The Face of Bounty?

Could Be The... Face of Bounty?
Please vote for Aayla :) ...

I am super excited at the fact my daughters entry into the Face of Bounty competition had been accepted and is now live for votes! I don't normally bother with competitions of this sort, yet on this occassion I couldn't help myself!

The morning I entered the competition, I had been going through tonnes of images of my children to update the family album, when I had come across this one and as I always do with certain photos I ended up in a blubbing heap of cuteness because my daughter really has brought out the soppy mom in me lol! And when looking at the company Bounty a bit later on for other reasons, I then found this competition... then found myself on the entry page... filling in the form... uploading the picture... send... Yup, so there we have it! Lol!

I would love to see how far my daughter could go in the competition in her catagory for this month, so it would be wonderful if you could offer your support and cast a vote for her on her page. I believe that you may have to register before voting. I am not sure about that. But if you do vote for her I'll be very grateful :) Have a great weekend!

Moonangelnay x

Birthday Princess!

Sunday! - Coffee and Cake
Mish mash mosh, children everywhere, actual cakes and bubbles...




My baby is now 1 entire year old! And wow what an exciting day we had last Saturday. The sun was shining, my food didnt turn into a complete mess (hurrah!) and despite madam's protests at all of her grown up birthday guests (she's still very clingy bless her) I believe that she had a very lovely day :)

I would have pictures of the party by the way! But my SD card has a corrupt image on it and I can't copy ANYTHING onto my PC. I have a reader on its way to see if I can transfer them direct (as opposed to through the camera), and hopefully i can show you some pics next weekend!

Anyway, onto the day! I myself was pretty pooped throughout the afternoon having been up in the wee hours baking cakes dancing to Outkast to keep me awake, whilst my other half was doing a big clean up around the house. It was one of those things where it hadn't exactly been planned that way but kind of happened regardless of the plans, as you know with kids it NEVER works out how you hope it will. We just make plans to make ourselves feel better and efficient don't we? LOL! So night owls we were!

My concerns were that I had possibly sabotaged the cakes as my tired and flappy arms began to flag as time progressed, yet luckily for the party guests they ended up looking and tasting pretty good! Phew! I decided to leave decorating them until the morning which was a good idea as the birthday girl decided at 2am to wake up just in time to celebrate the time of her birth, and inadvertantly spoiling the surprise of the amazingly flowery handmade decorations and balloons (the little monkey). A few hours were spent entertaining her with a present (the coolest wind up caterpiller EVER), watching her plough into balloons galore, and touching up on the last of my photo montage of her first year. It was all good, it worked out well in the end! I had fun decorating the cakes in the morning using lots of edible glitter, strawberries and wafer flowers! I haven't been so girly in years it was great!

Im really chuffed with how they turned out. I'm not into a lot of the things you see in the shops that they have for baby partys and was secretly horrified by just how much Disney stuff there was in my local card shop for party decorations, so ours were about 95% handmade by me, and were reused or recycled. I have this awesome flower circle punch that i used to use for labels for my hats but i had this amazing idea the day before as i rifled through a ton of old gift bags that were in the paper recycling, and made great use of them by making patchwork style paper flowers. They were a great hit with the guests and the kids, I was ever so chuffed!

In our garden i figured as a time saving mechanism, rather than decorate the trees, fences etc I got out a bubble machine and had that running for most of the day, along with the sand pit and pop up play house the children were really happy and seemed to enjoy themselves :)

My little man was a bit jealous so was frequently telling me that his sister still had presents to open (as he wanted to play with them lol!) but I was proud of him for being a good boy for the day. He has lately been a bit grumpy, probably to do with all the party planning goings on. But he made a great host for all of his friends and did a great job of leading and entertaining everyone, including us grown ups! My little girl had spent most of the day chasing bubbles or being held as she finds anyone but me or my partner an excuse to be a bit dramatic so that was an interesting dynamic to the day! It was rather silly but bless her she was giving everyone smiles in the end. :) It was a great day, I'm really pleased it all worked out.


Anyway! Until next time, have a fab Sunday!

BOO! ... I'm Back :)

Boo! - I see You :)
crikey where's this one been?...


