Through my writing, I’ve learned that this blog is a great way for me to express myself and communicate with others.  Certainly, there are crafty people here in Italy and I’ve met the nicest folks who have welcomed me into their culture and society here.  Hey, one can’t complain living amongst the rolling hills of Tuscany…seriously, right!

However, having this online place to connect with anyone in the world who has similar interests is absolutely freeing and liberating.  I don’t feel so foreign and I don’t feel so alone in my thoughts.  I love sharing and know that I need to blog, not just want to.  Additionally, I’ve been able to share my experimentations in my work, get feedback and share my inspirations and ideas for the future.  It’s almost like creating your own studio space and watercooler area virtually.  This blog is an online journal of discovery, it’s about my creative journey, it’s about community and it’s about living a happy life – that is what I hope it to be anyway.

So, I’ve done some research and gone through two blogging e-books written by Craftypod’s Diane Gilleland (Making a Great Blog and Creating a Blog Audience)  - they are great reads to help guide you step-by-step through the process of planning out your blogging strategy.  I’ve also taken notice of aspects I like and don’t like on other great blogs out there, to learn by example.  I’m sure it’s a constant learning process, but I’ve figured some things out, written up a plan and intend to follow it.

My plan and commitment is to blog every weekday – to inspire, update, share goodies, show work in progress and discuss artsy crafty topics.  I’ll be including photos with my nifty Nikon D60 of course and hope you’ll be following along with me on this creative journey.  December is a good time to start something new, right?  It all starts next Monday…woohoo!  Thanks for giving me a bit of your attention and see you again soon, ciao ciao!

However, we had a big internet outage here and I was completely offline and disconnected.  Talk about isolation and withdrawal from the internet, eek!  Turns out it didn’t matter in the end though because I got a high fever and stayed in bed practically the whole week…

Long story short, things are looking up now and internet is back.  Hopefully I can continue filling in my shop and continue with AEDM.  It really sucked that I couldn’t post daily as planned although I did try to do something daily anyway.  Will post more soon to share.

Whew…it’s weird when life sort of just takes it’s own unexpected twists and turns.

I have been working on some holiday card designs, but can’t decide exactly what I should get professionally printed.  If anyone knows of good printers in Europe – that actually ship to Italy – please let me know!  As I work away, here is a little holiday greeting for all of you!  Thank you for visiting my little blog space – I do very much appreciate it

First, I decided to update the design by adding the leafy background pattern.  It’s actually the first repeating tile background I’ve made in Illustrator!  I really wanted to add more of the yellow color to my design and shout out happiness!  Bright enough for you?  Also, just in time for Autumn with the leafy design.  I’m hoping to experiment more with tiling backgrounds as well, as soon as I get the hang of it.

Second, I added a Flickr badge to the right column to share my Flickr photos as well as tweets!

Third, I moved the introductory column to the right side of my blog, along with all the subsidiary links.  The reason for this change was primarily because of Google search.  I realized that the little description that Google picks up for your various posts seems to be the first paragraph of the page.  All my pages were showing up with the same intro blurb, so I decided to make the change and see if it would take effect.  That way the description text would match the post and actually be useful.

Finally, I also moved the RSS subscribe and newsletter sign-up to the upper right corner. I’m not so happy with the way it looks, so I will try to come up with something for my next blog maintenance.  I’m also hoping to add graphical links to the bottom footer of the site as well, to link to all my other websites.  I think it might look like ads, but I like banners as opposed to textual links…we’ll see. Here’s a before and after…

Happy Monday and see if there’s something you can improve on your blog as well!

Download Owl Calendar PDF (216 kb)

As a big thank you to everyone, I would like to start off by sharing an owl calendar I whipped up to get myself organized.  I love printables because you can always make copies if you mess up and it’s such an easy way to get nice stationery to write on.  Woohoo!  My little owl friend is featured in the lower left-hand corner of the calendar to urge you on because you can do it!  He’s also the little muse for this blog, see him perched up in the top header?  Enjoy and stay tuned for more loveliness…