um, holy crap.

Well, Wednesday was a fun day, eh? We went live after spending months getting the brand new, super-powerful server ready for you all and BOOM, she sploded.

[If you had any idea of the difference between what we had been running on for 6 years and the exponential improvement in hardware, capacity and pipeline with the new server, you'd be as frustrated as we were when it still wasn't enough to handle you all!]

Hub spent yesterday/yesterevening further tweaking the server settings, trying to make sure everyone could get in and by 11pm eastern time last night, we'd solved most of it. The server seems to be running smoothly now, and I find the download super-fast compared to an average day on the old server.

Thanks to 99% of you who understood we were doing our best to get it right! We'll be doing more prep behind the scenes before we go live with the surprise in 2009 and hopefully this won't happen again. But hey -- there are worse things than being so popular no one can get at your site, right?

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Guess what I'm going to do today? I'm going to a small PJ sewing party with my friend Jen. I'm going to pull out my Featherweight and dig into my stash of quilting fabric and make as many pairs of ridiculous PJ bottoms as I can.

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I've also got something to show you:

What's the yarn? Dudes. It's silk. From Briar Rose.

But Briar Rose doesn't do silk? They do now! Thanks to gentle persuasion from my friend, Jennie and yours truly, Chris at Briar Rose has finally added silk to her previously all-wool lineup! She gave me a gift of some of this gorgeousness at Rhinebeck and I wouldn't stop browbeating her until she agreed to put it in the shop, because I knew you'd want it too.

What's the pattern? It's a little something I've worked up for y'all. The whole thing will be available shortly, but I thought you might want a peek at the stitch pattern now. It explains why I'm calling the pattern Broccowli.

You may groan, and I wouldn't blame you.

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Me? I'm going to dig through a bag of fabric. Wheeeeee!