Take a Look Around

I have been blogging for over 2 months. I have sixty-eight posts under my belt and a serious addiction to being a blogger. You would think that creating a pleasant and personalized blog would have been high on my list of priorities.

It wasn't.

I was quite content with my simple blog courtesy of Blogger's boring template, until now. Take a look around. Did you notice the changes? If not, lie to me, because I spent many hours redecorating my blog this weekend.

Yes, that's right I* spent countless hours. That brand new custom header... Fabulous isn't it? Mine. Do you see my pink fridge? That's new too. I* whipped that together today. Do you know what I* am developing now? An award badge for the 12 bloggers on my fridge. I had no idea that I was so talented!

*(My husband will divorce me if I fail to disclose that I actually means WE, as in Jeff and I worked on these projects together and Jeff is the true genius behind everything. I tried to keep this from you because you already know that he is a sexy, amazing husband and father who cooks. I want to keep some of his talents a secret or a hot momma blogger is going to steal him away from me.
Happy now, honey? Great! Can you finish up the award badge for me?)

My computer is suddenly a graphic designing, layer and image manipulating machine. Do you want to hear the best part? We spent zero money on Photoshop. Did we steal it or receive it for Christmas? Nope, we didn't use Photoshop. We used an amazing and FREE program called GIMP. Yep, that's right FREE, as in they are giving it away. You too can get GIMP at http://www.gimp.org/.

Let me show you what GIMP allowed us to do. Here is the photo that my new banner is derived from:

We separated the girls, flipped one image, filled in and smudged the center, cartoonized and gave a pink wash to the images. Finally we added the text. Impressed? I know!

Honestly, creating the banner was the easy part. Most of my time was spent wrestling with Blogger's templates and code so my header would be centered and correctly sized. If it weren't for my code writing skills, this blog would be a complete mess right now.

I hope you like the changes around here. There's some beer in the fridge, help yourself.

You can't find the beer? Oh sorry, I must of deleted that layer.