I know I’ve mentioned The Quilting Bee here before, but I wanted to talk about it again. I first heard about it from Cricket, and I watched her work on her quilt for a long time before signing up myself. After I submitted my application I waited with bated breath for a few weeks - it turned out my initial application had gotten lost! When I was finally accepted, I was so excited. Since then, the QBee has become one of my favorite online activities. Since then I’ve learned a lot about pixel graphic design - it’s not easy for me, mostly because I’m simply not creative enough! But I have made several friends through the bee (Greetings especially to Heather, Manon, and Keskat!) and I love being part of a fun club. It amazes me that there are several hundred members of the bee…I have only met a small portion of the member list! So far the only person who has joined because of me is Ellie, but I’d like to encourage others to check out The Quilting Bee too…it’s a lot of fun! There are seasonal activities, contests, and games…in addition to the year-round fun of making new friends! (And yes, guys can join too, it’s not all girls!)

• I really should redo my sidebar. I haven’t updated it to change the Divinitas link into a link to my main TCG page even though Divinitas has been dead for months and I’ve joined a couple of others. There’s also just random junk in there I can get rid of.
• I need to wash my Qbee quilt.
• I have found that, as I was told by a Google staffer, Google Analytics is indeed chugging right along despite it thinking it’s not properly installed on my site. It doesn’t really tell me anything useful, though, so I am hoping to get a Measure Map invitation soon. Also, I clearly have smart readers, because 48.4% are using Firefox and only 46.6% are using IE!
• I have earned upwards of $15 from the Mechanical Turk; I think I will get all the way to $25 (free shipping) before redeeming anything into my Amazon account.
• I’m not sure why I’m posting this in my journal and not in my lovely self-hosted installation of Tasks.

Hooray! After several weeks of waiting - my first entry was never received - I was finally added to the Quilting Bee. It’s a clique, a club, an exchange…I’m not quite sure exactly how to describe it, but it’s fun. I initially found out about it from Cricket several months ago, but I didn’t bother investigating it much at the time. Recently she posted about more QBee events she was participating in, so I checked it out and it looked like fun!

I made several patches for myself and had a hard time settling on just one, but Cricket said she thought the Hello Kitty “Etoile” patch made her think of me immediately. I’m a little worried that there seem to be a ton of member patches with Hello Kitty, though, so I may end up changing mine after a month or two…we’ll see how it goes. I made my quilt using graphics from the QBee site; I would like to have it fit into my own domain but the rules state that you must design it yourself and I use a number of different blog templates for my skins. (Yes, I know about the tiny shift that allows the background to show through on my design. I haven’t figured out why it’s there or how to fix it.)

I’ve already started on the butterfly garden activity but I am having a tough time finding butterflies! I did get my first trade request just a few minutes ago (besides Cricket, of course) so I am on my way to having a fun quilt. This whole thing is incredibly girly and cutesy and goofy, so some of my friends might be looking at me a little funny by now, but who cares? I’m having fun.