I crossed the nine-yard mark yesterday. I’ve been finding it difficult to keep up a 1/2-yard-a-day pace, as that means about a 1.5 to 2 hours of weaving every day in addition to work and my new exercise routine. I’m tempted to come home at lunchtime and weave for about an hour before going back to work – a nice break! The wonderful thing about working just 3 miles away – such things are actually possible.
But I am continuing to make progress, and have kept the pace up so far – and the weekend is coming, which will give me more time to weave as I have no commitments this weekend. So hopefully I can get a little ahead of schedule then. I suppose I could avoid scheduling my weaving and just weave, but I work better with concrete targets and setting goals means I’m more likely to get done. And I enjoy the weaving process.
I have also found relief on the website front! I counted up the pages to be migrated and came up with 55 pages, of which I had already done about ten. At 1/2 hour per page, that would take me nearly 30 hours! With me working on the dress full-time, that was simply not going to happen.
So I posted the job on Elance, solicited proposals from a few people who had low advertised rates and were local, and two days later I have someone with excellent recommendations from previous clients (through the Elance feedback system) who is willing to port over my website for $8/hr. She’s going to start work on Saturday and hopefully finish up this week. It’s a small price to pay for getting closure on the Website thing. I’ll still have to figure out the redirects to keep things from breaking (for example, all the images in my blog posts currently point at photos on the old site), which will take patience, but at least the bulk of the work will get done, and soon I’ll be able to point travelingtiger.com at tienchiu.com and call the job finished.
And I found someone else who is willing to teach me couture design, and who comes with an impressive array of credentials. Stonemountain and Daughter (a fabric store in the East Bay where she teaches sometimes) has this to say about her:
Sharon Bell began her fashion career sewing and designing for clients on the East Coast. Later she taught at the American College for the Applied Arts in Los Angeles, chaired the Fashion Production Department at the Academy of Art College, and directed the Fashion Department at the America Intercontinental University. She presently teaches part time at the College of Alameda. Sharon loves sharing her knowledge with others in any way that she can.
I’m talking to her tomorrow morning to set up a time for a meeting, at the end of which we’ll figure out a price. Then I’ll see whether I want to go with her or Jane Foster. Either sounds like it would work well, so it’s a win-win for me.
