anoisette

I was just playing around with the fantastic pattern maker at bgpatterns.com and was pretty impressed at how easy it is to make nice patterns I’d actually want to use! It would be the perfect place to make a quick background for say your wedding website. If only they let you download the patterns in a higher resolution so you could use them on your invites as well… Anyway, the site is super easy to use and you can pick from a very nice selection of patterns, pick the color, the size, the texture, and a whole lot of other stuff that makes it so easy to end up with something you like! Even if you don’t have an immediate need to make a pattern, it’s a lot of fun to play with.

I’m way over trying on wedding dresses after going to a bunch of places last week. After a while they all start to look the same. I’m seriously thinking of making my own. But first I want to get some of my ideas on paper, quickly and easily, while still looking recognizable. I’m really out of practise sketching though. Luckily I found these awesome free fashion croquis templates. They’re great quality and you can even download them in Illustrator format. I printed a basic front facing one and now we’ll see what I can come up with for dress ideas.

Oooh go check out WhatALovelyName.com. It’s a beautifully designed site meant to help expectant parents find a baby name, but it also has a fun little logo builder. Pick a color scheme, style, and font and it creates a logo for you that you can download, or use to buy all kinds of you branded wares like stickers, postcards and onesies.  I’m making ones for my friends it’s fun to see what they make for me! Found via How about orange…

I’ve been playing with Wordle, making word clouds that I could somehow incorporate into the wedding. Not sure for what yet? The invitations maybe? Table numbers? A big poster? Anyway, it’s fun to pick fonts and colors and I like the way it looks and how it has significance to us as a couple. I ended up using text from the story of the development of our relationship and I like that you get the main gist from the big words and then can dig down and read the smaller ones. But really you could use text from anything, whether a favorite story or poem, or even emails you’ve written to each other… Or if you both have blogs it can pull the words from the RSS feed. Lots of possibilities!

2008 was the first year that more people lived in cities than rural areas. Unfortunately over 1 billion are living in slums. These amazing photos document the lives and homes of people living in 4 different cities around the world.

My goal for January was to get the Save the Dates made. While they are technically not yet made, they are out of my hands.

I ended up going for magnets from VistaPrint. I was extremely hesitant to use VistaPrint because there are tons and tons and tons of horrible reviews about them (just do a quick Google search and you’ll see), BUT one of my coworkers has used them a few times and had no complaints or mystery charges on her credit card so I decided to give it a go. Said coworker also hooked me up with an email promotion she had received for free magnets, so that was my starting point.

All I have to say though is that VistaPrint sure works hard to make a buck and does leave a bad taste. For example I was hemming and hawing over whether to order 50 or 100 magnets, it was $8 for 50 and $26 for 100 (which makes no sense whatsoever), in the end because of their funny ’shipping/processing’ charges ($8 for 50, $9 for 100), I got confused and figured I would just get the 100 and have it over and done with. Although now that I’m sitting down and doing the math I see that it would have been cheaper to order 2 sets of 50. Oooops.

To add insult, as soon as my order was sent through (point of no return because they claim the millisecond you hit that button the order is sent to their production system, making changes or cancellations impossible) I got an offer for another 100 magnets for only $13 with no ’shipping’ charges! Makes me wonder if something similar would have happened if I had just ordered 50 to begin with and tacked another 50 on for a discounted price. I could have really saved! I’m already having buyers remorse and haven’t even seen the goods!

Has anyone else had any experiences ordering from VistaPrint?

I was looking through my site stats and thought I should post this: I actually never did get to see the hippopost postcard I had made because I had it sent to my inlaws thinking it would arrive before I went to visit and it didn’t come until much much later. So that was a bummer.

So it was a few weeks ago that the new wordpress upgrade was released but I only got around to upgrading just now. It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought because I’d originally installed wordpress with Fantastico De Luxe but to my dismay when I logged in to my control panel to do the upgrade Fantastico was telling me I had the newest version and there was no option to upgrade. A quick search on the Bluehost forums led me to find out that Fantastico is apparently slow about wordpress upgrades and one user was changing over to SimpleScripts but there were a few things to watch out for (namely naming of db tables). One lovely person took the time to type out an explanation on how to migrate a blog to a SimpleScripts installation but just skimming over the post I was thinking “too. much. effort.” in the end I used SimpleScripts for a 1 click new installation (in a new folder) of the lastest version of wordpress and exported my posts (1 click) from my old Fantastico installation and then imported them into my new SimpleScripts installation (1 click) and it looks like nothing broke so hurray! Then I uploaded my theme to the new installation (1 click) and next I will delete the old Fantastico installation. Easy peasy.

First there was Ponoko, then Shapeways, and now I have just discovered Spoonflower, which is the one I am most excited for if only because it appeals the most to my crafty textile background.

Awesomeness!

I was reading the TripIt blog, because TripIt is so awesome and I almost wish I traveled more so that I could use it more, when I came across JohnEckman.com. I like the idea of this action stream thing he has going on. Apparently I must be living on a rock to not have seen something like that sooner. I’m going to investigate the options for wordpress. And what would be the best thing to use to have blurbs saying ‘just read title-of-interesting-article’ like this one titled How a lottery winner spends his multi-million dollar jackpot. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears!