HUGE Sale on Craftsy Classes!

Are you celebrating National Craft Month? If not, why not?

In honor of National Craft Month, Craftsy is having a HUGE sale with all online classes up to 50% off so you can learn a new skill or just do more of what you love. They also have a money-back guarantee, so what do you have to lose?

And once you sign up for a class, it's forever yours. You can work at your own pace or watch the videos over and over - whatever you want. Since joining Craftsy, I've signed up for 17 classes and every one of them is great! 

But the sale ends Monday, March 16, so get on over there now! You can either click this affiliate link to go straight to Craftsy or you can just type Craftsy.com into your web browser.


Happy Crafting!

Improve Your Photography with an Online Photography Class

Would you like to join a world-class photographer on location? Want to know more about portraits and lighting? Well, now you can by taking one of Craftsy's new online photography classes. Craftsy is working hard to revolutionize online education with highly interactive courses and there are six specific to photography. So check them out!

Courses currently available:
Shoot It: Product Photography Class - How you can take great photos. No expensive software or fancy camera required!

Kirk Tuck: Studio Portrait Lighting - Equipment, setup and lighting techniques for professional-quality studio portraits.

Portraits With an On-Camera Speedlight - Learn advanced on-camera flash techniques with Neil van Niekerk.

Landscape Photography: Great Sand Dunes - Join Rick Sammon and learn how to take breathtaking landscape photos.

Shooting Intimate Landscapes - Join Rob Sheppard to find beauty on a small scale.

Off-Camera Flash Photography with Neil van Niekerk - Expert flash techniques help you show your subjects in their best light.



For your convenience, I've added links to each of the classes. FYI - links are affiliate.

Belly Fat Blues

I just started Nutrition and Physical Activity for Health through Coursera and found that measuring your waist to help screen for possible health risk is NOT the same as measuring for clothing size. Dang! If I measure correctly, I'm teetering on the brink of too fat around the middle. So now I'm signing the belly fat blues.

I've been measuring my waist for close to 50 years. My mom taught me to sew as a kid and my baby doll pajamas even won third place in the adult division at the county fair when I was only 8. I also took sewing in high school (remember Home Ec?) so I learned how to properly take measurements under the watchful eye of Mrs. Giovanetti. Well, from a belly fat measuring perspective, I've been doing it all wrong.

How to measure belly fat

Measuring for clothing is easy. Just wrap the tape around the smallest part of your middle and don't cheat by pulling too tight. That's it. Measuring your waist circumference for health assessment happens in a whole different area - lower, where you have more girth. Yikes! So instead of being a couple inches below the danger zone, I'm right at the limit with no wiggle room.

If you'd like to be depressed, too, just grab your trusty dusty tape measure and raise your shirt...and you'll probably have to lower you pants, as well. Feel around on your hip bones slightly to the front, looking for the highest spot of the bend. Don't cheat by feeling the highest part toward the back or your measurement will be wrong. Once you've found the right spot, measure around with your tape level. NOTE: You'll be measuring below the navel.

How fat is too fat?

Risk of things like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes goes up once your waist exceeds 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men. Remember - a larger waist doesn't automatically mean that you'll have health problems, only that you're at higher risk.

So am I too fat around the middle? Yep - probably so. I've always carried weight around my middle and this hasn't improved with age. Now I just hope the class gives me some doable ideas to edge back away from the precipice!

Care to join me?

Interested in Nutrition and Physical Activity for Health? It's not too late to sign up for this 6-week class, and it's free. Hope to see you there!

Free Online University Courses!

Did you know that you can take university courses online for FREE? Well, I didn't - at least not until I discovered Coursera, "...an education company that partners with the top universities and organizations in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free" and believes "...in connecting people to a great education so that anyone around the world can learn without limits." How totally too cool is this???

The first course that caught my eye was Diabetes: Diagnosis, Treatment and Opportunities through UCSF. As the granny of a lovely 12-year-old Type 1 diabetic, I'd like to know all I can about diabetes and am especially interested in Week 5: Frontiers/New Horizons, where I hope to learn about treatment options that may be available in the not-too-distant future. But this course doesn't start until October so I found two more to take in the meantime.

Right now, I'm taking The Social Context of Mental Health (University of Toronto) and will start Nutrition and Physical Activity for Health (University of Pittsburgh) mid-July. I wanted to get a feel for the learning platform and easily found many courses I'd love to take - and it was really hard, but I limited myself to just the two (so far...).

