I'M A BLOGGER, FOLLOW ME!

So after the swap ended for the I'm a blogger, follow me swap everyone was assigned 10 partners. We were to visit our partners blogs, read them, leave them a comment and follow them. For an added bonus we could write a blog post about our partners blogs. I mean isn't that what blogging all about *BIG SMILE* I was trying to give everyone a free idea for a blog post ( wonder how many took the idea and ran with it? )

The first blog I went to visit was A.M. Design. This is where I got the idea of taking pictures of items I see in thrift stores (good one huh?).  She's even decorated her home with items from thrift stores. She also displayed a 2-D design project that reminded me of the idea I had for my photo alphabet scavenger hunt. Wonder what I am talking about? Visit her blog and take a looksie.....Next there was Three turns to home in this blog you will find crafts, pictures and posts about her daily life. If you like fabric this is the blog for you she makes table runners, does embroidery, quilts and seems to do project after project.  That will be me one day:) Now I just seem to start sewing projects, unless they are small ones I can finish those. Ramblings from the animal house makes you seriously hungry!! She takes pictures of all of the lunches she take to work in her beautiful bento boxes. Get this she changes the accessories or little trays that goes inside of the box in all of the pictures. Can you tell I'm jealous? Yes, I want a bento box!!! Do you want to send me one??? Email me for my addy Jmcoupontrain@ymail.com :) I'm just tryin... Anywho...she has made two commitments one trying to take her lunch everyday and two completing the 30 day journal challenge. I plan to look into this 30 day journal challenge, it's on a lot of blogs!! Birth of a Notion is where I went next. She loves to do mail art, decorate the mail she sends! You would be amazed at the things that are used to decorate envelopes and how cute these items look. Next was Welcome to the Life and Times of the Brown's, this documents the daily life of the Brown family including lots of pictures and videos. There are also a few crafts shared along the way :) Living in Dar was the next blog I visited. This blog comes from a family living in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and they share what it's like. Living in Dar also has recipes, tons of pictures, and this great feature called Muffin Tin Monday (all of the food showed on Mondays looks great)! A little bit about SCRAPPINAUNTIE and my CRAZY WONDERFUL CAREFREE life! is where I headed next. There's lots of statements that kind of make you want to write one yourself to tell what you are thankful for. Then she mentions Geo Caching...I keep seeing this on blogs!!! I need to totally google this game or whatever it is, because it seems soo fun. Can you believe she has metals for this *She must be good* She also has pictures of her scrapbook pages. After scrolling through a few more posts I went over to Neomuyeppeo where she talks a lot about her favorite group SHINee and shares some of her art (she's really good). 3stairs was next, I have to say it's a busy one! There's the information from the tweets (a little birdie told me, lol), reviews, giveaways, actual articles, fill-in Fridays and a link to homeschooling resources. There is some good information if you take the time to read it all. Last was 365 day 365 Do It Yourself Projects (no money spent), here I found the milk carton wallet! I am going to make that wallet, blog all about it and post pictures I give my word!!! Besides crafts, we get to share the family's vacation, recipes, and pictures.

I hope you will go check out some of these fantastic blogs I have the honor of following. I would like to say Thank You to all of the followers I have gained through this swap and THANK YOU ALL FOR JOINING MY SWAP!!!

~Bella~  

MY BLOG SWAP ON SWAP-BOT CONTINUED!

The final numbers rolled in July 22, 2010 for my swap I'm a blogger, follow me. It ended with a total of 109 swap members and was in the # 2 spot in the top swaps on Swap-Bot the last time I saw it. Unfortunately, after weeding out all of the advertising blogs and members with non-working links to their blogs on their page; the swap ended with a total of 104 participants, which in my opinion was a great turn out! As promised I became a follower for all participants and many have returned the favor. I must say it turned out to be a great idea. From this many more ideas have spawn as well. I know for sure I will have many more posts reading others blogs have given me lots of ideas. Specially 104 blogs and yes I read through more than just the first post!!! So many ideas wonder if I can follow through....ONLY TIME WILL TELL :)

~Bella~

BE MY BLOG FOLLOWER ON BLOGGER

I participated in a swap on Swap-bot called Be my blog follower on Blogger.  To sum it up it was a blog swap only for those of us with blogs on Blogger. It was a chance for us to get more blog followers.  There was a total of 29 people to sign-up :) We each got 10 partners that we had to checkout their blogs and follow. Yay, that means 10 more followers for me and 10 more awesome blogs I get to read!! I loved all of the partners I was paired up with.

