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!

What is Craftsy and Why Should YOU Take a Class Online?

What is Craftsy?
Craftsy offers online classes to a worldwide craft community. Craftsy also provides a marketplace where independent designers (like me!) can sell their patterns; a supplies shop so  you can get deals on yarn, fabric and class kits; and a section where members share pictures of their crafting  successes. Craftsy has over two million members and is growing daily. With classes in quilting, sewing, knitting, painting, photography, cooking, and more, there's something for just about everyone!

Why should YOU take a class online?
Online education is a great alternative to the traditional classroom and is undoubtedly the wave of the future! Craftsy courses give you world-class instructors right in your home, whenever it's convenient for you.

Busy schedule or unable to leave home? No problem - with Craftsy courses, you can learn at your own pace anytime you want. Want to learn a new skill? Online classes allow you to watch and re-watch as many times as you want to perfect a technique - and you can refer back later, if needed.

And Craftsy even has a variety of FREE classes! So...what are you waiting for? Head on over to Craftsy and find or renew your passion for crafts!

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.

Fidgeting for Weight Loss

I'm just finishing up a really interesting class through Coursera on Nutrition and Physical Activity for Health. During the past week, we've been studying energy balance and how calories are burned both during activity and at rest at various rates depending on individual metabolism and other factors. This got me to thinking about fidgeting. Can increasing your fidgeting help with weight maintenance or weight loss?

I remember being told as a kid to stop fidgeting. After all, what teacher wants a fidgety kid? It's disruptive to the rest of the class, right? I wasn't particularly fidgety so it wasn't a problem for me to stop. But now I think I'm sorry I did. How many calories would I have burned over the past 40+ years if I had continued to fidget?

Right here on the home front, we have an example of how this works in real life. We're all in our 50s now (there are five in our little non-random sample) and experiencing various rates of middle-age spread, some more than others. After I got onto this whole fidgeting thing, it occurred to me that the one member of our little group who has gained the least weight with age is the one who is fidgety. He rarely sits still. I've been watching him closely over the past few days and now it's no secret to me why he eats more than the rest of us but isn't getting broader.

I realize fidgeting isn't the whole story here. There are many other factors involved in weight maintenance but I think increasing my level of fidgeting is worth considering. Like any other habit, it seems fidgeting can be learned so I think I'll start swinging my foot while sitting here at the computer with my legs crossed and see how it goes for me.

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.