Tag Archives: Design

July 20, 2012 · 4:00 am

Extreme Makeover: Blog Edition

The hubbub seems to have died down, and now it’s just me and you again.  And also a few new folks.  But not 20,000.  Which is good, because that was making me nervous.

This new-look Great Smitten site launched almost two months ago, and it occurred to me recently that I never gave you a proper tour, which is so rude of me because, in the South, that’s what you do when people come round.

So please, grab yourself a cup of coffee and follow me…

Header

My gorgeous header is my front door.

It was a joint effort between Jessi Connolly, who designed my overall blog, and April Knight, an illustrator from Charleston, South Carolina.

Simon was praying for me one night a few months ago when he asked God for my words to be like arrows.  Around the same time, I got an email from Jessi with some ideas for my design – and one of them was an arrow.  I went with it.

Now…if you’ll mosey on over to the sidebar with me…

Meet Faith

Self-explanatory

Social Media Buttons

Aren’t these pretty?  Email me, follow me on twitter and pinterest, become a facebook fan of Great Smitten, and subscribe via email.

I’ll compare this bit to my front porch.  It’s where we hang out.  Get to know each other a bit.  Chit-chat.  You know.

Sponsors and Affiliates

These are lovely people who have partnered with Great Smitten to get the word out about their blogs and businesses.  If you’d like more info about becoming a sponsor, you can click on the little “sponsors and affiliates” header and it’ll take you somewhere you can find that stuff out.  Or, you can just email me.  (Remember how to do that?  We covered it above.)

This is my front yard, with all my political signs stuck in the grass.

“Vote for Herb Humphries!”

“Vote No on November 5!”

Except mostly vote yes.  For these gals.

Reads

These are blogs and sites I personally read and recommend.  Simple, really.  It’s my rolodex.  Did I mention I’m giving you a tour of my house in the 80s?

Search Great Smitten

Again, self-explanatory.  I hope.  If not, email me.  Bless your heart.

Do Your Dream/How to Rope an Englishman/What My 20s Taught Me

These are recurring features, and you can find them all at the click of a button!  If you haven’t read them, you totally should.  I wrote them, and I like them.

So I guess this is kind of like that room in your house where you keep all your beauty pageant crowns and track & field trophies on display.  Not that I have any of those.

“I Read Great Smitten” Button

If you’ve got a blog and you want to tell the world that you read Great Smitten, grab the code in that little box there and paste it in a widget on your blog.  Boom.  Easy.

Follow on Facebook

This is where I like to display your picture.  You know, like a picture wall.  Because I’m into those.

Archives

This is where you can find all of my posts, ever, in chronological order.  Some of the old ones are embarrassing, but I’ve left them up for now to keep it real.  It’s kind of like how you keep your old yearbooks on your bookshelf.

I Miss This

This is a pointless list of things I miss from North Carolina.  I thought about deleting it with my new design, but I didn’t want to, so I didn’t.

It’s my house; I do what I want.

…

Thank you very, very much for coming on my blog tour.  I’ve got a few things in the works for the coming weeks, including the continuation of How to Rope an Englishman, a couple of new features I’ve been working on, and more inspiration to live a creative, authentic, passionate life.

It’s a pleasure to have you here, and I hope you’ll make yourself at home.

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October 2, 2009 · 11:25 am

What do I have in common with Garth Brooks?

My little sister commented on my facebook (yes, this is what it has come to) that I’m due for a blog post.  Indeed, it’s true.  And I apologize to those of you who do check back regularly to see what I’ve gotten into, what I’ve baked, what kind of lesson I’m being taught with the aid of dough and coffee and 18-year-old students misspelling their way to an Associate’s degree.

I’ve had a lot of restless nights lately, with Big Life questions playing on my mind – questions that remain unanswered.  But I hold out hope for answers.  And the Good thing that is happening now, is an answer to a question I asked a while ago.  I think this is how things work with God sometimes.  All that stuff about His perfect timing is true, and sometimes “unanswered prayers” (nod to Garth Brooks) are only delayed.  The answer may not be the one we were looking for, but it’s always the right one, and often it comes in this sort of cycle, later on, when we’ve moved onto another question, an answer we’ve already asked floats in on a breeze, rather than shaking us like an earthquake, the way we imagined it would.

You know those quotes people throw around about “finding your Passion?”  Like that one that goes something like, “Find what makes you come alive and then do that, because what this world needs are more people who have come alive?”  (someone please feel free to comment with the correct wording, I’m too lazy to google right now)  The thing is, I always read that quote and get this knot in my chest. 

What makes me come alive?  What is my Passion?  Writing, yes.  That, I love.  But it never feels like enough, because I think when you’re passionate about Words, you have to be passionate about something else, too, or there’s nothing to inspire the words - nothing to mold them around.

And now, somehow, by accident, my Passions have become so clear that I can’t believe I ever missed them: they are Words, People, and any form of Creation and Design.  Baking and cooking and sewing and jewelry-making and, in general, making things, not for myself, but for other people. 

This news came to me like an epiphany a few days ago, as I spent a day baking bread for my husband and for my friends, and sewing a baby bib for my pregnant housemate.  There is nothing that brings me more joy, that inspires me more than using my hands and my eyes and my brain to create something that will bring pleasure to another person.

I should have figured it out a few years ago, when I realized that my stomach flip-flopped every time I walked into a fabric store – or a grocery store, for that matter.  But, like I said, only God knows when our ears are prepped to hear the answers to our Big Questions…and I think sometimes He holds out on us a little while to make us more hungry – to increase our wanting so that, in its fulfillment, we experience the fullness of His Joy.

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