Loretta Oliver

How to Buy a Domain Name
What is a domain name? It’s the www.PLACE.com that you tell people to visit you at. In the online world your domain name is like your street address and your website hosting is your neighborhood. We’ll talk more about hosting services in another post. First, let’s get your domain name chosen and registered to you. […]
Amazon; More Than Just an Affiliate Program
When we think of Amazon we most often think of books, Prime, or the affiliate program. There are so many opportunities available with Amazon these days, it’s hard to remember them all. Marketplace – seller central Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) – sell stuff and let Amazon handle the fulfillment and customer service Handmade – where […]
That Holiday Gift Guide Might Be More Trouble Than You Thought
If you’re adding a holiday gift guide to your website or blog using Amazon affiliate links, it could just get you in some trouble. I see this happening every year. Bloggers putting loads of work into gift guides, only to have to go back and practically start over because they don’t want to break the […]

Stitching & Stash Acquisition for February
Not so much stitching in February. Everyone was sick, there were fevers and flu bugs and just … ugh, so glad it’s March. Stitching progress was made on: Mill Hill Azul Calavera Neglected Threads SAL January Biscornu (finished stitching!) Stash acquired: I picked up the February Thread of the Month pack from Ship’s Manor plus […]
Neglected Floss SAL Biscornus
January Pattern I figured since we’re using neglected threads, I might as well use some neglected fabric too. I pulled this opalescent Silkweaver fabric from my stash to stitch this month’s pattern. The threads are leftovers that were missing their labels. Now I need to find a button that matches these colors and I should […]
Stitching Mill Hill Azul Calavera
finished all the green and blue beads on Mill Hill Azul Calavera, only purple and white beads left to add before it’s a finish

Why Do You Work?
This question was posed on Facebook recently by Wendy Maynard and as I hit enter on my reply I thought it might also make a good blog post here and something to explore a little deeper… My answer on Wendy’s post was: ~ sense of responsibility ~ bills to pay, no matter how many I […]
Invoicing and Accounting Tools for Your Virtual Assistant Business
There are probably hundreds of ways to handle invoicing your clients and collecting payments for projects. We’ve talked about a few of them here before and you may be using something already. New tools are coming into the marketplace all the time with more small businesses doing things in the cloud and using web based […]
How to Find Your Paypal Payments & Fees
I noticed a few virtual assistants asking about how to do this on Facebook, so I thought I would do a quick blog post and include some screenshots, because I remember the first time I tried to find these numbers it wasn’t intuitive or easy to locate. There are two places that you’ll find the […]

Unicorn Whatevered
This unicorn and rainbow pattern from The Hob-bee Hive is a little naughty, a little fun, and a lot of cute. It’s the perfect blend. I love it 🙂 When you download the pattern [here], it’s actually an Excel spreadsheet so it might be a little different than what you’re used to seeing for cross […]
Duck Family in the Water
A cute duck family – mama and her babies – swimming along enjoying their day and looking cute in this free cross stitch pattern from Beau2stitch. The design is 160 x 190 stitches and can be found under Free Animals Cross Stitch on the Beau2stitch blog or by clicking [here]. Enjoy & happy stitching! 🙂
Easter Egg Ornaments
All four of these shiny egg shaped ornaments were designed by Janelle Giese and are available as free pattern downloads via Kreinik. Get the pattern PDF files [here] and [here]. There are four egg patterns all together, in two PDFs. All the designs do include specialty stitches, but the pattern files include some instruction to […]