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!