Well... When was the last time I posted? (Checking) Like, March? Wow that's quite unbelievable for me after managing to post weekly for so long! But there has been so many reasons behind it. You'll remember me being slightly overwhelmed at the time with work? Well... it got worse (better)!

I can't complain because it was such a great thing at the time to think YES! My business is successful! But man, I had really been plundered in at the deep end. I had to pretty much stop everything I was doing in every aspect of my life, apart from caring for my kids so I could work. Literally... including meals and sleep. It was shockingly busy. After the first busy day it became apparent that there was more for me to do so I had pretty much given up bed to work on hats, to hopefully ensure I wouldn't let anyone down. I worked throughout most of the nights in that period that I could keep my eyes open for, for about 5 weeks on the trot. It wasn't pretty, I looked like something out of a horror movie each day through fatigue and had on a few occassions collapsed because of it. But there is a reason behind it and it was due to the fact that Etsy had popped one of my hats into one of their Etsy Finds emails and my gosh the response was phenominal. I only found out like 30 mins after it happened when wondering if all the emails from Etsy in my inbox were a glitch LOL! I had a few hundred orders to contend with plus hundreds of emails to deal with in that first week, which just kept coming (but not as severely) in the time to follow. I was overwhelmed and overjoyed to begin with as it was such a positive thing to have happened but looking back I wish I was better prepared as I certainly won't be doing all nighters for a month again lol!

My mistake was not making stricter policies, or being clear enough in my listings about what buyers can do to buy/get in touch/etc, and as the vast majority of my query emails were actually answered in my shop announcement, I found myself getting highly frustrated by the fact that people were quick to email me before checking elsewhere, which after few tens of dozens of emails did start to get frustrating as I wasn't working on the orders. It's surprising to think about how much time I spend on my emails but I had always envisioned my business being personable, but I lost so much work time to emails which really could have saved my butt on the whole polava if I had made my shop more newbie friendly.

So I have had multiple shop/listing/appearence overhauls to try and not only make it all "make sense" and easier to work out how to find information, but I figured it needed a facelift too. Hence the new banner :)


Ah it's nice to be back though, and it's nice to have learnt something big about my business that I think will help me greatly in the future! Although I have to say something odd has been happening with Etsy recently that seems to have slowed loads of shops sales down. Has anyone noticed it with theirs? I scoured the forums and someone said that one of their Etsy friends who's one of the top Etsy shops selling like hundreds of things a week is down to single figures which just isn't right at all, and I had honestly thought that maybe it was just that time of the year :s

I hear on the grapevine that Google has been making it more awkward for internet users by introducing more keywords for their "don't you dare use these on your webpage" list. For Etsy users, if you're lucky to be syndicated it will effect you most definitely. Words like adult were an issue before, in or out of their obvious context. But now words like shipping are a problem! Which for me meant changing ALL of my listings to make sure I don't disappear off the internet. It's a good thing I'd been planning on it anyway as part of my overall big shop changes. But yeah some people in the forums believe that's a large part of this low views, low sales problem of the past month. Who knows but I do hope it changes soon. These are livelihoods we're talking about for a lot of established sellers (new ones too) and I think Etsy needs to talk about it as they are aware of it! In the mean time I'm looking into advertising, making new hats etc so it's time I can make use of still, although I would like to start earning more consistently again.

It's leaving me with lots of time to enjoy my daughters babyhood as on Saturday she'll be 1 entire year old! My baby! I can't believe I'm at this point already and she has done so well bless her in her first year. She's walking now, enjoying baby signing to the point of using it to communicate and not just to make us smile :) and she's playing lots with her big brother too. I can't wait for the day, I'm hoping it'll be sunny so we can have a little party in the garden.

So until the weekend, as I'm unsure I'll be blogging again until then have a great week!

moonangelnay x

Late again!

