I had a friend who had a baby boy and I was fortunate enough to have a blue and white changing pad on hand, but it made me realize that I needed some baby items on hand. I do not personally need them, but do have friends having babies so am working on a set of cotton warp and chenille weft baby blankets. Chenille looks thick, but is actually quite slow to weave.

My neighbour has decided to start weaving so I sold her a loom and taught her how to put on her first warp. Her scarf is really quite nice for a first one. I bought a small 8shaft loom so I will be able to continue with the projects I learned from Jane Stafford. I have yet to try the new loom.

I also decided to make several felt tea cozies and they sold well at the gift shop where I spend quite a bit of time working. I am able to take my spinning wheel and knitting to the shop so end up getting a fair bit of yarn spun. I have not sold any hats recently so will need a different project. I do wear them as well and often use handspun and have two new ones for myself.

The weather is variable but we are thinking spring even though there is a lot of snow coming down. Different birds are coming to the feeder and the chirping is really nice to hear.

Now it is February and I have wrapped up the six batches of soap I made in January. They have two using aloe vera gel which helps give a lovely lather and is healing to the skin. A soap with mustard, mustard seeds which I have wanted to make for a long time and which is a great lovely lathering soap which is supposed to open and cleanse the pores. A very good citrusy wake up soap. And then my very popular wild rose soap and my poppy seed soap. In December I had a run of three batches of goat milk soap, my special lavender swirl soap, an ocean beach soap with seaweed, and a milder citrus sunrise. I am planning a few other soaps in the near future.

Planning an alpaca jacket woven project from last summer’s handspun alpaca, finish my scarf warp. Make some felted scarves and some woven scarves in less fine yarns. I plan to use more of my supply of yarn and fibre before replenishing anything.

Other plans include having a few workshops, such as felting and soap making classes. When the weather gets warmer, I hope to have a dye day or so with a few friends and/or students.

One is a pure olive oil soap for the people who do not want coconut oil and two are goat milk with olive oil only. The goat milk is the liquid I use which means I have a maximum of the goat milk properties in the soap. I also have two soaps made by using aloe vera as my liquid and I find that makes a lovely, mild and well lathering soap. One has apple juice in it and then there are a couple of lavender as well. These have all been wrapped and are ready to be delivered to the shop where I sell them. I have them ready in my studio as well.

Coffee Soap for coffee lovers and to clean onion, fish smell from your hands.

Another Coffee soap to scrub your hands.

Poppy seeds are a mild scrubby soap and also look nice

An overview of the soaps made recently. See the different colours and textures.

I also did some stuff with the Google Webmaster Tools.  The main reason is so that I can be informed of issues with the site if they come up.  Google recently sent out an email to people who are signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, who have sites with older versions of WordPress running the site.  This seems like a good thing to find out this sort of information.

The site now ranks number two for the search for Tricia Rasku.  This was not as we wanted it (it was ranking third or fourth) but now it’s much better.  The entire first page is pages that are related to Tricia Rasku of TR By Hand.  This is part of the effort to get good organic SEO happening, and also we’re working on getting good paid SEO happening too.  We are not convinced that paid SEO is really the way to go, our experience with that with Datse Multimedia Productions is that it will drive traffic to your site, but unless you use good keywords that relate to the site by themselves they won’t drive quality traffic to the site (the keyword that drove all the traffic to the site was “Canada”).

Added a site map to the site, and submitted it to the top four search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask).  This may not be necessary, but it’s a good step in getting search engines to see the whole site, and not just a little piece of it.

Any questions as to how I chose to do all these things are certainly welcome.  I may choose to respond to them here, or in more depth on the Datse Multimedia Productions website.  For now I’m happy to share the general information which I have shared here.

Thank you for being patient with us while we have been working on little things on the website a bit at a time.  This website will be really quite interesting when we get everything we were planning on up and running on here.  It’s unfortunately been a bit slow so far.  Hopefully soon it will be starting to take more shape.

I was planning a project this morning which was to be a workout mat, sewn with a lovely Guatemalan fabric and stuffed with some warm wool fleece. Bookwork and phone calls took most of the time so this was postponed until tomorrow. Tomorrow, Thursday is my regular spinning day and I expect a couple of people in the afternoon, with three unable to come. It is a relaxing day which I look forward to each month. It is on the second Thursday of each month and is open to anyone available to come. We spin, talk, give each other tips on all sorts of things and share.

Last week I dyed and painted 29 silk scarves and loved the outcome. I did not yet take any photos as:

1. Too bright outside to shoot. 2. Too rainy outside to shoot. 3. No time as I was out of home/studio working.  Photos will be pending except 13 of them have gone to 2 shops already, but not yet sold.

Today, because of a torrential downpour I planned some working with wool, but paper work has intervened.

Blanket on upper Deck

I finished the three blankets and have finished them. Lately I have been busy with my soap products for the upcoming Christmas sale time. I have new soaps ready and will be making even more. They are full of nice oils and some special additives as well.
Yesterday, I mixed up over ten dye stock solutions as I was down to few options. Last week, I had a class for scarf painting with a couple of pre-teens which went really well.