New Website

So, I've been busy recently with my website.  I had originally created it about ten years ago when I wanted to start a costuming business.  At the time, my primary focus was Halloween costumes.  In one of the first years, I sold 35 costumes over the course of two months.  Many of those were the cute Flower Baby costumes that I made many variations of.

For a number of years, I made a wide variety of costumes, primary for Halloween.  Some of them got rather repetitive - I had a surprising number of people who wanted baby Elvis or baby nuns!

Then I joined the SCA, and began to concentrate on Renaissance costuming.  Of course, just keeping my family of five in garb, especially for long events like Pennsic, meant that I was already sewing a lot.  I also did garb commissions, mostly for friends.  And eventually I decided that while I didn't mind keeping my hourly rate low for friends, I was tired of having to minimize my value for public commissions.  I raised my rates to $15-$20 per hour (which I still think is low, considering the skill required to do what I do - the people who mow lawns and clean homes in my neighborhood charge more).  For the custom requests I've gotten recently, I'll give them an estimate using that cost for my time, and not a single one has taken me up on a commission in several years.  So, I decided it's time to get rid of the Halloween costuming stuff, and concentrate on the SCA stuff.

I had recently learned Joomla to create a website for Harlie des Roches (Mistress Sarafina Sinclair in the SCA) when she started a sewing studio.  I decided to use that new platform to create a more updated website for myself.  I've made my Philippa information (classes, projects and wardrobe) the primary focus, and only included the Halloween and cosplay stuff under an "Other" category.  I'm happy with the new look and feel of my website.  I'm waiting for the DNS to switch over to point to the new site as I type this.

One thing I wasn't originally prepared for is that there are many people who have likely saved links to my class and project pages, or to my images.  Doing some searches to update the links, I found that many of my articles and images are linked on Pinterest or come up in Google searches.  I don't want to break those links and have people not be able to find me.  So, I'm going to have to leave my images out there and update my HTML documents to redirect into my Joomla site.  Hopefully I won't mess any of it up!

www.cardinal-creations.com