We wrote our first post for Wee Folk Art in July 2008. For those of you that have been with us since the beginning, I know there are still many of you around, you’ve been through many changes with us. Since the beginning, and I say this with a great deal of authority since I have just been through EVERY posting on the sight, WFA has always been a constantly changing and evolving source of creativity and inspiration. I chuckled as I went through all the old posts (well most of them…. I’m still finishing up), retagging them for our NEW and IMPROVED site format. Every couple of months it seems we have posted about how the blog is under going changes in either in focus or design. My mother (Kimara) and I have changed directions many, many times in our Wee Folk Art journey. And now, after many months of skulking about a bit, happily meandering aimlessly, and taking the time to smell the roses, we find ourselves at yet another fork in the road.

Not surprisingly, we have come to the conclusion that what we really love doing is blogging. We love sharing a bit about our daily lives. We love teaching and encouraging others in their crafty endeavors. We love being able to share our time and talents for FREE on the web. We love enabling others to do what we do. We love sharing awesomeness that we find elsewhere on the web. And, we love to chat.

What we don’t love doing is running a business, tracking inventory, and, oh, please never make us do shipping again! We also don’t want to publish a book or make the exact same thing over and over again. We loose interest too fast to follow through on anything too big. We like to explore, try new things, and immediately share our latest cool find or new trick with others.

We want our site to be a haven for crafters, homeschoolers, parents, and homemakers. We have spent quite a bit of time reorganizing, reprogramming, and redesigning our site to make it much easier to find all our awesome content. We are also in the process of setting up forums, which we hope will become a place where all of you, our dear readers, will join us for a cup of <insert your favorite hot beverage> and chat.

All of this takes bunches of time and personal resources, so we have decided to reinstate our sponsorship program to help keep us up and running. It is also an awesome way to connect like minded merchants and readers. We see it as a win-win-win situation.

As we unveil our latest Wee Folk Art transformation, we hope you enjoy all of our new features.  I must say that due to the shear volume of content and the variety of crafts and activities, organizing our site has been a bit of a challenge. So, in order to make navigating our site a bit easier, we have several ways you can explore past content:

  • Use our search button which can be found in the right column under the Networking buttons.
  • Use our Site Index found in the top banner menu. Our index is much the same as a book’s. Simply scroll down until you find something of interest and click on it.
  • If you are feeling particularly ambitious, and don’t want to miss a single entry, ALL of our posts are included in our Archives, also found on the Site Index page. Just click on a month and you will see all the entries.
  • If you want to cruise our Galleries that contain just our Tutorials and Patterns, simply click on the Gallery Buttons (in the flower icons) found at the top of the page, and you will see a tabled version of our tutorial and pattern posts.

I have been working very hard to get all the old posts updated to work with all of our new automated gallery and index pages… but I haven’t finished yet. If a favorite project of yours seems to be missing, don’t panic! We have not lost or removed any content. Over the next few weeks we should have everything resorted and accessible… so keep checking the galleries and watch them grow. I’m amazed by how many of our old projects were lost and buried on our old blog. There are many posts that have been unearthed now and will seem new to many of our readers. Enjoy uncovering the lost treasures.

In the process of updating our site we have had to reset our user database. When we first started publishing Wee Folk Art, only registered users could see our patterns and tutorials. We removed that limit shortly after we began blogging and opened our whole site to the general public. The ability to register remained but the only benefit at that point was that you could create a custom signature for your comments. Unfortunately our site has been hit fairly heavily by spam bots and most of our registered users are bots not readers. This slows down our database and makes it hard for us to find real users. So we have decided that now was the right time to clean house. What does this mean for you? Well, if you’ve left comments in the past while logged in to your account, your name may no longer appear next to your comment and show up as a guest comment. Also, for the time being you will not be able to login. You will be able to re-register just as soon as we get the user database back up and running. You may not be able to get the same name but with a clean slate, most names should be available again. There will be a few more steps involved in the registration process to help stop the bot traffic, so registration may take a day or two as we will now have to approve all members (the first few days may be a bit slower if we have high volume). Why will you want an account since you can leave comments without one? Well… the next big thing to come to Wee Folk Art is our Forums. This will be a place where all of our readers can freely chat about all things crafty, discuss homeschooling, recommend books, and in general share their latest endeavors with the WFA community. We are very excited about this new chapter in Wee Folk Art, and yes you will have to be a registered user to participate in the forums.

For now, enjoy the new site. Take it out for a spin. Kick the tires so speak. Dig deeply and enjoy the unearthing all of our old patterns and musings. AND PLEASE let me know if you run into anything that seems a bit buggy. It will probably take a few weeks to get everything running smoothly. Just leave a comment here or send me an email.

And… just for fun you can take a walk down memory lane and check out how our banners have changed over the years.