Creating Kris ~ a young mom blogs…

Mother’s Day blinkies and more!

This is one holiday I’ve got the jump on this year!

I actually ended up creating about 42 blinkies after putting together a cute new set of bases with purple gradients… using it for Mother’s Day blinkies, wedding blinkies, graduation blinkies, boyfriend/fiance/hubby/partner blinkies, and others. It just goes to show you how far one little starting design can leap!

You can find the new Mother’s Day blinkies (along with the other ones already in that collection), on this page.

This style of blinkie can be found added to these categories of regular-sized blinkies:

“Together for x years” Blinkies
“I Love my partner/hubby/BF” Blinkies
Engagement Blinkies
Month of Marriage Blinkies

Also, my work in getting my Wedding-type blinkies more modernized has also turned my attention towards my wedding-themed stores (that I’d kind of left to fend for themselves a couple years back). For some reason, the store provider changed their graphics style and any transparent graphics were now showing up as having BLACK backgrounds! Not so nice-looking on white merchandise. I’ve revamped and re-uploaded the graphics so they all show up nicely on T-shirts, hands, and the like. My Brideswear and Coupleswear Stores are therefore back in business.

We’ll see if I manage to find the time to update all the others … but I wouldn’t count on it. I’d really like to update the YM stores, but then again I’d really like the time to do EVERYTHING that I’m super behind on… My chronic pain has been quite severe for the past few months and I’ve had to catch some extra sleep almost every day for 1-3 hours! Pathetic I know, but I just can’t seem to function well without it (if I skip my morning “nap”, I’m just totally dead after dinner and I would not usually the one cooking it on those nights). Anyways, I digress. All that to say that I do really hope to get more of my online work done someday, but I have very all-encompassing health reasons why this is not easy to do.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great week!

Blog move & update

You can’t tell to look at it, but my blog has been moved over to a new host. If you notice anything “glitchy”, please let me know so that I can fix it. Or ask my wonderful engineer hubby to fix it (have I mentioned that he’s wonderful?). Thanks hon for patiently helping me with this big transition of all my sites!

On the subject of family, I’ve also taken this opportunity to update my Family page. Both of my munchkins celebrated a birthday in the past few months, so their tickers needed to be updated. This time around, I’ve just created the type of ticker that counts up and says how old they are now instead of counting down to their next birthday…

Speaking of updating pages, my Friends page could probably use a little bit of updating too! For instance, I have a little blurb in there about my neighbour friends but of course since we’ve moved I don’t have the same neighbours!

Another change on the blog is placing all my Blogroll Links and links to my websites on their own page. I pruned down the list to include blogs that are posted to on a regular basis and/or friends I still keep in touch with regularly as well. I plan to share some of my other fave blogs in a “link love” post format sometime… There are so many wonderful creative women out there!

I’ve updated my “Site support” sections as well to try to get good results with not too much distraction. I’d better become more successful at this mompreneur stuff if I want to be sharing what I’ve learned with other WAHMs on this blog! I don’t consider pennies a week to be successful! One thing I did learn about writing a good blog is to keep posting your new material and don’t get stuck in too long of a “lull”.

One new feature I’ve been playing around with is the Scheduler… I can write blog entries when I’m feeling up for it and then schedule them to be posted at a later date and time! A few of my entries over the past couple weeks were posted using this feature and I’ll bet you can’t tell which ones!

Thanks for reading my “Creating Kris” blog! Whether you are a WAHM, aspiring mompreneur, creative scrapbooker or card-maker, new home-owner decorating her space, or just a friend or curious online guest stopping by for some inspiration, I’m glad to have you along for the ride!

Why is “mompreneur” not in my dictionary yet?!

I have 2 blog entries started with the latest scrappy/stampy projects… but I don’t want to post the hand-stamped card entry until after my hubby goes to the baby shower at work on Thursday (you just never want to spoil a surprise). And for the latest scrapbook layout, I did both sides separately so the 2nd side of the 12×12″ double-page album layout needs to have it’s photos uploaded and all that.

So in the meantime, I’ll bring you an important and much-needed blog announcement! In my exploration of life as a WAHM and savvy web mompreneur, I’ve always been open about my business activities – for the sake of honesty and transparency, but also to help other moms find out what it’s really like out for the average mommy blogger and webmaster (who is not of Dooce-caliber-fame).

It’s tough out there but I am doing my best to make something happen. You hear all the time about people earning $ from the web just doing nothing, so it absolutely infuriates me that I’ve gotten next to nowhere after a couple years of working hard to try to earn some income from my already-in-progress projects (and those couple years came after a decade of volunteer work and running websites and groups for free!!!).

If I ever get famous though, I’m taking my friends with me, dammit. I know so many talented, crafty, and hard-working women who are running their own businesses (either on their own, online or offline, or through an established Home-Sales company like Stampin’ Up or Creative Memories) and just aren’t tapping into what is promised. There’s gotta be some tips out there to help create success, and I’m on the lookout…

Here are the changes that’ve been made in the past week or so to increase privacy, but also increase website success:

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