The first blog I checked out was Kelly's Place. She has lots of crafts on her blog. I'm not sure if I liked the shrink dolls the most or the altered barbies. I mean who would have thought to use drinking straws as hair rollers for dolls? She did! Kudos for that :) Second, I strolled over to Kiwifruit83 page. She had two blogs and I decided to follow both because they were two of my favorite things, food and crafts!! In Search of Exceedingly Good Baked Goods was the first one I looked at. This blog tells about places she has visited and eaten at, things she has cooked, pictures and recipes included (that's always a plus!) and even includes some pictures of some very delicious looking Marzipan Fruits. Her second was a craft blog titled Crafty Carrie. Everyone I would like to say THANK YOU TO CARRIE! I have seen many swaps for stuffies and never knew what they were, because the swaps did not have pictures. There was a blog post on this site entitled Stuffie Swap with cute pictures that you all should see. I make stuffies all of the time I started when my son was a baby. I can now join these swaps thanks to you! Careless in the Care of God was the next blog I visited. She has a great two part list of 101 Things in 1001 Days, reminds me a lot of my post My Bucket List. The list is based on a link that led me to a site called Day Zero. I will have to check it out and write about it in another post :) Next was Emmanem Handmade this site has lots of  handmade goodies. I loved her mail organizer :) She has tutorials and pictures of places she has traveled to. Remember When...Remember Then was the next blog. I love this because it's one of those flash back type blogs. It talks about everything that happened back in the good ole days :) Have Stamps.....Will Craft... was up next! I have to say she's a very crafty lady. She takes the old and makes it into something new, by refurnishing items or turning it into something new with a new purpose altogether! Great creative work June :) Next, was Run Away Maggie May this blog shows all of her fun adventures. All Be To Galore came next I have to say she is a very talented knitter. I hope to become as good as she is one day. However, at this present moment I can somewhat knit. My rows are very neat, they look great, not bunched up at all. The only bad part is if you pull the string everything comes apart and it's NOT suppose to do that. Moving on.....Longanisa Feet. This is a great blog!! More of a journal type in my opinion she talks about her daily adventures, lots of pictures and thoughts. The last blog on my list was *She Scraps* Yep you got it SHE SCRAPS, LOL! Was that cheesy? This blog has lots of pictures and great ideas! My favorite was the altered ribbon tutorial. She has lots of examples of her crop work and scrapbook pages.

I am really looking forward to reading all the new blogs I am now following and I am truly THANKFUL for my new blog followers as well. THANK YOU ALL FOR READING :)

~Bella~

WELCOME TO ALL OF MY NEW FOLLOWERS :)

First of all, I would like to say THANK YOU FOR BEING A FOLLOWER! I am so happy to finally have someone to read my work. Now I have to think about the words I say and not just type the first thing that comes to mind, lol! Although I will not let my writing take me out of character. I want you all to get an idea of the type of person I am and the things I like to do. I know that without joining the blog swaps and the blog groups I would still be struggling to find followers. I appreciate all of you and love you dearly for taking the time to read the craziness, vents, look at my art, crafts, my family trips and whatever else I decide to include in this blog of mine. I vow to try to keep you entertained as much as possible, refrain from using ungodly words as much as I can and not talk about people, lol! Well, sometimes those facebook statuses are ridiculous and those pathetic females that have half naked pictures of themselves on their page, but can't figure out why they can't find a man needs to be talked about! For my swapping followers I will always keep you updated on all the new swaps I have doing :) and those that I think are interesting. Don't seem like I am going to be stopping no time soon. I need feed back haha let's see if you guys are really reading the posts. What do you all think of me starting a blog group on Swap- bot? Leave me comment with your thoughts. I will do another post with all of the details comments and links to those that comment as well :)

Thanks again for being a follower!!

~Bella~

JULY BIRTHDAY WISHES!

I recently participated in a swap on Swap-bot called July Birthday wishes email swap. I thought it would be nice to share this little tidbit w/ my blog readers about me and my childhood as well. So to keep the wishes going I would like to wish all of you out there in the blogging world a HAPPY BIRTHDAY OR HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY TO YOU depending on when your birthday was.

My birthday was July 4th. CANCERS ROCK!!! I spent it in Jacksonville, FL with friends and family as usual :) We went to a friends cookout and had great food, great drinks, the kids played and we saw some fireworks!!

As a kid I use to hate the fact that my birthday was on a holiday. But as my parents figured out how to work it into a schedule it turned out to be great!! We (my cousins and I) would always spend the night with my Grandmother so we could go to the carnival. We would wake up early and leave without eating breakfast. We would spend most of the day at the carnival until it was time to go eat dinner. It's not like we had not filled up on sweets :) We also played games, the one I hated & was the worst that SHOULD have taught us all a life lesson was the JAIL GAME!! The fake police people would actually chase you! You would pay any amount from $.25 up to $3.00 to have someone put in a cage (the jail) and they had to stay there until they basically begged people walking by to pay their way (bail) out if they didn't have money. The bail was double the amount of what was paid to put them in there. People could donate until enough bail was collected. They only could hold you for an hour. I remember one year after I spent all of my money, my cousins got together and paid the full $3.00. I had to sit for the whole hour!! I begged my Grandma and Parents not to give them any cake but they didn't listen :( However they did get fussed at for leaving me in there :) We always waited about an hour before the fireworks displayed before having cake and opening my gifts. We never went back to the rec center to watch the display we could see it from my Grandmother's yard. We would sit there in our lawn chairs too full to move most of the time. Once the display was over at the recreation center, we would start lighting our own fireworks.

We no longer go to the rec center anymore because it was changed into a YMCA a few years back. But I still go watch a firework display somewhere every year. My son loves them :) Maybe we can get a yearly tradition of some kind going again.

Thanks for reading!!

~Bella~

MY BLOG SWAP ON SWAP-BOT

I just wanted to share my excitement about my blog swap on Swap-Bot "I’M A BLOGGER, FOLLOW ME!!!" It's going GREAT so far :) Out of all the swaps I have hosted, it's the first to make it into the Top Swaps. Right now we have 33 participants and 27 with the swap on thier watchlist. I promised to follow everyone that joined. Today I had nothing to do so I took my time and started going through some of the participants blogs. I have to say they have some fabulous blogs!!! I have a lot in common with most of them. I am not even half way through the list. I was suppose to just browse to make sure the blogs were not just advertisements and really talking about their hobbies, crafts, life and things. Boy did a few of them catch my interest! I have to admit, I will be following a lot of blogs after the swap is way over. Specially the scrapbook and craft ones. I could get lots of cool ideas from those blogs I never could have thought of trying on my own. Thanks to all that have signed up so far, I can't wait to see what the out come is going to be. TO BE CONTINUED......

~Bella~