VERY Belated - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...


ahem... argggghhh! Crikey what a mad couple of weeks! and it's still mad! I should have expected it really... making bunny hats... changing my shop tags (getting used to this SEO thing now)... the addition of a NEW HAT and picture courtesy of the amazing jsbfrechin on Etsy from www.m-mphoto.com and EASTER is but a month away. It's lovely to be so busy but my poor garden hasn't been sown and I am experiencing waaaaaaaaay too many late nights to compensate for the times I'm unable to work when I have the "kiddie shift". I am ploughing through the next few days with my partner finally having a few days off work, but yes some things are being sacrificed like my features for the blog, planting my potatoes ( :( ) and other foods, and anything I think could wait a little bit longer... but ohhhh... when the backlog of hats is out of the way I am SO going on a spa day. I think it's necessary :)


One thing I managed to do in the last few weeks is design new business cards for Babamoon and a postcard with details of my out of house business in baby portraiture that I think may actually manifest sometime this year, and I had the first lot of 100 come through the other day which almost brought a tear to my eye. They're AMAZING! I thought I'd show you the current look for my packaging which I've been using for a while now, using the pink envelopes (yep... the post office people know who I am LOL), my cards and the labelled hat inside a protective sleeve. I had used the free cards from Vistaprint for a while and figured I needed something more personal... and my goodness these are just perfect! Please excuse the quality... I've been using my phone for images recently as my poor DSLR's charger is missing somewhere in the many boxes that still need to be emptied :( But still! :D


So until next time, hopefully things will be less sporadic on here soon but for now I'll be writing when I can at least once or twice a week.

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

Strange

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...


Weird Week... yes... It has certainly been different! This morning for instance has been the 2nd night in a row that my son (not the baby) has decided to keep me up all night, then when coupled with my daughters desire to do the same things can be pretty tiring for me as you can imagine! It normally happens when I have been up late working too. Go figure! So I've been awake each night imagining all the snoozing bodies in my timezone whilst the kids are jumping around all over the bed. At least it's given me time to reflect a lot on plans for the future which has been the positive!

I won't go into everything but I'll share what occured at the start of the week. It was probably the weirdest day, with my new sofa having arrived to the house, and the darned thing just refused to fit through any of the doors! We got it in, in the end without the rip off suggestion from the company we purchased from (upholsterers to take apart my NEW sofa for a quarter of it's value??? I know they didn't even try to go there... nooooooooo!), by getting it in through our front window which had to be removed... ho! Oh the fun of that day...

But yes. I do wonder why sometimes in life you tend to get these very bizarre stages where loads of strange things occur. And believing in the law of attraction I do get a bit confused by it. As these events are generally neither positive or negative for me. Just weird... like you've hit some sort of ink smudge in the story of your life.
I always expect with negative events, that they will be followed by 3 times more positive results (they always do) and that positive events are always progressive in the same way. Things are constant and always moving with a directive known as intention. But something in between that is far from normal? I don't often experience things that for some could be extremely frustrating for some that leave me feeling quite neutral. It's exciting to say the least, I do wonder what will come of such things as I think sometimes that in a way maybe it means I'm quite comfortable with the occurances in life and open to new experiences without judgement or fear. Then I can completely contradict that and poop my pants about things which I guess is human nature, having an emotional body as we all do. It's fascinating though. The kind of things that move people to joy, or tears, or just don't really do anything. I love experiencing emotions as they tell me so much about me, where I've been and where I'm going and especially since having my children I find that all of my experiences whatever they are, good or bad seem to be worth it in the end.

Happy Valentines day for tomorrow everyone! May cupids arrows work overtime :)

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

Storm Before The Calm

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...


In, Out And Shake It All About... Warning... a bit of a rant here as I need to vent! It's nice to know that after an entire month of delays both unforseen and out of our control and the masses of stress involved with it all, we are finally in our new house and can worry about normal things associated with moving.

Like unpacking... urgh. I didn't realise just how much stuff we had to be honest as a lot of our knick-knacks were cleverly hidden away in the side passage at our old place which we rarely ventured into. It was so much of a surprise that we totally misjudged how long we'd need the removal van for and ended up having to hire it AGAIN for a few more days over the following weekend to try and get the bulk of it out. Not nice on our finances but with little help it was all we could do, as with the short notice of the move (that we couldn't help) there wasn't any reasonable advance we could give to any friends or family willing to help. Luckily though some of my closest friends offered a hand despite how tight everything was and did their bit either helping to pack, organise, move or take care of my son (as my daughter wasn't having any of it lol), as did my dad who drove all the way from Wales to do his bit for us. It didn't entirely go to plan, but at least the worst of it all has been done and like I say, the normal worrisome parts of moving can be worried about.

