the spork in the road

My journey to starting a blog has several paths. I hope I took the right fork in the road. Or was it a spork?

When I first heard about blogs (in 2007 or 8), I thought "who would want to read any of that stuff on the internet?" My best friend Shari said "Donna, they are for people who like to share". I still didn't get it.

Jump forward to 2009. My husband, Vince, and I own Fancifuls Inc, an online business where we sell brass stampings and findings (we have been in business since 1993, more about that later)  when Stampington and Co. (publishers of Somerset Studio and a bunch of other magazines that are really inspiring) gave us a free ad in one of their publications because we were doing a lot of advertising with them. They did not give us a choice on which publication it would be, so imagine my surprise (or dismay depending on my point of view), that the ad was in Artful Blogging. I said to Vince  "Ugh, they put our free ad in this blogging magazine!" And then I opened it.

 OMG! I had no idea what an art blog was. The stories, the photos, the artwork! The more I read, the more I thought I might want to do a blog someday. I even went to Barnes & Noble and bought Blogging for Bliss by Tara Frey. 

But, alas, my computer skills are woefully inadequate . And I type with one finger. And I have a terrible habit of starting new projects with enthusiasm, but end up not keeping up with them. Since Vince is a self taught techno-guru with the patience of a saint (more on that later), and kept volunteering to set me up with a blog and upload photos, etc for me every time I said "I want to do an art blog", I finally said let's do it- so here we are and we'll see how this goes. 

So not only have I started the blog today, but we also set up a Facebook page for Fancifuls. Which is what I think really got me wanting to do the blog because we put a bunch of photos of things I've made on the face book page and it was so cool to see that stuff on there, and everyone else can see it too. But I didn't want to be limited to only projects that are made from Fancifuls products, because I like to do many different kinds of crafts- paper arts, jewelry, sewing, soft sculpture (like the bird pictures in the title banner), decorative painting, collage art, decorating, upcycling items, I know there is more, but I can't think of everything right now. I just love to play in my craft room whenever I can. 

 which usually looks worse than this.

 My brother Dave says this is where the magic happens.

I hope I can share some magic with you.