Review ~ Check out 1and1 for affordable web hosting!

Have you been looking for affordable web hosting for your blog or digital scrapbooking store? Do you already run a store but have low online storage, forcing you to put a limit on how much product you can have in your store at any given time? Would you like more space, more email addresses for your designers to use, and an easy to use interface while paying less? Do you have trouble including photos in your blog for fear of running out of space on your server? Have you seen the amount of images I have in my posts? Well I’m barely using a fraction of the amount of space I have by going through 1and1 and I only pay a few dollars per month!

If you answered yes to any of the above, then you really should check out 1and1! You can find a banner for them in my new Affiliates sidebar section on the left of my blog. Or if you are reading this through an RSS feed reader then scroll down to the bottom of this post to find their banner.

With 1and1 you get free software when joining, free marketing tools, an easy click and build system for setting up a store for the first time. They offer hosting for both Linux and Microsoft operating systems with 4 different sized packages from Beginner to Developer! The basic package provides you with 10GB of web space, and 600 email accounts with 2GB of mailbox space! The business package provides you with 250 GB of web space, 2500 GB of monthly transfer volume, 25 FTP accounts, 2500 email accounts with 2GB of mailbox space! How could you not want to at least check out a company with such amazing rates?

We’ve been with them for 1.5 yrs with no problems, and great customer service experience! For more information on 1and1 please feel free to click on their banner in my Affiliates section of my sidebar.

I hope this information has been useful for you, I truly do love this company or I would not be promoting it. Have a happy scrappy day everyone!

Layout Recipe #31 ~ Little Day Dreamer

This week’s layout caught my eye over at the Scrap Artist gallery, it’s by Pam and is entitled Little Day Dreamer! I love this layout with it’s blended in photo, it really adds to the dreamy feel! And the gorgeous blending of elements, snowy, sparkly, and icy all mixed together ! Please feel free to click on the image and leave this talented scrapper some praise!

Ingredients List:

• Winter Cool Kit by Jofia Designs
• Happy Island Kit by Jofia Designs (ribbon)
• Winter Garden Elements by Jofia Designs
• Chloe’s Treasures Kit by Paint the Moon Designs (Little Stars)
• Puddles of silk ribbons by Paint the Moon Designs
• Funky Flowers Brights by Paint the Moon Designs
• A Wildflower Holiday by Weeds and Wildflowers (Icicles)
• Festivities Collab Kit by AH! Designs, Two Sisters and ON Designs (moon, recoloured)

What was your inspiration for the layout’s theme or design?

First there was this cute photo. I made this layout as a gift for my friend Jofia, who is also the designer of this wonderful kit. I love the feeling of this photo, he looks like a little day dreamer I think. The colours in the kit were perfect and I love to play with all these great elements to show the feeling of a little sweet dreamer on a cold winter day!

What special techniques/actions/effects did you use if any in creating the layout?

I blended the photo in the background. I love blendings. I think they give my layouts the special feeling I like to show. I work with Photoimpact and it´s very easy to create beautiful blendings.

Thank you to my readers for checking out my blog today, I hope this layout has inspired you to mix and match some great products, and stretch your creativity! Please click on the layout above and leave this great scrapper some love!

Don’t forget that you can subscribe to my blog’s feed on any blog reader, as an added bonus there is a monthly freebie (click on banner at bottom of posts) only seen in a blog reader! And if you’d like to suggest a layout for me to showcase in my weekly Layout Recipes post, just fill out a contact form on the Contact Me page! You can suggest a layout of your own or someone else’s (I always get permission from the scrapper who created the actual layout before using it). Just make sure the layout uses 5+ different products! Thanks!

Layout Recipe showcasing!