It was a very hard time for us as can be expected, but without any more help with the kids progress is slow and both myself and Elric have been struggling. Luckily with my son being at nursery, their are some days in the week where things are easier, but despite my daughters baby protests at the mo we really could do with help with her, but unfortunately the only offers of help we ever get for her are from people who happen to be hundreds of miles away and to us it's just not practical expecting them to drop everything and spend so much money to travel to us when we know that it would cause problems for them to be able to do that anyway, plus the addition of their own personal difficulties to deal with which I really don't want to contribute to! So I have been watching her whilst trying to work, keep the house maintained where I can and unpack where I can, my normal duties of cooking, grocery shops, nursery runs, post office runs, plus watching my son when he's home, working on my PC, editing pictures for my photography shop, working on new hats, managing my babamoon business, generally dealing with the repercussions caused by the bad weather in the USA and homeland security delays that have devestated my business in the past month (I'll get to that), paperwork... oh my the list goes on and the fact I'm not sleeping kind of tops it all off.

Elric having his full time job has also had an equally painful amount of stuff to do at home including helping with the kids so I can work, and we are both just so lucky that at least we can support eachother through it all and try and come out smiling! A lot of our friends try and be optimisitc for us, but I don't think they realise just how problematic things have been and that our lack of time is now pretty much eating into eating and sleeping time. But we have to work, we have to care for our children, and we have to sort out the new house. We're driving ourselves 10 times harder than usual, so at least in about a month or two we can probably get the opportunity to relax! Lol! It'll get sorted, I know it will.

But despite this stress the thing that's hit me hardest recently has been the problems with postal delays and Babamoon. My hat shop is very close to my heart as I started it having being inspired by both of my children, and since January I have received floods of messages from concerned customers not having received their orders when they should have. It was only two thirds of the way through January where my postal provider AND Etsy decided to tell everyone why it was happening as thank goodness it wasn't isolated to my shop (I honestly thought I'd messed up packaging or something). It turns out that a combination of atrocious weather from the East coast stopped post moving full stop, coupled with homeland security in the USA having experienced a bomb threat on a plane in November upped their security to 100% which means any packages travelling on planes are either being held for weeks on end before being released in small batches or are being sent by boat or smaller planes which take a million years to travel. Most of my customers are in the USA so from the 8th of December my orders got hit BADLY by this, so far the latest package arriving in 5 weeks when it should have taken 5 days! I am SOOOO grateful that most customers have been really patient and understanding through it all. I can't tell you how amazed I am at how lovely they have all been. But there is a small portion that are blaming me even though this post problem is a global issue out of my control and effecting everyone worldwide posting internationally, two of whom threatened me out of the blue with action with their credit card company without having asked me before about what was going on. They have really made me feel down about it all. And even down about myself. There was one day with a particularly difficult message where I had considered giving up everything. It took a few hours before I became rational about it and realised that this won't be forever, I am reliable and I am doing my best to help everyone involved. I tell you what though it's been tough, having a barrage of daily negative messages (not necessarily against me I need to add) arriving for over a month and having to deal with it all by myself. It's just sad as I really do feel for this people, I know how it must feel as I am a mother and I make my hats as a loving mother and pour a lot of energy into making them perfect for the new little owners. So besides their money being effected it's my time and efforts too. It's been very hard. I can't control what the post is doing but it has still effected my self esteem as I do work tremendously hard to make everything right before they leave me. I have to keep reminding myself that there are always going to be angry customers and that I shouldn't take it personally if I know I've done what I'm supposed to. All we can all do is wait.

Post has been normal since mid January but now with all the bad weather going on in the USA I'm not sure if it'll slow things down again. I have had packages arrive in time over the last few days despite the snow so it's very confusing to know what to expect.