The site is pretty easy to figure out - if I can do it, so can you! I can either view the lectures online or download the videos for later viewing. One huge advantage to watching online is that the viewer allowed me to adjust the speed and I could race through the lectures. Beings I can listen faster than the normal video speed and can only watch online before 5am (bandwidth restriction), this was great! But downloading for future viewing is even better because I don't have to be up so early so often and can more easily pause and take notes.

There's also a forum for class discussions, which I will probably use minimally. After just a couple of days, there are already an overwhelming number of posts and I don't foresee myself taking the time to read through more than a handful. So I hope the other students use super-clear thread titles.

If you'd like to learn from topnotch instructors from big name universities, check out Coursera courses. Most courses are in English (currently 363 spread across 25 subject areas!) but there are a few in other languages, as well. You can either fully participate (discussions, homework, etc.) or just audit the course - you're choice. If you do turn in assignments and complete the course, you'll get a certificate of completion.

What are you waiting for?

Enjoy Craftsy Mini-Courses FREE!

It's no secret that I am now a total Craftsy junkie and the next 2 free Craftsy mini-courses I'm going to take are:

1. QuiltCon Lecture Series 2013 - Beings I wasn't in Austin for the Modern Quilt Guild's inaugural QuiltCon, I can watch some of the lectures from the event FREE! Can't wait to see what Heather Jones, Angela Walters, David and Amy Butler, Jacquie Gering, and Mary Fons have to say...
2. The Hand Painted Cake - Not sure I'll ever want to paint a cake but I'd sure like to see Erin Schaefgen's freehand painting techniques to create beautiful and edible works of art!

Check out all of the other free Craftsy mini-courses by clicking here. And if the links in this post don't take you straight to the free classes, just type 'free' into the search box. Enjoy!

Great Crafting Classes Online!

I discovered Craftsy a couple of months ago and I'm hooked! What I like best besides the quality and reasonable price is that my classes NEVER expire. That's right - I can come and go as I please and as my schedule allows. I'm already enrolled in almost a dozen classes but there are so many more I'd love to take - I just have to find the time...

My Craftsy Wish List:

1. Free Motion Fillers with Leah Day (she's my favorite!)
2. Pictures to Pixel Quilts (and this one is a free mini-class!)
3. Artisan Bread Making (who doesn't love bread?)

Check out all of the other great Craftsy Classes by clicking here.

Am I Creating a Bigger Mess with Project DO?

I’ve been ‘DOing’ for about a month now and have to ask – am I just creating a bigger mess? Strictly from a DO standpoint, am I better off than I was four weeks ago? First, let's see what I did this past week.

Project DO Progress - Week 4

Downloaded Real Player so I can keep videos straight. The problem being that I didn’t even have any videos when I started the month – and now I have dozens! Due to limited bandwidth, it’s only been recently that we can watch videos online, but to do so I have to get up really early (that’s another story). So to watch all these great videos at my convenience, I’m downloading. Hmm. How does this help me declutter my hard drive?

On the organizing side, however, I’ve created playlists and changed clip info so that I can sort and store the videos and easily find whatever I want whenever I want it. I guess I’m doing great on O but not so well on D…

Join me for Leah Day's free motion class!

On the other hand, you know how we’re supposed to learn new things to keep our minds active? Well, I’m excelling on that front! I’m telling you, watching a demo to learn some things is so much better than just reading a description. Through my new love, Craftsy, my brain is awhirr! I’m finally getting some proficiency with free motion quilting (many thanks to Leah Day for the great demos) and even signed up for a free Online Food Craft Class, Perfect Pizza at Home. Who knew that would ever happen? (affiliate links, fyi)

I’ve also discovered YouTube. Am I late to the party, or what?

Unsubscribed to 22 email newsletters, which really cut down on the amount of email I receive each day. I also set my message rules to delete known spam from server. If your email program allows you to do this, BE CAREFUL! You may miss important emails and never know it. I found this out the hard way several months ago when I kept expecting a file by email and it never showed up. I contacted the sender and she resent…again…and again…and again…

Finally, I turned off my message rules and guess what? Yep, it came through just fine. I examined the sender and subject lines and never did figure out the problem. There was nothing in either of those or the content that should have triggered the deletion. But it happened – true story – so be forewarned.

After this problem, why did I turn my delete from server back on? Because when I get several dozen spam emails with the same sender info, I get annoyed. Also, there are some subjects I just don’t want in my inbox. Period. So when I see a trend, I just quickly add the offending word(s) to my delete rule and am done with it.

As usual, I got distracted and dropped the ball on some Project DO tasks. For instance, although I’ve been adding my new Kindle for PC content to Calibre regularly and immediately categorizing by location and DRM status, I haven’t kept up on tags. So now I have quite a few ebooks that are not categorized by subject. Oops. Beings I’m up to 468 Kindle ebooks (at the end of week one, I had 261 - how is this decluttering?), it’s kind of important to be able to search by subject, don’t you think?

