Blogging Fusion

My Friend Rene and a little contest!

Many of you are aware of my friend Rene and her blog Cheaper by the Half Dozen, if you aren't go check her out! She has not been posting much on her blog these days because she has been busy writing! Her first book is going to be released on December 13! Just in time for Christmas!

If you don't already know, Rene writes Young Adult Christian books. Her first book is Sonshine Girls: Summer Secret.

If you are on Facebook please become a fan of Rene's by joining her "Page", Rene's Facebook Fan Page and have your friends join and help spread the word! And if you live in Texas, she will be doing a book signing in Conroe on the release date, details can be found on the Facebook page.

Lets all help our fellow blogger be successful! So, to get you all to help with that, I'm going to hold my first ever contest!!!

The prize will be 2,000 Entrecard credits, if you are not a member of Entrecard we will see if we can figure something else out, at the moment I don't know what, but we will come up with something.

So, here's what you have to do to participate:

Blog about Rene's book and Facebook Page and link back to me please :), this will get your name in once, come back here and leave a comment so I know you blogged about it.

Join Rene's Facebook Fan Page for another entry, just leave a comment on the Wall to let me know you joined for an entry :).

And, for each friend you have join the Facebook Page you will get another entry, have them leave a message on the wall to let me know they joined for you.

And no, Rene is not part of this, in fact I haven't even told her I'm doing this lol, she does know I set up the Facebook Page for her though. This is just my little way of helping out a friend, I don't have girls or know anyone really with teenage girls, and I'm not Christian nor really know anyone who reads Christian books, so this is a way I thought I might be able to help out a great friend, I really really want to see Rene become a successful writer, she's a great person and deserves it! I've known her as an online friend for 11 years and know the financial troubles her family has had and through it all she has always been just an incredible person, she deserves to finally have her time!

Oh, I guess I better pick a date for the contest to close! Let's say the contest will close on December 13th, 2008,  the same day of her book release!

Time Keeps Slipping Away

How the heck can Christmas be only 39 days away?? I read that on a widget on someone's blog, it has to be wrong, doesn't it? Wow, seriously, I've been saying for like 3 months now I was going to get my Christmas shopping done early, and here we are with just over a month to go! The fact that I can't find any good sites to order from using my PayPal account has definitely been a big part of why I don't have done what I hoped to at this point. I will open up a new bank account to transfer that money to, but I haven't been able to get to the bank to do that. I have been adding to my list though and getting it a little more detailed, so at least I will know exactly what I am buying.

The little bit of snow we got last week(or was it the week before?) melted right away. But we got more last night, oh yippee...blah! LOL. This snow will probably be gone in a few days though with the temps they're forecasting. I guess I can handle it if it keeps melting away right away LOL. Yes, it sure is purrrdy to look at, but the novelty wears off rather quickly when you have to put up with it for so many months of the year LOL. Oh, and just so you know I would bitch and complain just as much if it was too many days of super hot temperatures too lol, give me something in the middle and I'll be happy LOL.

I've been working on some more Cafepress stuff! Of course I had a good reason not to be blogging! I'll put in some pics at the end of this post. I am going to find a way of putting some nice links to my shops in my sidebars, but Cafepress doesn't do widgets(think they need to get with it where those are concerned lol), I did find someone who does, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong because when I tried theirs it would only show other people's stuff, I want it to show my stuff of course. So I will figure something out.

Actually most of my time hasn't been spent on doing the actual designs, it's been setting stuff up to do more designs. And you know what....I LOVE Gimp!!! Omg, I was actually getting tempted to save up some money to buy Photoshop or whatever it's called(can you tell I'm a pro at this stuff lmao)...but I have actually taken the time to learn more about Gimp and it is awesome and all for free!! I have looked up tutorials, I have found and added some of the most amazing brushes! There are a lot of free brushes out there, but since I plan on using them for designs in which I plan to make money from, I need to really weed through them all. Some people will not allow you to use them for those purposes, but thank goodness there are some out there who make these incredible things and are gracious enough to allow you to do what you want with them! I am going to compile a list of those ones so I can thank them appropriately, and since I have even learned how easy it is to make the brushes myself one day when I have the time I just might make some of my own and pay it forward by sharing as these great people have.....but I better not get ahead of myself too much just yet LOL.

Right now I'm watching the final Nascar race of the season :(....no more racing until February. My husband says it's good because then I won't insist on being home and planning our weekends around the race lol, but I think that I do that is good, because now for the next couple of months we have time to be out more, which means we spend more money!! See, my Nascar obsession actually saves us money by keeping us at home and not wandering through stores!