For me, a large portion of my time is continually being taken up by researching progress and emailing everyone to reassure them and I'm looking forward to the end despite knowing that in a week I'll probably lose a weeks wage in refunds to the angrier customers. I just want the end to come so I can stop dreading all Etsy conversations from coming in. That has to be the worst part. Assuming that all Convo's are negative and that sinking feeling I get when opening up my emails. I am positive at least that things are going well, so here's to good times to come!

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

Now, It's On!

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...


NOW, It's on... Oh crikey, the panic we were in on Friday. For half a day we were convinced our purchased house completion had fallen through because after a positive and hopeful morning, we had a phone call that changed everything and left us pretty much unable to do anything but chew our hands and wait patiently for a resolution for the entire day.

It was the first time in all the trouble we've had buying this house that it seemed like we were set to lose it and all invested into it too, since all the trouble began before Christmas with the vendors of the property. We were supposed to have moved before Christmas! So it really has been an ordeal, and totally down to their own disorganised nature and personal issues between themselves as a couple. We just got dragged along for the ride!

Luckily though, in the last 15 minutes of the working day, our Solicitors gave us a phone call to celebrate and we are now able to get a move on!

So for a few days I'll only really be able to mobile blog, but I'm looking forward to doing that, it's a chance to make myself familiar with blogging on the move! LOL! Don't know how it'll work but we'll see! So I can confirm at least that my features this week will most definitely be postponed until the weekend, but I will be around if I am able to update on progress :) In all this I am still working too so it's going to be a busy one that's for sure!

Oh, I thought I would post a picture of a new rainbow bunny pic for the rainbow hat in my shop. I had word from a buyer about an order which got me thinking about the images I use for that particular color, as the rainbow yarn can vary in intensity with each dye lot I thought it'd be an idea to have a few images that show the different intensities I had encountered in the past. So here is one of them! I hope to get better images sometime as I'm not that happy with the one's I have in this color. We'll see how it goes! Ok I'm off to follow blogs whilst I have my coffee and then get going! Speak soon!

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

An Early Coffee and Cake...

It's Friday...


It is on!... Our house move is underway so of course I've had to have lots of limitations this week with certain features, and this of course is one that I've had to postpone until next week too. There are some issues going on which I cannot believe are happening regarding the fact that we hoped to be moving this weekend, which is down to the sellers of the property we are buying. It's come today at the last minute so we're chewing our hands off waiting news on what's going on. the situation with the blog may remain the same as we still need to sort out loads whether we move when we'd hoped or not. I'll still be working over the days on my orders but I doubt my time can be stretched further than that really. I have had the chance to ready a few of the more recent things I've made and haven't shared on my blog so I thought I'd paste those into this quick post today, but I need to scramble really being as we have a tonne to do for this weekend! There's a possibility of course that posts for early next week will be postponed, but we'll see how things go with that! I'll be in touch soon everyone :)

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

Musing

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...


Musing... I seem to have hat ideas coming from all angles currently. It's very exciting and motivating to always be thinking about creating things, and even better when I get a moment to execute the new ideas and expand on others! My inspiration this week has mostly been for Babamoon, and so far I have had three new hats come out of it. One I am still picking and choosing images for so I'll probably launch that one next week, but I have the other two here to show today :) One is the familiar Flopsy Bunny Hat in Pink! Nothing spectacularly new, but I don't have any images of my other colors for the single colored hat, other than the Rainbow spray color available in my shop. I thought it'd be nice to have something in there for Valentines Day so baby pink was the choice :)

My other new hat as you can guess is a little smart number for boys! My newest newsboy cap! I've been meaning to do more boys hats and newsboy caps so I figured that I'd better get on with it. Ages ago I went a bit mad at my local yarn store buying loads of sale yarns and chose the one picured above out of my stash to make this one with. The only problem is the yarn is a discontinued line so even though I am able to obtain the yarn for the hat still, some time soon I won't be able to so it has become my first limted edition hat! Very excited about it. It's brought a whole new dynamic to my yarn hunting lol! So far it looks like I can make a fair few of them, but due to the limitations I am only making sizes up to 2T as i think with the yarn now being so rare it's best this way. Best grab one whilst I have the yarn!

