My First Paid Gig!

This little blog design hobby of mine has provided me some cash lately! I have created a couple more blogs.  The first one was for one of my closest friends, Lyndsey.  She and I used to teach together at Lee! This family has some incredible talents.  Filming. Photography. Crafting. Sewing. Building.  (She made our Christmas stockings!) It's unreal. But making a blog was not in those talents, so I was enlisted.  I did Lyndsey's for free... but then she referred me to her sister Graysen, who also is into filming and wanted to spotlight her work. And she paid me!

Both of these blogs taught me so much more... I learned how to create and add social media icons, custom tabs to match the headers/logos and embed vimeo files that actually play! I am planning to use the money to buy Photoshop Elements.  I've been creating all my graphics and logos on MS Word.  Which is getting a little ridiculous. Enjoy the blogs and these talented ladies!

http://themooretribeblog.blogspot.com/



http://littlegrayfilms.blogspot.com

New Hobbies Around Here

I am almost a year and a half into this stay-at-home-mom thing. And just recently some new hobbies have shown up around here. Besides crafting and DIY projects of course.  Which are about to explode.  More on that later.

The first random thing is helping some friends design their blogs! Which is only half a hobby, because I use other websites designs first, and then make it all fancy. I helped out Courtney and Kelsy's new crunchy blog, Going Granola and Matt and Rachel's blog too! It's so fun.  Whose can I do next?!!

 

 

Then there is this beautiful machine I received for Christmas. Which was $400 OFF its original price during Amazon's amazing sales in November.  I am in love.  It was pretty intimidating to thread the thing, but I had some materials given to me and passed down which helped get me started. I had no excuses! I am going to a baby shower this weekend and made a hooded towel and some burp cloths!! Tom is already asking me to turn some pants into shorts.  And I can always update our throw pillows. Make some curtains. So pumped!

 

Cole the Giraffe/Dino wanted to say hello.

Blog Facelift!

My free blog template expired...so I had to go (free) shopping for a new look.  Unfortunately, the free templates out there didn't grab my attention, so I went with a free background + banner.  I am pleased!! It was quite a headache, but now I feel like a pro after changing several things until it looked just right. 

Here are some of the tricks I learned...

I found my freebies here. They have a ton of great stuff!

Their instructions are pretty simple, but I kept ignoring the part about setting your blogger template to "Simple." That is key! The background didn't show up until I changed the template.

The banner (our title) opens as an image, so I just pasted it into Word and added text boxes to add the title.  I had to do this several times to increase the size and length until it fit just right in the blog. To place it in the blog template, I used the free software Snipping Tool (already installed on Windows 8) to screen capture the image with the words, and saved that image as a jpeg. Then I just uploaded that image "instead of title" for our blog!

The "Simple" template doesn't allow for you to change the text font, size or color.  You have to go through the html settings, which I will eventually do using this tutorial. I took two computer programming courses in college, but yikes.  I forgot everything, we didn't learn anything like this, and it definitely looks like a foreign language.

I also customized the template to increase the width of the posts.  I really like to place pictures next to each other, and the original settings aren't wide enough.

Bonus: The instagram feed is a free widget that you can get here.

Let me know if you need help!