Today has been quite the day!  As I am typing this, the snow is coming down.  Depending on where the front goes, we could get almost a foot of snow by tomorrow afternoon!

Today I started out my day at a Confluence Board Meeting.  Tomorrow is the first event for the Confluence North Side Network!  It will be a great event, I just hope that the weather will not detour people from coming!  This event will focus on Social Media. This is an area that I have really gotten involved in.  I love all the different things involved in social media.  I am not sure how it will help my business, but I am more than happy to learn!  One of the ways is with this blog.  Another is Twitter. . . which I am totally addicted to!

After the Confluence Board meeting, I headed to Starbucks.  Erik Deckers and I had a short meeting before my next with Greg Cooper.   Both were excellent meetings!   I found myself talking to both of them about social media!

They are both very active in social media.  Erik is across the board active.  He has started his own business, Deckers Marketing.  He has been trying to help me with my blog.  He has a wealth of information and is always giving me suggestions on what I can do to improve my business blog and website.  We also have great conversations about kids!  He has a very interesting story about his three great children!  I loved hearing about it!

After meeting with Erik, I had my scheduled meeting with Greg.  I basically met Greg via Twitter and then in person last week at the Smaller Indiana 4,000 Member Event.  He is also very active in social media but takes a different approach.  He is a local Realtor here in the Indianapolis area and understands how important social media is to businesses.  Not only is he very active but he is trying to get other Realtors involved as well as he is a speaker about the importance of social media.  He has a great story about a house he sold yesterday and twitter had a huge part in it!  It is a great story and you should ask him about it!

Greg suggested that I add a videos to my blog.  I do not know much about this so I am definately going to look into it!  It sounds like it would be fun and a great way to actually show off embroidery and promotional products!!

So what do you think about Video Blogs?  Should I start adding them to my blog?

Labels: blog, blogging, Embrodery, Embroidery, indianapolis, Kristie's Kreations, logos, promotional product, Smaller Indiana

OK, so now I guess it is my turn! I receive this last night on Smaller Indiana and completed it but this morning I noticed that Kyle Lacy wanted me to post it on the front page as well as my blog.

So here goes. . .OK, so now I guess it is my turn! Thank you Allison for sending this to me!

1. First and foremost, I love my family! I am married to a wonderful husband (Mark) and have two great kids, Nathan (almost 6 yrs old) and Lisa (3 yrs. old). I have an awesome younger sister (Angie) and brother (Andy)!

2. My husband Mark is very understanding and knows that I have to get out there in order to grow my business! He makes sure that he takes care of the kids at least two days a week so that I can attend events!

2. I wish I saw my family more! Most of my family is down south so I do not see them very often! I do have a brother and sister-in-law that live in Fishers! I wish I spent more time with them and my kids got to know them more and vise versa!!

3. I used to be a special education teacher. I was a teacher for 7 years before I stayed home to grow my business and raise my family.

4. I am from Southern Indiana- Evansville area - and almost all of my family still lives down there. Excluding my sister and her family (in St. Louis) and my brother and his wife, Allison (in Fishers)

5. I love networking and meeting new people! Anyone who knew me in my teaching years will be really surprised about this but it is true! I love getting out and meeting new people and then figuring out how I can connect them to others!

6. I have a great group of friends! Many are from networking and then others from when I moved to Indianapolis! They really made me feel at home when I was 3 1/2 hours away!

7. Allison Witmeier is my sister in law! She is married to my great "YOUNGER Brother"! Which I love to say because he is much bigger than me! If anyone knows him, "He is kinda of big deal" Or so he says! I grew up with him and can tell stories otherwise!

Rules are below. Enjoy!

Now my turn to continue:

Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged.

What 7 things would you list about yourself?

Labels: 7 Things About Me, blog, Embroidery, Evansville, Family, Fishers, Indiana, Kristie Bradford, Kristie's Kreations, Promotional Products, Smaller Indiana

Tonight I posted this on both Stark Reality and Smaller Indiana. Because some of my readers may not read these websites, I thought that I would add it to my blog as well. I am looking for any wisdom you can give me!

I was working on upcoming posts for my blog tonight and decided that I wanted to add a stock photo or a fun cartoon picture to one of the blogs. It has been a while since I went looking for pictures that are out there to use - free.

I started out at Google Images. After looking at pages of pictures, I noticed that they now have the following stated under the pictures: "Image may be scaled down and subject to copyright." Like I said, it has been awhile since I searched for pictures so this may have been on there for awhile but I just saw it. Not wanting to worry about copyright, I kept going thinking that I would find one that did not say this. Of course, I did not.

Deciding on a generic picture I clicked on one and saw that it has istockphoto written across it. I checked out istockphoto.com and noticed that you have to pay for the pictures. While I understand that this is a business for someone, I was looking for a picture that was free.

Continuing on my search for a fun, free picture I then did a Google search for free, royalty-free pictures. Of course it brought up many websites to check out. After looking at many websites and not finding one that I wanted, I decided that this was crazy and why not ask others where they like to go for this type of pictures.

Do you add pictures to your blog posts? If so, where do you go for the pictures you use?

Labels: blog, Favorite, Free Photos, Photos, Smaller Indiana, Stark Reality, Stock Photos, Website

This morning I was checking out some of the blogs that I like to stay up with such as Smaller Indiana and Stark Reality.  To my surprise there was a Post from Kyle Lacy in regards to a logo that he is developing for a customer.  He was asking for feedback from the Smaller Indiana community.

Most of the responses had to do with the look of the logo itself.  Well I had to add my 2 cents in regards to the logo being embroidered.  I started out by asking if his customer would ever want this logo to be embroidered.  If so, there are some things to think about when developing a logo because there are limits to embroidery. This is exactly what I have been talking about and plan on continuing to discuss.

The first logo choice has some shading in the logo.  Shading is not impossible to do but it is very difficult.  We have done shading in logos before but other logos, we will recommend that we get rid of the shading.  If there is just a little bit of shading then it can usually be done but when there are large areas where it is constant shading then it is not recommended.

The second point that I had was the small fonts.  Small fonts are very difficult ot make look good with embroidery.  BAsically the gist of it is that you are trying to put a bunch of stitches in a little space.  This just is not possible.  The font will not be crisp or readable.  I plan on discussing more of this in the near future.

Labels: blog, Embroidery, Kristie's Kreations, logo development, logos, Smaller Indiana