Okay back to my story, ten years of blogging. Thanks for all the kind comments on my awkwardness. You know what my most favorite part of blogging for ten years has been? It’s been you. The interactions, the friendships, the amazing people my silly little blog (hip housewife ahhh!!) has connected me with. I love it. I think it’s the biggest reason I still blog today.
So as you may notice from the photo above, once Miss Davenport got her hands on my website and introduced me to wordpress things were beginning to look a lot nicer.
In 2006 I had links, remember when swapping links was a big thing? Now I guess sponsorships are the way things work? When it comes to stuff like that, and me sitting here reminiscing about links I feel like a grandma talking about walking to school in the snow-up hill both ways. But its crazy to think how much blogging has changed in just the last decade.
Once my website was set up like this, it did not change for a very long time. More recently in the last few years I had wanted to add side bar items, but once again did not have any training. I did searching in wordpress and at first could only change things like the side photos and header bar. I loved my website design, but after so many years I just really wanted something new.

Meanwhile I had switched over to Etsy and was no longer using the zen cart shop, which was still hooked up to my website. Imagine my surprise when people told me that when you googled mypapercrane.com all sorts of stuff for prescription drugs were coming up. In fact even though my website looked normal to me, this is what people were coming across when they looked for my website.

It took me weeks, maybe longer really to read info on what to do, where to look. I believe that my website was hacked through the outdated zen cart, so I removed all that, but then had to go through all the files and find the hidden code to get the prescription drug stuff that was hiding on other pages of my website. It took a long time, but I did it! At this point I am sure a lot of you would of hired a professional, but I’m stubborn that way.
Once my website was finally fixed I was more determined then ever to get a real grasp on how it all worked. I realized I needed to start updating wordpress. I know that sounds so incredibly dumb, but when you don’t have any training in this area, unless some one tells you these things need to be updated you just don’t think about it. I read everything I could about using wordpress and customizing it, and took a big step and began using a new theme that was highly customizable. It has still changed a few times, and I’ve asked you guys for help with questions on more then one occasion, but I finally feel after ten years that I’ve got a real handle on my website and how to change what I want, when I want.
This still doesn’t really delve into what it means to me to have been blogging the last ten years. To be honest I don’t know if there is anything amazing or insightful I could say about the whole thing. It certainly doesn’t feel as though it’s been ten years. I’m not quite sure when I will stop blogging, but I know it’s not something I plan to do forever. Blogging not my job, but more of a way to show you what I am doing at my job. I guess my job is being a maker, this is just who I have always been. But as I am sure you can see from my blog-this is is not all that I am. Thanks for allowing me to share it with you world, for the last ten years. Thanks for being mostly kind, I appreciate that.
Now there is a new way of sharing….instagram. Instagram is super satisfying for me because it has my favorite part of blogging, the sharing and connecting with other people, but faster. Without the pressure of writing out a blog post. I like that people can offer little glimpse’s into their process, or life without the time and care it takes to publish a blog post. I mean, I guess there are people using instagram to upload beautiful photos they’ve taken with their point & shoot cameras. But for me I like the quick photos, the ones that show us what is going on with them right then & there. Sometimes however, instagram makes me lazy about blogging. I am trying not to think of it as an obstacle though, instead just a different way I can share. Do you think that instagram is changing blogging?

I’ve been meaning to make a post about this for awhile now. I kept thinking my blog’s ten year anniversary was in May, then when I finally went back and checked it was actually April. So it is time that I talk about blogging for a decade…here goes! The photo above in my website and blog as it looks now, which is so very different from the way it looked ten years ago when I started it. Ten years ago I had a newborn baby, a great passion for making things, and a computer. I decided I would make a website and a blog so I could have a set place to share the stuff I was making. Before that I had been sharing it on message boards like the Nervousness.org community. People were giving me great feedback and I felt really excited about being able to make things and share them with people all over. I was making all sorts of silly purses. Hedgehogs, dead cat purses (cartoony I assure you) and then one day I had a long skinny scrap of brown fabric that reminded me of toast crust. I made a toast plush and thus my plush “food with faces” was born.
So here is the thing about looking back at the blog and website I made ten years ago. It’s embarrassing, seriously it is so embarrassing. Not only did my website have clip art, it had patterned back grounds. I luckily drew the line at a website that played music and had dancing gifs but that was probably only because I couldn’t figure out how to make them. I had no experience with web design, and it showed. I wrote embarrassing things. Friends I referred to myself as a “hip housewife”. I can only thank my stars that I did not have access to the internet when I was 16, because if I find the 25 year old me embarrassing, I am sure 16 year old would be mortifying. That being said people were incredibly lovely, encouraging, and no one told me my website looked terrible….well, not right away.
Here is how it looked about 3-4 weeks in. Oh and I had a yard sale section.
Any blog readers go way back to when I made tampon dolls? Here is a photo of the original doll. Which to me looks as though it was made by a five year old. Embarrassing, I tell you! These dolls actually were very popular and I am told that the image of my son’s arms holding a bunch of them can still be seen on some websites. I just got tired of being known as the “tampon lady”. I just thought they were funny, and well of course I was making dead cat purses too.
Here you can see the first toast dolls I made. First I’d like to point out they are not toasted at all, they should of been referred to as bread. I remember I had dolls like this the first year that I sold at Crafty Bastards and then a few years later I had perfected my design, upgraded to wool felts and my bread range looked like this. (and apparently I thought it was fine to post blurry photos) Well a girl came up to me and said she remembered my toasts from before, but then she saw that they cost more (I believe they were $15 instead of $10) and she was upset about the change. I think I should of brought along a photo of the old toast to show her she was getting something much better haha.
Then of course there were my original donuts, you can see the donut holes I made here too. Again these look really rough to me. You can see I have sewn hundreds of donuts over these last ten years.
At some point I got tired of trying to keep a blog on a website and switched to live journal.
Finally in 2005 the amazing Kristen Davenport (who now has a vegan food truck in Austin TX go taste her amazing baked goods!) sent me an email saying she wanted to build me a proper website, for free. I told her she could do it for trade and in the meantime she created the little webpage you see above to direct people to my zen cart powered webshop. I’m going to go ahead and leave you hanging here till tomorrow to give your eyes a rest before we go on. I’ve got an exciting giveaway at the end of my story, kidrobot goodies, handmade goodies, maybe some spoonflower fabric too–so stay tuned for that!