New Storenvy Shop Open!  Adventures in Graphic Design!  

   This post is going up a lot later than I hoped it would, but at least I'm typing again!  One day off blogging turned into two, then an entire week.  Losing my momentum is not good!  But I'm back now...  Let's see how I did this month, shall we?

December Checklist

   Not as good as I would have liked to do, but some of my projects evolved into much bigger ones once I got into them, and little Freya had a very needy two weeks midway through the month.

December Haul

   Quite tiny as far as hauling goes, I was very good and didn't buy anything during all the big sales (besides some laundry soap and supplies for projects) - yay!  Since I've been off work buying non essentials hasn't been very tempting.

   I did buy more nail tip guides and a pretty set of silver peacock feather decals.  The Airborne gummies were sent by Smiley360 for testing!  I did win a giveaway at the end of this month, and it was my first time winning a cash prize!  So no pictures to come of that, instead look at this giveaway:

   A giveaway from one of my favorite fellow bloggers, Lab Muffin!  Go check it out here, it's open until January 22nd as she celebrates her awesome blog's 2nd anniversary.  I guess it's wrong to add "win this giveaway" to my list of January goals, not to mention completely out of my control, haha.

My Storenvy Shop

   During the process of gathering a whole herd of polishes to be sent off for adoption I realized it may be of benefit to forgo the "Blog Sale" page here on my blog and switch to something more official.  I decided to go with Storenvy because of the near-unlimited product listings they give you and lack of additional fees.  I've creatively named my storefront "Princessly Polished", and while I'm not announcing it's grand opening yet you can go browse the store, and even buy nice things!

   The above picture shows what I have listed so far... a drop in the bucket, really!  There will be plenty more polishes to come, as well as perfumes and other cosmetic items... maybe even some accessories!  Soon my Blog Sale page will be empty of everything except for a link directing you to the new store if all goes as planned.

PrincesslyPolished.com Redesign

   I was seriously going to hire someone to redo my blog for me.  Not anything super fancy, just custom graphics, buttons, and all that.  Instead my creative side won over saying that I'd be happier saving money and spending time to do what I wanted.  Miracles happened and I started understanding how Gimp worked!  Just as I was getting really good with that I thought maybe Inkscape would be better for it's vector capabilities, so I made things with that!  But it was missing a few features I needed desperately so my husband did a bit of searching and found a program to buy that does it all.

   That means I've learned 3 interfaces in 3 programs in 1 month.  Yikes.  A waste of time and brain cells?  Most definitely.  As I've learned different (progressively easier!) ways to do things and found effects that I can create I keep tweaking what I'm going to do around here graphically.  So I did put myself behind schedule... but I'm super-duper happy that I'm doing things myself!

   As I head into January I'm going to take time off writing blog posts and finish my layout redesign, as I'm hoping for a more cohesive look for my content.

January Goals

   And that's it for my list.  I'm keeping it short because I know those few things are going to hog a lot of my meager free time and...  *sigh*  I'll be going back to work next month, too.   Not looking forward to that!