Tomorrow the site showing Etsy fabrics by color will be two months old. And in the course of those two months it will have been seen by more than 19,500 people. If I’d had any idea what I was getting into back in May when I started this project… I’m coming to see the flow of cloth through Etsy as a river: unstoppable, ever-changing, and altogether daunting. No matter how I struggle to represent this river of fabric – rewriting (and debugging) the software I use to sort it and doing by hand and eye what can’t be done by computer – I wind up always with an imperfect snapshot of a river that’s already flowed on. My website is always, necessarily, out of date.
In terms of commerce, this is a good thing: fabric at Etsy is selling, new fabric is being offered for sale, and the great river is moving on. In terms my personal life, this is a stressful situation. I hadn’t quite planned on doing almost-weekly updates of such huge amount of fabric (7,006 pieces looked at in this last update and 1817 of them shown on the morecloth site). Nor had I foreseen that I’d be at the same time rewriting and debugging the software that does the sorting. Certainly I hadn’t planned on carrying off this performance with a potential audience of 19,500+ people. All very exciting and a bit scary. If glitches occur, I hope there’s some forgiveness: the whole team for this project consists of me and my cat, together with two aged and battered computers.
The collages in this post are put together from screenshots of what’s currently up at morecloth. For now all my effort is going into streamlining the more or less weekly process of assembling pages like these.
Hi, you goals are challenging and I love you for it. I’ve made a post about your website and would love to do more of a feature, I’ve used a photograph as well, so if you aren’t happy with it let me know and I will take it down. If you need help let me know!
Posted by Bettsy Kingston
Link | August 4th, 2009 at 8:19 am
I love what you’re doing, and sent a link on to my little quilting group, as well as my daughter, who haunts ETSY.
I appreciate your skills!
Posted by Letterpress
Link | August 4th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
thanks so much for this amazing application. No matter that the real time status is difficult to keep up with – this is a great way to browse. I will indeed be one of those that spend a lot of time using it.
Posted by fabricgirl
Link | August 4th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Your site is awesome! I found out about it when I analyzed how people were coming to my Etsy fabric shop. Your site was a big contributor to my shop’s traffic. I blogged about it at http://my-fabric-obsession.blogspot.com. And as a fabric seller on Etsy, I thank you!
Posted by Sara
Link | August 6th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
This is pretty amazing! A very intersection of technology and crafting. I realize you are super-busy, but would you be interested in a guest post at our blog about morecloth? Perhaps you have a little something written already on why you put this together and/or how it works. If you are interested, feel free to email me. I help publish a crafting newsletter with 200,000 email subscribers, many of whom sew. They would love to see this way of browsing Etsy fabrics. If not, just thank you the wonderful tool!
Posted by Caley
Link | August 11th, 2009 at 11:53 am
I’d like to implement your software and help you maintain it (I’m a professional developer) on La La Llama (http://lalallama.com). I think it’s a great tool and would love to help you keep it alive. You’ll have full credit with a link back to your site or blog. Let me know if you’re interested.
Posted by La La Llama
Link | August 18th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Actually the labor-intensive part of maintaining the morecloth site has mainly to do with making aesthetic decisions, rather than with smoothing out wrinkles in the relatively simple software behind it. I may complain about feeling a bit overwhelmed at this early stage of things, but I do plan to keep morecloth alive. Since a number of people have asked about the color-sorting software, I’ll try to post something in the next week or two about how it works.
Posted by catherine
Link | August 18th, 2009 at 11:05 pm