Yesterday was November 1st, and it was a great day to refresh my sites and shop with everything new I've been working on lately.

Podcast is Live! After finishing recording my 3rd episode of the Yarnings Podcast, I decided to make it live to my main site and share it with my friends outside the knitting circle.  from the site: "The Yarnings Podcast is a new audio blog that talks about fibery/crafty projects with stories of cooking, geekyness, and more." 

kadyellebee patterns.  Even though I've been designing my own patterns for a while, I didn't have any live until yesterday.  The patterns site launches with the Wren Shawl, a knitted pattern for a round shawl designed to wrap around the wearer many ways.  This pattern itself has both charted and written instructions. 

kadyellebee on Etsy refresh.  3 new product lines were added to the kadyellebee shop, and all products got a retouch in their descriptions and keywords to make things easier to find.  The 3 new lines are the Wren Shawls, Rambaldi Scarves, and Woven Purses.  This is the culmination of hundreds of hours of designing, knitting/crocheting, and photoshoots!  

Three big things for a big day.  It is a great start to the holiday season, and makes me very excited for things to come :)

I have been a fan of trying to define myself for years. I so closely identified with my ISTJ-ness (Meyer-Briggs) that I created a blog version of the test (bloginality). It just makes me feel more firm in myself when I understand ME.

I don't know why I was surprised when Tara made the suggestion to me that defining myself would help my business. (Seriously, her ideastorming *is* magic, if you need some help, she's your girl!) Idea being, if I knew more about myself, I could sell to my Right People better.

Enter the book Style Statement: Live by Your Own Design. After reading through the text portion of the book, I spent the last week just going over the worksheets and writing in my little black composition book every evening. When the questions got hard to answer, I set it down and waited until I was inspired again. I wrote a lot of words that I associated with myself.

In the end, I came up with a result that resonates with me, and gives me a style to enhance how I already dress, communicate, and express my personality and my business.

Structured Fanciful

That means that 80% of my personality follows the guiding principle of Structured, and the other 20% (or creative portion) of my personality is Fanciful.

Structured was really a no brainer, once I saw the word and the synonyms, it captured my orderly-ness, my love for architectural elements that are lined up, and my need to have lists that follow the pattern of the previous lists.

Fanciful was a little harder. My tagline of "giggly geeky girl" had me wanting to capture the girly-ness but without calling myself Feminine (which has a lot of nurturing associated with it) or Romantic (true, but not quite encapsulating it all) or Designed (which seems to imply fashionable and trendy, where I have my own flow). Once I saw the word Fanciful and looked it up in the thesaurus, it fit.

What will I do with this information? It will be my guiding principle when creating for the kadyellebee shop... but I think I've already followed this look without knowing it! Just embracing it seems so natural now, making lists with curlies in the sidebar (and using words like "sidebar" :wink: ) are ME, and making it my standard is okay.

Give yourself a moment to consider what your guiding principle is. Trust me, it's a fun ride!

Good News: The possibility of my library branch closing had me in tears, in this post.  We found out on Monday that it's been saved for another year with some careful budget rearranging and cooperation of the mall.  (press release) Phew!

Bad News: My great job with Six Apart came to an end on Tuesday when they made cuts, discussed in this post.  Even though it was only part time right now, I have always loved this company and had hoped I could continue on in even this small way.  I'm sad, but still love Six Apart, so it's hard to be mad at them!

Good News: I'm making great progress on my Christmas knitting. :)

Overall News: We have been getting ready for a trip to California for thanksgiving to see E's family.  Hopefully to see friends, too.

There are so many blessings in my life, I'm really trying to concentrate on them and remind myself that when a door closes, another door may open.