Little dollhouse on the prairie

Some of you may remember when I posted in December about the giant dollhouse project. At the time we had hoped to have it finished by Christmas, or soon thereafter. Well… it’s now March, and it’s finally finished!

Thinking back at how naive we were to think we could have it finished by Christmas is rather amusing. We had no idea what this project would entail, obviously. I don’t want you to get the impression that Mark worked on building it continuously through these last couple of months, because that is certainly not the case. There were long gaps during which the dollhouse sat gathering dust in the basement. But, it was a lot of work. In case you would ever consider building one, you should be aware that it’s like building a real house. The results make it almost worth it though. Mom added the icing on the cake by making curtains and adding flowers to the window boxes. We hope Hannah will enjoy it

I think I’m addicted…

…to the computer that is.  I sit here before Jack wakes up, when Jack takes a nap, after Jack goes to bed, and any time in between that I can squeeze in.  I have been staying up wayyyy past my bedtime.  It seems there are endless things to do now that I have the blogs I’m trying to “monetize”.  They are new and the more content I can get posted the better.  The little bit of ad revenue I’ve generated is really motivating, and the sites are gaining every day in traffic and page loads and people are beginning to find them via search engines.  I’m also working on a couple of blog headers for a customer, and just finished a new one for Sarah Lolli.  As if I didn’t have enough blogs, I turned my randaclay.com site into a blog to gain the benefit of having regular fresh content that the search engines like so well.  Yeah… I’m addicted.

New site- Free Stuff 4 Kids

I’ve been visiting these work at home forums lately, and read things about people paying their house payments with their ad revenue from “pay per click” sources like Google Adsense, and I’m thinking, “I have got to get in on this game.” We feel strongly that I should stay home with Jack and not go back to work, but it can be hard to live on one income, so I’m always looking for new sources of revenue. I didn’t really want to put ads on this blog right now, although if I could get beyond the average hit rate of about 20 “uniques” a day, I guess I might. I racked my brain to come up with a blog idea that I could find lots to post on, have some original content and that would be fun to design, and FreeStuff4Kids.net is what I came up with. It’s a shameless attempt to make money, while also attempting to provide some good content that people might return to visit from time to time.

So, take a look and let me know what you think. If you know of some things that might be good to put on the site, let me know (randa @ randaclay [dot] com)!

New blog design and Merry Christmas!

I checked out some books from the library the other day about letterhead and logo design, and one of them had letterheads from 1850-1950.  I was inspired by the beautiful old-fashioned, engraved look with watercolor backgrounds and interesting color combinations.  Since I can’t leave things the same for long anyway, I decided to see if I could imitate the look in a new blog design.  My mother lamented the loss of the cute little clay people, and I have promised to bring them back in a future design.

I hope all who stop by here now and then have a Merry Christmas- God bless you!

New site up!

I just finished a web site project I’ve been working on since this summer. It took a while for them to gather all the information that they wanted on the site, and it hopefully will be a good resource to the churches in the association. Stop over and check it out when you get a chance!

New site up!

I have just finished another web site/logo design project.  Stop by the Dairy Queens of Mid Ohio site and tell me if you aren’t hungry for a Blizzard after visiting.  Ok, there’s only one food picture on the site, but somehow while I was working on it, just looking at the words Dairy Queen for a couple of hours got me thinking about how I could justify a Buster Bar as part of my healthy (not) diet.

Make Your Mark

I have a new site up to check out. Right now it’s under the randaclay.com domain, but in the next day or so, mymmonograms.com will be set up. After doing some custom monograms for multiple people, I did some searching on Google and didn’t really find anyone offering a similar service. I LOVE the idea of a personal “logo” for a couple or a single person, and I am hoping lots of other people will too. Check it out here - Make Your Mark, and tell your friends!

This makes a great gift by the way. I had a custom embosser created for Mark to emboss the first page of all his books. I also had a custom rubber stamp made with my monogram and it works great!

New site up!

One of my recent web design projects is complete! Check out the Metro Columbus Bible Institute site here. If you hear of anyone needing an web, print or logo design done, I’d be grateful if you would refer them to me. I feel blessed to be doing more and more design work these days. I enjoy it so much and always wanted to have an opportunity to do more of it and maybe add a little to our bottom line!