I’ve been working with a local blogger who wanted to launch a bigger and better version of her blog.  She curates and posts about local Des Moines vendors that cater to wedding needs.  The website: Des Moines Wedding Savvy.

We began talks a couple months back, and after chatting about the creative direction for a while, I decided it was time to build out the site. I love her style and it definitely shows throughout the blog scheme.

So, brides, check her out.

Crafty peeps — she’s got a lot of local vendors (big and small) featured. Want yours featured? Contact her, and she will hook you up. She’s always looking for new and exciting vendors who are ready and willing to cater to her brides. Plus, it never hurts to get your name out there in one more place.

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I remember when the word/tag cloud things were all the rage on the internets. I used one for tags a long time ago on my old blog.

I’m creating a bunch of these for a project for work, and decided to see what words I use a lot on my blog. I’m using wordle.net to do this, in case you’re wondering.

So, here ya go. Here’s words most-frequently and most-recently used on my blog. Enjoy.

Bored? You could create a wordle of your own blog  … and send it to me. I would love to do a post of your wordles and would love to see what you’re really talking about.

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A fellow craftster just blogged about my gorgeous yellow water pitcher and some of my other ceramics in the craftster.org blog.  I’m really flattered. You should check it out!

It’s not often that I get press, so I’m pretty excited about this.

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Just thought I’d mention to y’all that I’m now a featured lifestyle blogger on the Des Moines Register. To quote my friend Corey, it’s the modern-day equivalent of having a cable-access show!

Which reminds me of some of my favorite SNL sketches … and best movie to spawn from SNL characters.

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One of my favorite blogs, a la mode fabric, just turned one. She’s having a fabric giveaway of absolutely adorable fabrics (what else would you expect?).

My favorite, of course, being the blush mendocino set.

Anyway, go here for details! Contest ends February 28.

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Holy hannah, this is awesome!

Fat Quarter Shop (which I frequent and my credit card bill hates me for it) gave P.S. I quilt a $50 gift certificate to give away.  To enter, comment on her post about the giveaway. Additional entries if you blog about the giveaway and if you follow her blog.

I hadn’t heard of P.S. I Quilt’s blog before, but man, I sure have now. She picks lovely fabrics and blogs about them and makes fabulous quilts and patchwork items.

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… and the winner of the marker set is:

KIM! (comment #21)

Okay, so with so many comments on this giveaway, I kind of felt guilty that one of my friends won these.  I felt so guilty that I did the random number thing TWICE and it picked #21 BOTH times. Now how’s that for random? Crazy.

Anyway, thanks to everybody who participated, and I will be doing another giveaway soon. Just have to cook up what I’m giving away.

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I was featured yesterday on the Things We Make blog. I love it!  I feel so famous when people blog about me!

I met Amy Palanjian a couple months back when I did Market Street Media Foundry’s Market Day.  She’s on staff with ReadyMade magazine here in Des Moines, so I felt pretty special when she interviewed me (but I’m sure she interviewed all the crafty people there at Market Day).

Anyway, I got an e-mail from her yesterday letting me know she did a write-up on me on her blog.  She featured my tea cup I made for my friend’s mom’s benefit, my lava flowers cup/saucer set, my white musical flowers fiestaware set, my green pyrex birdies and coffee set and my musical flowers on pink plate.  Oooh ooooh… and my wonderland quilt.

eeeee!

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Time for another giveaway!

This is the 3rd one I’ve done, and I’m loving it!  I gave away a Birdies Plate and a Mermaid Bag.

Up for grabs this time is a Manifesto Poster from Lululemon Athletica in blue.  I acquired this from my co-worker when she left last week to embark an a new life adventure, and I don’t have any room for it in my cube!  It’s a really cool design, and it’s got a lot of great pieces of inspirational text.

Here’s a picture of the poster:

To participate, just leave a comment (of any sort) on this post.  I’ll use random.org to pick a winner on July 15.

Good luck!

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I spent the whole weekend in Ames since it was graduation weekend and the BF FINALLY graduated. We went out Friday AND Saturday. I managed to squeeze in an hour-long run/walk yesterday while he was doing the big graduation ceremony (I didn’t go since I couldn’t sit for that long)…and we went to Applebee’s with his family for supper (mmmmmm huge ass apple walnut salad!)…and then we watched StepBrothers until super late last night. I got up early today but wasn’t very productive at all (it’s after 7 PM!!). 

First, I spent most of my morning putting together a 5K training plan for one of my BFFs, Adria. I convinced her to run a 5K with me in September or October and she’s up for it. Updates on that will follow.  I’m finishing up the program and will be hopefully sending it to her tonight so she can start on it.

Secondly — the obvious — I spent most of my afternoon moving my blog (formerly runningchimes.wordpress.com) here and doing a quickie design that will suffice for now until I get time to do a real design and redo my portfolio. I’ve been paying $10 a month for this domain, I might as well get SOME use out of it!

Finally, I spent a lot of the evening listing some things on my etsy store, re-figuring some prices and retagging some items. I’ve got quite a bit of design up. My store got some traffic the other day when I posted that black prom dress that I’ve decided I’ll never be able to squeeze into.

Unrelated: I had decided not to work out today, but then re-decided that I should. AND if I do, I get to eat the ice cream that I have in the freezer. Don’t worry — it’s just a single serving. I plan to do a half hour of biking since I haven’t biked for a while and then some strength training and stretches. Maybe 45 minutes of biking. We’ll see. I plan to go at 8 PM. That’s later than usual, but I’ve got a new rule: something is better than nothing!  I have a hard time working out late, but I figure biking easy for 30 minutes is better than sitting on my ass for 30 more minutes. 

Anyway, that is all. I shall be posting more crafty stuff hopefully and more running stuff. I need to take some photos of my crafts and post them here, facebook and on etsy. Also, I’m going to probably start using the nike+ again this week since I can run 1 mile consecutively. I’d like to know what my pace is…just for s&g’s.

Finally: Shout out to PerpetualSpiral (whose real name I don’t know…which I feel bad b/c she’s pretty awesome) — fellow craftster and twitterer.  She’s always got some kind words and praise for me!  Yay for tweeps that I’ve never met in real life.

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