A little while ago Amy and Jen were thinking of buying some pigment inks, and they asked me to stamp out come colors for them. I have most of the A Muse Studio colors and several Fresh Ink colors, so I put together this chart for them. Since it has been a few days since I posted (my blog host went down!), I thought I would share the comparison here.
On each of the four panels, the Fresh Ink is stamped on the left, and the similar A Muse Studio color from my stash is stamped on the right. Here’s a list of the colors on each card, by column. (A Muse colors noted with a “*” in the photo are called by their original name, and have had a name change since I purchased my inks.) I will say that Turquoise is much more of a genuine turquoise color than it appears in this photo, and Birch/Seattle appear more brown in the photo than they are in real life - so sorry about that.
Panel #1
Left: (Fresh Ink) Red Currant, Strawberry, Tomato Red, Fuschia, Pink Lemonade
Right: (A Muse Studio) Cherry, Burano* (now called Poppy), Apple, Berry, Grapefruit
Panel #2
Left: (Fresh Ink) Peach, Melon, Ginger, Mango
Right: (A Muse Studio) Bellini* (now called Melon), Apricot, Lido* (now called Saffron), Papaya, Mermaid
Panel #3
Left: (Fresh Ink) Freesia, Turquoise, Navy, Mojito, Basil
Right: (A Muse Studio) Blueberry, Ocean, Navy, Grass, Fern
Panel #4
Left: (Fresh Ink) Birch, Provincial Gray, Putty, Blue Sage
Right: (A Muse Studio) Seattle, Slate, Pebble, Latte
Which colors are my favorites? Of those shown here: Tomato Red, Berry, Melon, Mango, Turquoise, Mojito, Seattle and Provincial Gray.
Hope this was helpful! For dye inks, I have mostly been using Hero Arts inks, and my go-to black ink is Versafine Onyx Black, though the Memento Luxe one is very good too (both of those are pigment inks). My go-to brown ink is Papertrey’s Dark Chocolate (dye) ink - love!
If you have any questions, please let me know and I will reply in the comments here. Today’s highlight: I rescued a very very floofy white dog today - you can see his pic on my Instagram feed - it made my day!
Suzanne
It has been a little more than a week since I changed over my blog from Blogger to WordPress, and several people commented or wrote asking me about the DIY process. I thought I would share some thoughts, but please keep in mind that I am far from a computer expert; I learned how to do this using internet searches and reading articles online. I’ve tried to break the process up into several categories for you to make this easier to understand, but I will warn you that this is a long post:
Renaming my Blog
The first part of this process took place for me last winter when I decided that I wanted to rename my blog; at that time I wasn’t quite sure I would switch blogging platforms. I thought of many names for quite some time, and in January I decided that I liked this name the best and bought the domain. Then I sat on it to test out the name in my head. After several months had passed, I realized that I still liked the blog name and some friends didn’t have any adverse reactions to it when I talked to them about it, so that part was done.
Why did I choose this name? I knew that I did not want to use my name as my domain name for a few reasons. One is for professional reasons - since I have a website for work, I wanted to minimize the chance that anyone from work would find me (realizing that horse may have left the barn, but still…). I also wanted the domain name to match the blog name, and I wanted the blog name to be applicable to things outside of cardmaking should I ever decide to start blogging about something else. Lastly, I knew the name had to be something I would not get tired of, since my guess is that there are only so many times you can switch blog names. (As I explained previously, my old blog name just wasn’t “me” anymore for a variety of reasons, even though it was certainly fun for me to say it in my Boston accent.)
Switching Blogging Platforms
The decision for me to switch away from Blogger was pretty easy: despite the fact that I had been using only 2.29MB of space in Google (where up to 15MB of space is supposed to be free for email, blogging and photos), Blogger forbade me from posting at some point because I was “out of space.” This happened to me in the middle of a DT post, so I panicked and forked over my credit card info to pay $2.49 per month for up to 25MB of storage; when I looked into this, I realized that there is not a very user-friendly customer service forum/email/avenue for addressing this with Blogger. I had been housing my photos in Flickr for years, and to this day it utterly baffles me that I had to pay for storage. (I am still getting warning messages from Google in my Gmail, so we shall see what happens with that next.) I wasn’t angry about the money, I was angry that there seemed to be no real reason why I was being charged this fee, and there seems to be no outlet for reconciling it. The disappearance of Google Reader made me weary of Blogger’s future, and the repeated push for me to join Google Connect and Google+ really irritated me.
(As a side note, I can’t say enough good things about using Flickr for storing my photos. Blogger does something wonky to your photos to resize them for their format, making them a little blurry. Go ahead and try loading blog pics from Flickr to see if you notice a difference; I read about this online a long time ago, and I didn’t believe it until I tried it myself. When you upload your photos to Blogger, your photos are stored in a Google Picasa Web album…I am not sure how many people realize this, since I don’t think Google does the best job of laying this all out for people. In my opinion, switching to Flickr means that you gain more control over your photos regardless of your blogging platform.)
