better.

If you find the whole white version a little weird, just flip the light switch and go back to the old. Your browser should remember the setting - at least for a little while.

One thing I like about having 2 versions of the site: you can change it on a whim and change it back if you don’t like it.

Anyway, there are more changes to come, but not ones that will affect the site/s or the puppets. I’m also going to take this week to do some cleaning out of old materials, books, etc; plus kill a few projects that I’m not going to have time for. So technically I’ll be away from my computer a bit during the coming week… but I certainly won’t be having a ‘break’.