New site for TAFA-List goes online

Some time last fall I received an e-mail by a to me unknown person, Rachel Biel from Rayela Art, telling me that she had found my website and asking me whether I wanted to become a member of the Textile And Fiber Art List (TAFA). At first I hesitated, but after a few days I checked it out, got in touch with Rachel and finally decided to give it a go. I jumped over my own shadow, got myself a Paypal-account (which I needed to pay for the fee, and which Rachel rightly suggested I should have if I was trying to go more international with my hand-dyed fabrics) and signed up.

Because Rachel was in the midst of having the newly designed site set up, I decided that I would only take advantage of the lower price for signing up  before it went online, but that I would wait with uploading my profile until the new site was about to be launched. That took a bit longer than she had anticipated, so we received several mails informing us about progress and delays of the site, and what Rachel wanted it to do, and how she hoped it would not get too complicated for non-computer-freaks to manage their own profile. Just after New Year’s she then was looking for guinea-pigs to start uploading their profiles, which I could unfortunately not be part of, because we were out of town visiting friends. Then it took still a few days longer, but it finally happened this week.

So in preparation for the big launch I spent part of past weekend preparing and uploading images, trying out what I wanted to say about myself and my fabric business, and my art business. I wondered whether perhaps I should have taken two memberships, one for justquilts.de and one for justcolours.de, but then I decided for the beginning it was ok the way it was right now. After all, the two are somehow related, so it wouldn’t matter to have them appear together on my profile. Although my membership officially is listed as “justcolours.de”. 

Now it’s up there, and you can check the whole site out here.

One of the things I immediately fell in love with is the members map feature. When you look at it, all the little balloons show you where a TAFA member is located. So when you have a particular affinity for a specific country, such as New Zealand (as I do), you can look at the map, see who’s there, click on the balloon, and (virtually) meet new and interesting people. (As you probably have noted, I have included that world-map-gadget at the bottom of my blog-site, which tells me from where people have looked at my blog. I’m so thrilled to see Brazil, Far Eastern Russia, included on that map. Of course, here I won’t be able to find out who’s behind those red dots, but it’s fun to have them on the map anyway.)

But let’s get back to TAFA – I also spent quite a while surfing the list and discovered many interesting things. Take a look – I’m sure you will enjoy it, too!