Hello my friends! I’ve got some good news and some bad news, first the bad news…. my desktop computer got a virus or something and now I can’t access anything on it till my hubby gets around to reformatting it and reinstalling all my programs. It’s not disastrous since my photos and layouts are backed up on a separate drive from my main one, and my kits are all on the EHD. However, none of it’s accessible from my laptop ’cause we use a network to access it and we don’t want to open the door from the desktop to laptop until it’s reformatted to make sure we don’t transfer the virus to the laptop. So I have no new recipe layout for you today. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that since I couldn’t scrap a recipe card, I spent last night looking through the galleries for some scrapped recipes to showcase for you here! I tried to find a couple of different sizes and several different styles so that there’d be something for everyone!

So here is the recipe scrapping inspiration for you, whether you want to scrap rectangle sizes like 4×6 or 5×7 or if you’d rather scrap in a square 12×12 or easier to print 8×8… I’ve got something for everyone! Enjoy!

 

I hope these wonderful recipe cards help to get your creative juices flowing! I’ll see you all back here tomorrow for the Layout Recipe of the week, and as usual it’s a beauty! Have a happy scrappy day everyone!

Review ~ Pay Per Post

Hello my wonderful readers! Today I would like to talk to you about something new that I’ve recently signed up for that will affect my blog. It’s called Pay Per Post and is a place full of blog ads that you can write reviews about, and it’s a way for me to bring in a little bit of money through my blog.

I’ve been humming and hawing about whether or not I should join and I finally decided that I would give it a try as a way of financing some things I’d like to bring to my blog. I’d love to have contests and draws on a regular basis but I just can’t afford to give you anything really great, so this is a way of affording to give you, my wonderful readers, more. I would also like to bring you more informative articles, posts about things that you as scrapbookers might be interested in. I love bringing you the inspiration to scrap, and now I’d like to also bring you some informational posts too. All of my review posts will still be my opinion and I will be choosing what I review with great care.

So far Pay Per Post has been fairly easy to navigate and set up. I think that if you already have a great well thought out blog that this is definitely a great way to kick it up a notch. You can pick and choose what you want to write reviews about, you can write as many as 2 per day but there’s really no minimum either which is great. If you have time to write many you can, but if you don’t have the time then you certainly don’t have to feel bad about not writing anything for weeks.

I am really hoping that you will like this new addition to my blog. It most certainly will not replace my wonderful Challenge 411 or Hybrid Hookups Mondays, my Tasty Thursdays, or the Layout Recipes posts on Fridays. The reviews will only be posted on non-themed days.

Have a happy scrappy day everyone!

My top 10 places to find scrapbooking freebies!

Are you thinking of scrapping your memories digitally but don’t have a lot of startup money? Want to know where the best (in my opinion) freebies are? Want to sample the work of some great designers before buying? Then check out my list bellow for great sites and blogs that offer freebies, and check out the two blogs that find the many many freebies out there on a regular basis for you!

But first I would like to bring to your attention some rules about downloading and using freebies. Distributing scrapbooking kits, elements, templates etc that you did not create wether you paid for it or received it free is digital piracy. For more information of digital piracy please check out the Stop Digital Piracy Blog.

My favourite freebie finds:

1. My freebies section of course! – a little of this and that
2. Kristin CB’s CT blog – Quickpages in all shapes and sizes
3. Shabby Princess – full kits!
4. Shandy Vogt Designs’ Blog – amazing templates and more
5. Gifts from Alma at The Scrap Habit – mostly mini kits
6. Andrea’s Bits and Scraps and Little Ironies – awesome templates
7. Miss Mint’s monthly freebie – full kits!
8. Misty Cato Designs’ blog – limited time offer samples

A few freebie finding/listing blogs:

1. DigiFree
2. Scrapping with IkeaGoddess

An extra tip if you’re really into freebies is to sign up for some designer and store newsletters. Many of them include coupons and freebies that are only available in their newsletters! If you don’t want your home email account to be filled up with newsletters etc then make a secondary email address with someone like hotmail or yahoo just for that purpose. Just be sure to check it, lol!