Extreme Makeover: Blog Edition

As you can tell, my blog has had a bit of a face lift. For a long time, I have come across so many cute blogs with the cute little headers and cute little post dividers and thought...hmm maybe I will just pay someone to make me a cute little blog. I found some designers who do it for 60-70 dollars and some who do it for 20-30. Then I came upon the websites where all the cute little blogging graphics are sold. Digital scrapbooking is the new fad these days and there are TONS of websites to find cute little graphics. I thought to myself  "maybe I can spend too much time figuring out how to make a cute little header and such, and buy the graphics myself." Well, that is pretty much what I did over the weekend after the cute little baby went to bed. I stayed up way too late figuring out how to layer, resize, crop, merge, import, flip, flop, stretch, etc. I learned about pixels, transparency, guides, grids, blah blah blah. It took me forever since I would start something and then not know how to start over if I messed up. I found those cute little buttons, ribbon, paper and frames from GottaPixel. They have "packages" of scrapbook graphics you can purchase for anywhere between a dollar(whoop whoop!) to 20 dollars(um no thanks). I found a package with just the right about of graphics and the colors I wanted for only a dollar! If you are not familiar with how digital scrapbooking works, you purchase a package of graphic images and download the zip file. Once you upzip your file, the next step is figuring out how to layer them with pictures to create a collage, or header in my case. A lot of people use Photoshop but I downloaded a free program called Gimp. It is awesome and works a lot like Photoshop. If you are willing to give it a try(it is a lot of fun!) there are plenty of websites where you can find free graphics or tutorials on how to add a post divider or change your margins. HTML scared the begeezes out of me when I first started messing with it, but now, I have learned a little about what all that nonsense means. A great website I found for blogger tutorials is BlogBulk.  Let me know if you have any blog makeover questions, I will be glad to help as much as I can now that I "sorta kinda" know what I'm doing! Haha!