A Bit Of Better Blogging Part Two

And a winner from Sunday. A big thank you to Rinda for her fabulous organistion and to everyone who blogged and hopped and partied and commented. It took Horsey quite a while to fill his hat with all the names (today he used one of the beanies I'm knitting for Helen's appeal) and it's taking him even longer to pull out the name of the winner..

So we'll start with my blogging tips round up for this month. I hope you find something new here:

• I've got Jo to thank for this first one. It's fantastic! So many excellent free tutorials, it's really not to be missed at Adori
• Another excellent stop for blogger fans is Blogger Scrapbook (more tutorials and freebies)
• And its Wordpress sister here. Both by Reflecting The Designer
• We've just missed the Bling Out Your Blog class at Little Light Studio but it's still worth keeping an eye on, and they might run it again
• Likewise, the Blogging Your Way class at A Creative Mint. But the photos alone on this blog make it worth a visit. Really something to aspire to!
• If you like to write even more than you like to photograph, then check out The One Minute Writer for a prompt every day. You can scrapbook it or you can blog it!
• Or check out Seven Days Seven Answers for more ideas
• And finally for this time: a free printable blog planner right here. Love it.
• You can find A Bit Of Better Blogging Part One here

Oh, I knew there was something else. We're still waiting for Horsey to pull out the winner!

Here you go:

Becky..please get in touch and I'll get your prize out to you. I hope you like it!

A Page And A Thank You

Door shouted Sheriff Horsey from the sofa. It was Thursday afternoon and he had taken a break from the heavy business of ruling the Hobby Horse world. he was putting his feet  foot up and channel surfing in that weirdly annoying manner men use when they know they should actually be doing something more useful.

So it was down to me to get the door and, well, I'm very glad I did. Look:

My gift from Lizzie's giveaway had arrived. And how lovely it is, so beautifully packaged for Spring, with a chatty note and the gorgeous extra of a  notebook she made herself. See the little green one? Maybe she has some more in her etsy shop. It's worth a look. Inside the tissue paper I found the miniature bound book from Badbooks. Beautiful! Thank you Lizzie. I was so pleased I took a break from the ironing and had a nice cup of coffee instead.

Today I'm (still) Loving..6x12 because I've found it's a great size to use the photos from the little Pogo printer I got for Christmas

Giveaway Winner

So, Horsey, I said. You know this giveaway on my blog?

What? he said. And I could see that he was busy; conflicted, in fact, trying to choose between watching The Politics Show, The Olympics or the Sunday morning repeat of Ice Road Truckers. Oh, you mean the free gifts you have to give out, he continued

No, Horsey, I said (smiling sweetly through gritted teeth because I knew that I wanted his help; and I could see that he knew that I knew that he knew that I wanted..you get the idea). It's a nice thank you for the readers and now we have to choose a winner.

How are you going to do that, then? He had brightened at that.

Well, I said, you can use a Random Number Generator to-

A RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR? You can't do that! It has to be illegal, he spluttered, you can't go round making new numbers when the ones we've already got are confusing enough at the best of times.

That's why we are going to pick a name out of the hat. Your hat, I interrupted quickly.

And, after a couple of false starts, that's what we did. I did catch him trying to pick like this:

Then he agreed to do it properly (wearing his Ice Road Truckers hat)  but he came up with this:

Finally, we had a winner:

So, Jennifer (who posted at 21.19 on 23rd February), Congratulations! Please drop me an email with your address so that I can get your book in the post. And thanks again, everyone. I really treasure every comment you make and every story you tell. I'll be doing a book giveaway again, I think. Clearly my librarian genes are calling me home. Happy Sunday!

Cowboy, Take Me Away

(or, Better Late Than Never)

I think a fair number of you have already made the acquaintance of Horsey, the Sheriff Hobby Horse who believes he can rule the world. He popped up here and, against my better judgement, he is allowed a word or two if I'm running low. So I knew he had his fans. Even The Sheriff himself was unprepared for his Valentine's Day surprise, though. A bit of gentle blog reading turned into a riot when I clicked here. I called Horsey; he looked over my shoulder and then slid to the floor with a gentle thud. But he rallied quickly. He looked a little flushed, I thought, as he asked if the "googler" was working. He had things to check, he said. Stuff to do. People to see. And then he hopped off to Marks and Spencers. Under cover. In his false beard. Two fire alarms and a nasty incident in the linen cupboard later, and he said he was ready for his close-up.

As if his head wasn't big enough already.

With thanks to Deb, who made  this post entirely possible.

It's The little Things

I've been coming across a few posts like this one lately. And I like the idea a lot. It's sort of the opposite of sweating the small stuff. It's about choosing to celebrate small successes instead of  searching for big ones. It's about quiet satisfaction with the little things in life. And that has to be good. I'll let you have my list of small successes in a minute, after I have a think about what the rest of the family might say if they were around and I could ask them.

The Tall One might say facing down the bowling machine at cricket or (possibly) making it into the house every day this week without my sister saying 'ooh your blazer smells of girls'.'Which is what she did last week
The Small One might say chipping a hole in my giant gobstopper  or (more likely) most of my successes are quite big actually. But thank you for asking.
Horsey did say oh, oh. I made it onto your blog again and you said that wouldn't happen for a very long time. Then he hopped off, whistling what sounded to me like "They're going to put me in the movies".

And me? I discovered that I could find the reset button on the central heating myself and that it was quicker and easier than hunting out a thermal vest; and I finished up the remains of my Studio Calico kit before the next one arrives. The little photos in the second page are printed with the Pogo Printer I got for Christmas. If you print small, bad photos don't look so bad. Really.

Oh, and to answer questions from my last post: the retro boy sticker is by October Afternoon (Report Card) and the tall red thing in The Tall One's room is for boxing against. It's better than aiming for your sister. Less hassle.

Talking About Hobbies

So, I'm trying to learn a bit more about photography (I'm trying to learn something, anything about photography) And I'm taking this class. I've been looking for somebody to take photos of today; but they're all out, so when the teacher suggested using a stuffed animal instead I knew immediately there was only one man for the job. The pistol packin', sheriff-badge wearing hobby horse: Horsey. I asked him to help and he said What's it worth? So I said If you cooperate I promise not to talk through Ice Road Truckers (which is his favourite show) and he said Lets do it. So here we are. First up: playing with focus points.  I can play up Horsey's beady little eye:

or his shiny, new badge:

I think I'm starting to get the idea. So, because I had another layout to show you today, I took one photo with intelligent auto:

and one with the back button:

and it turns out that the first one looks flat and the second one draws your eye towards the embellishments and the photo. Or am I imagining things?