The next step was deciding whether or not to move to WordPress or Typepad. I chose WordPress since it seemed more popular and because there seem to be more options for blog designs with WordPress. One thing that I realize now is that WordPress.com blogs are free, but they lack the level of customization one might prefer if considering a blog redo; WordPress.org is a different option that allows more flexibility with blog design. The important thing to note is that most WordPress templates that are available online from designers cater to WordPress.org blogs, which are not free. As best as I can tell, these blogs require a domain name and hosting service. Another benefit of WordPress is the online community that supports it, including a blog that appears to be authored by the original WordPress inventors - I’ve been so happy with how easy it is to find out how to do something in Blogger by searching the web.
Blog Hosting for WordPress.org
Here is where is starts to get tricky. I am pretty sure that having a blog in WordPress.org requires that you have a web hosting provider and your own domain. I read several articles on recommended blog hosts, and fairly consistently Bluehost.com was recommended for WordPress.org blogs, though I am sure others are great too. The tricky part for me was that I had purchased my domain from GoDaddy.com months previously, and Bluehost offers the domain for free when you sign up for hosting with them. I had to go through the added step of transferring my domain from GoDaddy to Bluehost after purchasing the hosting service, which was on sale for roughly $4 per month, but there can be all kinds of fees on top of this for things like virus/spam protection, etc. The tutorial that I used to get me through this part of the process can be found here. Please feel free to review all the options that they give to choose what might be best for you. In this article, it talks about uploading WordPress to your hosting service, but it was all pretty self-explanatory to setup once I opened my account with Bluehost. There was even a point at which it asked me to call their customer service line for setup, but they beat me to the punch - they called me before I could even reach for my phone, and the gentleman on the other end of the line was so helpful! This just made me happy. (As an aside, I believe that Typepad also charges a fee for blogging there, but I am not familiar with the details.)
Wordpress Templates
At some point, after following all of the Bluehost setup instructions, you will be ready to customize and beautify your blog. I tried for years to do this myself in Blogger, and gave up some point about a year ago when I realized that there are some pretty affordable templates online that make a blog pretty with a few clicks of a button. Without knowing the ins and outs of how WordPress operated at the time, it was not tough for me to give in to the idea of buying a WordPress template. I searched online and on Etsy for quite a bit of time for something affordable that also allowed for customization and added features like social media icons. If you also choose this route, you may find that some templates come with any particular software that might be needed to run their templates, whereas others expect that you purchase it separately. You may also need to consider whether or not you own programs that will allow you to edit and customize files like a blog header (using Adobe Illustrator, for example). Again, be sure to pay attention to whether or not the template is designed for WordPress.org or WordPress.com. You might also want to explore how much it would cost for the blog design company to make all the changes for you, since this is a very time consuming and not so straightforward process at times; I have spent easily more than 30 hours working on this over the course of the last week because even after the template was loaded, there were (and remain to be) lots of things that I would like to further tweak or customize.
In the end, I don’t think I could have done all of this if I weren’t on vacation - my eyeballs hurt! The DIY approach is not for everyone, but there’s certainly a very nerdy part of me that loves tinkering with the computer code and back-end stuff. From what I could tell, you can spend anywhere from $25 to $1600 on custom WordPress templates (I am not gonna lie, the $1600 one was freakin’ awesome, but it was meant for someone with a hardcore real business, not a cardmaker, LOL!), but there are also TONS of great options built into WordPress itself.
That being said, WPBeginner is a great site for learning how to do things in WordPress. There are downloadable widgets for pretty much everything, and the majority of them seem to be free. Internet searches will easily help you find what you might be looking for, but my approach is always to cross-reference several articles to compare opinions of plugins and approaches to CSS code. You can visit the WPBeginner site and sign up for daily email tutorials, and I’ve enjoyed browsing those. The WordPress Codex is also an AWESOME help tool.
I feel like that’s just scratching the surface since there are a lot of details that I may have missed. The hardest part is having to learn a whole new way of blogging under what is a more complicated system to set up (writing posts is easy!); this takes time and patience, especially researching all the options.
One last piece of info relates to followers and redirecting my old blog to this one. Some of you have let me know that my new blog is showing up in your Reader still (thank you!), and that is good news. I was using Feedburner with my old blog and was able to switch the code in Blogger to burn the new feed affiliated with this blog, so it seems that I have been able to keep most followers. I found this tutorial online, but admit that there were a few bits that I am not sure are working entirely. Of course, you can always buy your own domain and stick with Blogger if you just want your own .com, and probably find very similar tutorials online for that.
In the end, I am loving the change despite all the work and tinkering. If I haven’t bored you to death and you have any other questions, please feel free to e-mail me anytime or just comment here. Again, I am not an expert, but am happy to help if I can!
Suzanne
Hola from the middle of Hurricane Sandy… Here is a card that I made for Neat and Tangled Stamps and for this week’s CAS(E) This Sketch Challenge.
I have a bunch of tips on how to work with patterned papers from 6×6 paper pads on the Neat and Tangled Blog today, and I hope you’ll head on over to check it out. All of the details about my card can be found there too.
Hope you’re dry and safe!
Suzanne
P.S. In case you missed it, my blogoversary giveaway can be found here. 
