More than Fish and Hammocks

Past projects are interesting things.  I keep all my old sketchbooks specifically so I can look at past ideas and see if maybe any of them can help with current problems.  Past projects on the internet are especially interesting, because frequently they never go away, and if they're public, they often stay that way even when you've moved on to something else.

Before I found metal and glass, I was a Fiber Artist.  I still am, a little bit.  I have a spinning wheel tat I turn to in times when I really need to de-stress and think.  I'll probably be a spinner forever.  My other great fibery love was netting.  I learned it in order to make hair nets for costume purposes and then just sort of ran with the idea.  If you've ever been to the nightshaderose.com main home page, you saw under the Studio link a logo for More Than Fish and Hammocks, my netting web site, that I set up when I realized that while there were a lot of pictures of how to net, there was something of a lack of any really good color-coded illustrations.  The problem with pictures is that people tend to take pictures of their own projects-in-progress and when you're showing rows of interlacing and even simple knots, having all the thread the same color makes it difficult to see what's actually going on.

Sheet bend knot illustration from F&H

So anyway, I put up this instructional site, largely as a precursor to possibly writing a book on the subject, did maintenance, periodically added new info, and then life got crazy and I got distracted, and I ended up mostly abandoning it.  As life went on, and I moved from TX to Seattle I didn't think about it much, but I didn't bother taking the site down.  It's not like the information would go out-of-date.  Maybe twice a year I'd get an email praising the site or asking for more detailed info/advice on something, and I answered politely with the best advice I could give, but I didn't think anything of it.  Flash forward to the last couple of months.  I've got the studio site up, and Analytics installed, tracking how many visitors I have and where they're coming from (not a lot, and generally direct), and it occurs to me to put Analytics on F&H, "just to see."
Apparently F&H has been quietly gathering notice while I wasn't looking, and is now considered a standard internet reference on net-making...particularly the illustrations about how to make the knots.  It's getting 30-50 hits/day, with referrals from all sorts of other places.  The most entertaining thing to me is that while I made it thinking on the scale of lace and hairnets, a lot of my traffic is from fishing and utility-related sites.  Apparently everyone needs good illustrations.

Long story short (I know, too late), past project might be current again, simply because the internet kept it from just going away when I was done.  It won't be a lot, just a couple hours here and there to keep things fresh that might eventually add up to enough to publish in dead tree version.  My main focus will still be metal and glass, but you might end up seeing me work silk in on occasion now, too. :)