Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Ch ch ch Changes.... and other stuff

I haven't blogged in a while then I started back up the other day. Since I blogged there have been a few changed I thought I would bring up.


 Well I just learned a couple days ago that Bead-Patterns Magazine was going away... I will miss it as I can take all the issues with me on the computer or iPad and they don't weigh anything more at all and yet I have a wealth of projects at my fingertips.


 Sometime when I wasn't looking or beading much for that matter and probably why I wasn't looking, Beadwork at about.com got a real guide! I think they actually went through a couple real actual beading guides but this one appears to have stuck. She has some nice projects on my glance I took today.
 Jewelry Crafts Magazine died a while back. It was the first magazine I was published in and boy was my Mom proud. Finally these beads were leading somewhere, and now it's gone. Run into the ground by the editor who lost interest and instead of passing it along to someone who could put soul back into it, she just let it go and fall apart it did. The start was when they failed to publish the CHART to the item on the COVER. At the time it was just chalked up to the time that Beadwork Magazine published an issue with the word EGYPT spelled EYGPT or something like that but NOT spelled correctly. Now you had to wonder HOW THE HELL a magazine went to bed with a HUGE headline misspelled on the COVER.


But then instead of using the desktop publishing capabilities of computers to make diagrams in tutorials in the magazines these days – I can’t pin point one but I have seen WAY too many hand drawn diagrams for stitch tutorials. It looks AWFUL and is hard to see. When did they go backward to hand drawn diagrams? I started adapting programs on the computer to make my tutorials since 1992 and I took class from an instructor who hand drew all her stuff but back then – everyone didn’t have a computer at home or the expensive graphics program to make the diagrams in. I started on my roommate’s Mac and KidPix, graduated to SUPERPAINT a program by Aldus who got ate up by guess… ADOBE.. SHOCK! And was never updated. 8 bit graphics for those who know what that means. Huge pixels for those who don’t. Said roomie and I sat one evening and went through the WHOLE book and learned how each tool worked and we both knew that program in and out. I grew up to PowerPoint which in many ways works like Superpaint. And believe it or not Superpaint had a couple things PowerPoint doesn’t offer. Superpaint had 2 layers only – one paint and one vector. So it was like having Photoshop and Illustrator on top of each other and switchable.


 I love making my tutorials many pages and many steps so anyone practically can bead from them. I’m not selling advertising space, and I see no need. I also try not to use too many abbreviations. Recently I got a pattern from a friend who bought it but couldn’t make it. It took me 3 times sitting down with it to get it done and even then I said bad words and wondered WHY anyone would put so many intersecting thread paths on one diagram. It also changed words like 4mm fire polish bead to some combination of 2 capital letters which made no real connection to the thing it referred to making them confusing. When you sell a tutorial directly to a beader who has to print it – make it AS CLEAR AS YOU CAN. Why confuse people with multiple steps and abbreviations like the magazines? Give your customers the best product you can. I have been updating my tutorials as I list them on Etsy with extra photo and nice big photos on a cover page of the finished product. Why not give the customer the very best chance of good results with as little stress and confusion as possible?


And I noticed people selling one tutorial for personal use and one tutorial for commercial use as in you can make and sell the item the tutorial teaches you to make. Fun fact – I contacted the copyright office – they are very nice and prompt. They used a pattern for an apron as an example. As long as the item isn’t a registered trademarked item like MICKEY MOUSE, then you can SELL ANYTHING YOU OWN OUTRIGHT. You bought the beads and there IS NO REASON YOU CAN NOT SELL THE ITEM IN ANY TUTORIAL. This does NOT mean you can have the pattern mass produced in China and sold at Walmart. But you can make a few and sell them – no one dies and MAYBE you will use some of that money to buy another tutorial. What a RIP OFF! Someone said that if people were uninformed enough to pay more I should let them but how unfair is that? Isn’t it that for evil to prosper all we need is for good people to do NOTHING? So nope – not keepin quiet here. It’s bunk and they know it. If they don’t, then they need to learn a little about copyright… COPYRIGHT COVERS THE TEXT AND DIAGRAMS OF THE TUTORIAL. It does NOT restrict what you can do with what you make from them.  Don't cheat people, people.  It's just rude.

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