Summer’s here in the UK (again…we had a false alarm in the beginning of June) and suddenly the sunlight has fallen on all the joys of a sunny British July. Ice lollies, wildflowers, lemonade*, little black insects that hop a ride on you when you’re outside and then invade your house.
And best of all, strawberries. Little sweet ones. Like these – remember them?
Well, because Summer is finally here, I’m going to celebrate with my first giveaway-blog-hop-design-team-apalooza post. Five entrants will be picked at random to receive four of my strawberry charms (the sizes you receive will be randomly picked) set with antique copper findings. For free, yay!
So what do you have to do to enter? I’m so glad you asked (because otherwise I’d be talking to myself). Here are the rules:
1). Leave a comment here by the 31st July 2012. (This giveaway is open to all readers, regardless of location)
2). Post a link to this post to your blog/FB/Twitter/Pinterest account for an extra entry (one extra entry per link posted). If you do this, make sure to come back here and comment with a link so I can add your entry!
3). If you’re picked, post a picture with a description of what you did with the charms, and reveal it on the 20th August 2012 with a link to this post and the other entrants.
In case you couldn’t tell, this is my first time organizing one of these, so it will be an experiment for all of us. Let’s see how it goes!
*I only recently found out that in America, lemonade is not fizzy and clear like our lemonade, but pale yellow and flat. I always wondered how so Americans managed to make lemonade in their own homes, and I guess that explains it!
Inspired by Brandi’s post on her favourite WordPress plugins, I’m putting up some of the most helpful widgets and plugins I use, along with a quick explanation.
This is must-have if you’re moving from Blogger to WordPress. It carries everything across – comments, posts, categories and pictures – and means you can continues with your blog as though you’d never moved a single page.
If you read any marketing or small-business blogs, you may have seen the phrase ‘link juice’ (yeah, sounds completely gross to me too but nevermind) which refers to all the links or backlinks you’ve amassed for your site. Moving your blog means that your ‘link juice’ (seriously, why not just call it ‘web phlegm’?) will be lost, because you’ll probably have a new site address. Blogger Redirect does what you’d expect – redirects all the links to your blog and its posts to your new site, and all you have to do is add a snippet of code to your Blogger template (warning – this means you’ll lose your Blogger settings, so make sure you’re finished with your old blog before doing this)
Comment Reply Widget (found on Brandi’s post first)
How often do you leave a comment on a blog, and never go back to see if there’s a reply? It’s one of the reasons I still prefer forums to blogs: a forum collects together all the different topics in one place, allowing you to return easily to a conversation. But this handy little widget means that if you leave a comment on a blog with this installed, you’ll get a notification as soon as your comment receives a reply – letting a chat continue, yay!
A quick peek at what I’ve been playing around with in polymer clay. I’ve been trying to get the rustic, acrylic paint effect my own way – rustic and organic styles baffle me (in that I’m never sure if I’m doing them right!) but here are the results.
First up: Kites! I suddenly one day thought, “Oooh, kites.” So here they are:
And now…something else. They’re tea cups. Really. I thought they had some sort of rustic, quirky appeal, like ceramic charms:
I have a confession. I often don’t look at pictures. If someone’s image description tempts me, I’ll load up the picture, or if I’ve gone to someone’s Flickr stream I’ll load all their pictures, but apart from that, they take up too much data on my mobile internet.
So why on earth am I now a Pinterest follower? I can’t get enough of it, because I’ve found it’s so useful for:
a). collecting picture links for future shopping. Instead of bookmarking tens of pages so you can return to a shop, Pinterest lets you collate the specific items onto one board. Here’s a Czech glass one I’ve been building up: Delicious Czech glass
b). keeping a quick visual guide to tutorials. A board by fellow polymer clayer Cara-Jane shows how a Pinterest library of tutorials can be created from around the web…and I confess I followed her lead and made my own board: Tutorials that make me go, Hey, cool!
So since I’m now in full-fledged Pinterest mode – come follow me at ContinuumDesign (no s on the end becasue of character limit, boo!) or leave your own link here so I can check out your boards 
And if you have any group boards that you find fun, I’ve love to see those too!
Little update – there an interview with me up at Beading Arts so if you fancy seeing what I’m going on about now, click the link