Oh, and in case you're wondering, yes one of these days I will get back to my Feature Friday stuff, and my poll I decided to stop changing it only on Fridays, I will just put one up when I have something I want to ask, whenever that may be....which happens to be now LOL, so yes I am changing my poll today!

Ok, enough babble for now, thought it was time for a bit of a catch-up. Here's some pics of 3 designs I put up on Cafepress this week(think Gift Giving LOL):

What am I Doing?

First of all a HUGE THANK YOU to all you great people for your comments on my new layout!! 

Well, my blogging time hasn't picked up any just yet obviously LOL. So you might be wondering just what am I spending all my time doing? Besides just regular taking care of the family stuff anyway LOL. Well, I had not been to Cafe Press in quite a while and decided to pay it a visit one day last week. I made one design on there, so far back now that I can't even remember when exactly, I think it was early this year. This one design was so simple, I mean so incredibly simple! I typed out the words "Mom of boys....Need I Say More" and set up a "store" with that one design on some women's shirts. I have assumed that nobody has bought any of my stuff because I thought you got notified when someone did, and I think I have only once ever briefly mentioned this on my blog, so I have not really advertised and with the thousands of designs on Cafe Press who would find mine and want it? Well apparently 3 of my shirts sold! Woohoo! I had a $5 markup on each one, so I didn't even know I had made $15 on Cafe Press without even trying!

So of course that gets the rusty wheels in my brain turning. If I made $15 without even trying on a design that took no thought whatsoever, what could I do if I really tried? I have a very artistic husband, so if we both worked on stuff what could we do?

On the weekend we went out and bought a Wacom Bamboo Tablet(see pic below)(here is the answer to your question Callie LOL) to give us more options on making designs. I have wanted one of these for a while, first they could not even be found up here, then stores started to get them but the prices were crazy(they seemed to only be bringing in the higher priced ones). Last week Office Depot had one of the cheaper ones on sale, I missed the sale because I couldn't get to a store, but on Saturday when I could they were nice enough to let me have it for the sale price still...yayy! And I am completely shocked to see that I got it for less than Wacom has it on their website for! Stuff is never cheaper up here! So that is a huge shock!!

So, what I have been working on is Cafe Press stuff! Once I get a good chunk of designs ready I am going to upgrade and set up a real store, but I don't want to do it until I have at least 20 really decent designs. So for now I am setting up a separate free store for each design. The couple of single designs stores I have going so far are Juno Design, this is the one with my "Mom of Boys" stuff....and Flip With Me which only has a design for a Flip Camcorder(which actually matches my blog layout LOL)....you should see all the wonderful designs people have done for the Flip Camcorders!! I can't order one though :(, those they will only ship within the US.

That folks is what has been keeping me busy! I will share as I add designs, and if I add anything that you like I would love it if you would keep my stuff in mind for Christmas gifts!

Whaddya Think??

Ta-da!! My new blog layout!! And I am more excited about this one than any other I've had before for one very special reason.....I MADE IT ALL MYSELF!!! Can you believe it!?!? I am a complete dope when it comes to these graphics programs, but using Gimp I actually managed to do it myself! The background itself is nothing, but I added all the little tweaks to move my sidebars all to one side and put a border around them. But I even did my Header all by myself!! I hope it looks as good in other browsers as it does on mine. Yes, I am very proud of myself if you can't tell LOL.

Blog Work

I'm going to be doing some work on my blog, but I just don't have the time right now. This week has been so busy! Today is the 3rd day of babysitting my niece this week, plus we had our first meeting of the year with our homeschool facilitator. So the week has pretty much been a write off for getting other things done. I'm hoping either on the weekend or next week I can get to the things I want to do on here. I am going to change the background again and I will probably delete a lot of my widgets and add some new ones in their place. And I might set myself up a sort of blogging schedule so that I can get more going on here other than my occasional babble, see if I can make things a little more exciting. So if you don't hear from me much or at all over the next few days or so I'm still here, and if you pop on and see something completely different, it's still me!

Bad Night!

Man, I had a horrible sleep last night! Overall it was not a good night, Obama won, my Calgary Flames lost :(, I slept horrible, and this.....

Yep, that is snow on my front lawn, it started in the evening yesterday and has been falling lightly since :( . Ok ok, I admit, it's pretty to look at, and it's not going to bother me too much for the next few days because I don't have to go anywhere, but I do have to worry about hubby out driving in it(fortunately it's not sticking to the roads yet), and on the weekend I will be going out and it's supposed to snow again on the weekend :(.

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