textillia

The Textillia Stash-a-thon kicks off this Saturday! We'll be in full Stash-a-thon party mode all weekend! Bruno and I will be hanging out in case you need help with anything, and I'll also be working on logging my own stash in between helping everyone out. Help us build the database while getting a bunch of your pattern and fabric stash logged - it's also a great excuse to go through your stash and see what's in there!

It's hard to believe, but as of this past week Textillia has been live for six months! We're so happy with how far things have come, both with adding new functionality to the site and with our growing community. Thanks so much to everyone who's already gotten involved - we're grateful to have each and every one of you here, taking part in our grassroots effort to build the Ravelry of sewing!

We've had such generous offers of help from many of you, but ironically because my chronic illnesses limit my time online so much, it's been difficult to help you help us - I'm happy to say that as we get more established, that is changing! Some lovely volunteers have already stepped up and taken the time to add loads of fabric and patterns to the database. One member in specific, Ksenia aka. Owl.Laughing deserves special thanks, as she has taken it upon herself to add what must by now be hundreds of patterns to the database! Thanks so much Ksenia, for all the time and effort you've contributed!

Now that we've got lots of the basics established, we are ready for you to dive in and help as we work towards our goal to get out of beta before the end of the summer (hopefully sooner!) The biggest missing piece of functionality we want to get in place by then is Groups. Groups will be a core part of the community focused side of Texillia, and will enable us to create a bunch more tools for the business pages as well. We know how important this will be with the increasing challenges of using social media to stay connected with sewing friends and businesses, so this will be a key step in making the sewing community of our dreams!

Ready to help? Here are 5 ways you can get involved...

The Queue is here!!!

One of the features we knew we wanted to add soon when we launched was the Queue, and we were so excited to roll it out last week! If you're familiar with the queue functionality on Ravelry, this is similar but with some important differences, most notably that your queue will display both patterns you've queued and any "active" projects you're working on. Essentially anything you're planning to work on or currently working on will show up - it behaves as a complete to-do list, as we know it's common to work on multiple projects at once and struggle with staying organized!

It's time for another big update of new functionality we've added to Textillia over the last week and a bit - Bruno has been busy! But first...

A quick PSA: We've been having some issues with our website hosting provider (says every new website ever), so we're preparing to move to a new one before Bruno heads to visit his friends and family in Belgium for the holidays. This will mean a little service outage when we have to take the site offline briefly, so stay tuned as we'll be sure to announce when the planned downtime will be!

Friending + friend updates on your studio page

Friending is here! You can now friend your friends! (Friend is a verb now, right?) Just look for the red "+ Add friend" button on their Member profile page.

Hi everyone!

Thanks for an amazing first week! More than 600 700 (we passed 700 overnight!) of you already signed up and we have been totally blown away by your support and are so excited to see you all using the site and making yourselves at home. Bruno has been busy this week, adding new functionality and fixing a few things here and there. Here's a quick overview of what's new on the site for anyone who's not subscribed to the newsletter... (If you're not, sign up at the bottom of the page!) 

My studio

Your "My Studio" pages have come to life and will show more kinds of messages as time goes on! Now when someone favorites your business page, or favorites or comments on one of your projects, you'll see a message there letting you know. Check there regularly to see who's interacting with you, and be sure to show some love to others by clicking the heart icon or leaving a comment when you find projects or businesses you like too!

We've finally launched!!! Welcome to Textillia, the sewing community's very own cozy corner of the internet - we're so excited to have you all here! As most of you know, we've decided to launch early in a Beta period - that means there are a few rough edges! We decided to do this for many reasons, and one of them is that it'll let us see how you use the website and adapt to that as we continue to build it, make improvements, and add new features.

Before you get started, here are some quick pointers and tips to help get you settled in...