I did manage to make good progress on updating some of my computer files, which was actually my first Project DO focus. For instance, all my computer files for a couple of blogs now match the post/page titles. I also moved all my blog/site folders to a main folder rather than having them buried deeper on my hard drive. And I’ve started creating subfolders to better organize the content on each blog/site. Am I done? Not by a long shot. And if I keep adding instead of taking away, well…it could be never ending.

But am I better off?

Now, back to the original question: Am I creating a bigger mess with Project DO? I don’t think so. I would have discovered online video learning anyway but now I’m keeping it all organized as I go. No more going back and playing catch-up like I’m doing with the rest of my computer files.  So yes, I am better off!

What will I DO in February? I haven’t decided yet. I’ll continue with the good habits developed in January but may start focusing on another area and come back to my computer files later in the year. That’s the beauty of Project DO – I make the rules!

So...what are you DOing in February?

Valuable Lessons We Can All Learn from Kids

As I was surfing the Internet today, I ran across an awesome guest post by M.Farouk Radwan on Unlock the Door, a personal development blog by a young man named Stu. The post in question, 5 Lessons of Life from Our Children, is excellent and you absolutely must read it! (update 1/17/13 - discovered the article link is broken so I removed it)

Farouk highlights the innate persistence, optimism and creativity that comes so naturally for children. (I know, that’s only three things so go read the post to find the other two.) When do we start to lose that anyway? Somewhere along the way, as we grow and mature, we start to give up more easily, become more “realistic” and stifle our creative expression. Now how counterproductive is that?

Anyway, read the post and give this some serious thought. What can you do to emulate a child (no temper tantrums, please!). We’re blessed with 10 grandchildren of various ages, including a soon-to-be-3 little man and a darling 5 month old baby girl who will both be here this weekend. I’m going to watch them closely with Farouk’s points in mind and see what lessons I can learn.

How about you? Got any kids handy? If not, find yourself a few - there are valuable lessons to be learned!

Learn Something New to Exercise Your Brain

Thumbs up to lifelong learning!

Just like every other part of your body, your brain must work-out to stay in shape, so I just signed up for three classes through KSURF Virtual University. That’s right - I don’t already have enough to do. Never mind all my unfinished projects - I’ll just let my adult-onset ADD get the better of me yet again and add some more stuff to my plate. But they’re great classes . . . really!

My KSURF Story

I found out about KSUF a few months ago and signed up for a free class through an introductory promotion for new students. I really enjoyed the online format and got a lot out of the class. My favorite parts were working at my own pace and no required homework or tests. You see, although I love learning and even fancied that I might enjoy life as a professional student at one point, after I finally finished up my degree during my 30s, I swore off anything that involved term papers or tests.

Well, I liked the free class so much that I just couldn’t resist signing up for more when KSURF offered a holiday discount - either $5 off $20 or $10 off $40. Simple math tells me which the better deal is so I selected $45 worth of classes despite the fact that I already had plenty of projects in the works. See how susceptible I am to bargains? (I’m also a sucker for free shipping and never order anything from Amazon without exceeding $25.)

A Few More Details

Anyway, with KSUR classes, you can start at any time and have two months to finish. You can submit assignments or not, take the final or not - your choice. If you don’t take the final, however, you won’t receive credit for the class on your transcript but I don’t care about that. But for those who need CEUs, you’d have to be more serious about finishing up. Also, check ahead of time to make sure that the CEUs earned through KSURF are accepted by your employer or organization or association or whatever.

Now for my new classes - I’m taking How to Be Organized In Spite of Yourself, Intro to Personal Journaling, and Memoir Writing: The Journey to Myself. So see? They’re all useful on a personal and a professional level. I’ve started the first lesson in How to Be Organized and have discovered how few hours are in a week but that’s a subject for a different post. Suffice to say, you will be learning along with me if you follow this blog.

Now Exercise YOUR Brain!

So exercise your brain today. Resolve to learn something new on a regular basis throughout the year. Try an online class, read up on an unfamiliar subject, start a new hobby, or try your hand at Sudoku or logic puzzles (my two personal favorites). Regardless of age, but especially as you get older, brain exercise is critical. And it’s easy - you don’t even work up a sweat or get out of breath (two things I'd rather avoid). So what are you waiting for? And if you know of other online learning opportunities, please leave a comment and share with the rest of us!

Please note: I am not affiliated with KSURF other than as a student and am simply sharing my personal thoughts and experience.