A few weeks ago I posted about some party theme ideas I found. In the end I decided to go with a color theme of pink and green and to save the more specific themes until our little one was older.

The color theme came about when I was making the invitations. I turned to scrapblog.com to create it because I knew it would give me the stickers I needed and the freedom to create the invitation I envisioned. Scrapblog offers printing but I had some cardstock already and decided to print the invitations at home.

After that it all came together….

From top to bottom:

The “happy 1st birthday” banner was  home-made using scrapbook paper, cardstock, and paper string. Look for a tutorial in our craft tip of the week soon!

The scrapbook pages were displayed on a wall and featured a lot of our baby’s firsts and milestones.

I wanted to share with our guests the monthly photos I took so that they could see how much she had changed. Each month had two photos tied together with ribbon and pinned up with a clothespin decorated with flower punch-outs.

No party is complete without a birthday hat! There will also be a tutorial for this in the craft tip of the week soon as well.

We started the party in the birthday shirt and tutu, which were a huge hit. The front is our little one’s first initial with a little crown – for being the little princess! The back of the shirt says, “I’m one!” with a large one underneath. The onesie was made using photoshop and iron-on sheets. The tutu was bought from Trinity’s Tutus on Etsy.

It was a lot of fun making many of the decorations and celebrating our little one’s first birthday with family and friends. I think she really enjoyed it too!

As a knitter I have tons of patterns that hope to make someday printed and organized into 3-ring binders (this was the days before Ravelry!) They were looking a bit uninspired and plain on my bookshelf.

To give them a new look I cut scrapbook paper to size and tucked it in the bind. Rather then trying to remember which color binder was which I stamped the words “PATTERNS – ADULT” and “PATTERNS – BABY” on white paper and glued it on.

Now they’re also a decorative piece on our bookshelf!

A hint for sliding in the bind- open the folder flat to give yourself more room. You can’t see it from the pic but one of them got a little bit bent while I was putting it in!

This installment of plugins features ones embe uses for layout. Without some of these, especially the custom widgets, our site wouldn’t allow us much flexibility with our different pages.

TS Custom Widgets

Enables us to use different widgets on different pages. It can also display different widgets on posts, pages, categories, authors posts and tag pages. I like this one for its ease of adding different sidebar items without having to mess around in the HTML.

Exclude Pages from Navigation

Like the name says, this plug in allows you to exclude a page from the navigation bar (or sidebar menu). This lets embe have many different pages without cluttering up our menu bar.

Wp Post Columns
Allows us to create columns within posts/pages. You can see this one in action on our Products page where we listed the products into two columns. This really saved me the hassle of creating a complicated table! (As you can probably tell I’m all about the shortcuts!)

I’m a sucker for making the small things look pretty. At my old job I even decorated my pen/pencil holder (ie. a paper cup!) by drawing on it with a sharpie. Print-it-yourself calendars are often plain to look at. Why not dress them up by printing it on decorative paper?

These are the basic steps if you already have decorative paper:

Step 1: Select your paper.

Step 2: Open the calendar file.

Step 3: Load the paper into your printer. Make sure the pretty side is what will be printed on.

Step 4: Print!

If you don’t have any decorative paper- no worries! You can do what I did for the calendar in the image. I went to Canon’s Creative Park. They have free download-able scrap booking backgrounds, borders, stickers, and letters.

For October I wanted something halloween-ish and found this one with spiderwebs. I printed the paper first and then followed steps 2-4. I used Microsoft Word to print the calendar and moved it to the bottom right for aesthetics (I like white space! Plus it gives me room to add notes.)

This past spring, I took two classes–HTML and Dreamweaver. Both were online classes–I had never taken an online class before and was pleasantly surprised at how much I learned without physically being in the classroom.

As a marketing professional, I used the Web quite extensively to market products as it is a powerful and cost-efficient way to reach a broad audience. I wanted to take my experience one step further and learn how a Web page is created. Just like knitting where the instructions look like another language, HTML is a computer language with its own set of instructions. In the 6-week class, I learned the fundamentals of Web design, planned the content, structure of my Web site and created pages with backgrounds, tables, hot buttons and animations. I even got more insight into search engine listings.

The other class I took was Dreamweaver which is an industry-standard Web design program. This class required purchasing Dreamweaver software. The challenge that I had was that I purchased the latest version of Dreamweaver (I mean, why would I buy an older version), but the course material was written for Dreamweaver 8. I’d say about 80% was still valid, but there were a lot of parts that I skipped because it was not relevant with the newer version.

Anyway, in this class, I learned how to create documents and work with text, images, links, tables and multimedia files. I learned that there are 5 primary questions to guarantee success for any Web site project:

1) What is the primary objective of my site?

2) Who is the intended audience?

3) How will visitors be viewing the site?

4) How should visitors navigate my site?

5) What will the site look like?

I highly recommend these classes for anyone interested in creating their own Web site!