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

New Stuff!

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...


New Stuff!... I am trying to adjust to a quiet few days after a long busy couple of months, and obviously what happened at Christmas with our dog, and really enjoying the free time to think, read, bake and conjure up new ideas and nurture my shops a little. It's been lovely outside of work too being able to get out of the house a bit to enjoy lots of 1 on 1 time with my children.


I have tried hard over the months to give determinned attention to my photography store, and I'll be honest I had been experiencing times of wondering whether I should have closed up as my other shop Babamoon has dominated so much of my time, I have up until now been completely unable to get out and take new photos. Maintaining it was never a problem but I'm always seeking the fresh and new, and with the seasons changing I have been so desperate to get out and enjoy capturing some of the interesting things going on in nature. And then there's my digital painting, the signature of my style in Moonangelnay Photography. That's been at a standstill lately and the most useful thing my pen tablet had been doing in my absence was to collect dust. I felt pretty guilty that I was only able to print orders and renew listings. It felt very much like a production line, and there was nothing new being put in so I really did think that I should have shut shop for a little while until I have my studio set up in my new house when we move. Thankfully though the break has come along without me needing to close either of them even just for a vacation so I have some new things coming along in both stores that I wanted to share which I had been meaning to do for months :) It's nice having the urge to take photos but I have a growing backlog of images with tonnes of notes on to edit from the summer and autumn so I'm currently completing those as well as thinking of new ideas for images this year.


My daughter has started to crawl this week which has been the highlight for our little family. It's so far been a bum shuffling effort from her to get from A to B, but she has finally begun to coordinate her legs with the movements from her arms. She's still a bit clumsy with it but it's early days. I'm very proud of her for being so mobile for so long without the ability to crawl! She looks like she's ready to pull herself up to her feet too as she's giving clambering up furniture a good go. It'll be lovely to see her running around, I can't wait :) My son has also had some nice things going on for him lately like growing confidence in his independance, which has come in good time for him beginning nursery. He's been ever so good intergrating into the whole nursery scenario which for a lot of children can be a bit daunting, yet his teachers tell me he settled in without any real sort of need for their support, and has already been making friends after just his trial session! Very proud of him for that. I'm sure when I was his age, I clung on to my mom's ankles for dear life when I realised she was going to leave me at nursery LOL!


I think I might bake some bread today so I'm off to do that after checking out the hoppers from Thursdays Blog Hop. Stop by on Thursday if you'd like to join in the next one, I do try to follow back everyone I havent followed before! Hope you all have a great weekend and take care x

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

A Quick One

A quick one... I'm sure everyone is going mental this weekend preparing for Christmas... 6 days away... sheesh! I am quite certain the last time I looked which i swear was yesterday (ahem) there was at least another 10 days added to that number. Anyhoo, I cannot ramble much today for I have orders to fulfill, presents to knit, and food to prepare for the big day. I instead thought I'd leave a recent new image that I hope to add to the collection in my hat shop after Christmas, and give ya'll a sneak preview :) I have made bajillions of these rainbow bunny hats so I thought it deserved some new images. And this one is one of my faves! :)
If I don't randomly post in the week (which is likely as I have too much to do to focus much on features), I'll wish you all a Merry Christmas now! Speak soon!

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

Frozen Over

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...

Frozen Over... Phew I have had a busy couple of weeks. Now that my last shipping days are coming and going things have quietened down a bit so I have had the chance to chill the last few days, which funnily enough has felt totally weird. I'm used to being busy anyway but I had been uber busy with orders which with the bulk having been completed, I am now left with just a few local orders and a bit of spare time to do what I want with. And I haven't known what to do! LOL. My daughter has taken advantage and has gone from clingy to being glued to me so we've had loads of time together. My partner has suggested I go out for the day sometime in the next week to have a bit of me time which I can now comfortably enjoy since the weather in the country has become milder the last few days. Boy did it get cold here lately.
It's unusual for the UK to get as cold as -25 celcius or something like that, but in places it plunged to that and may have been lower I'm not sure. I know what the weather suggeted for me locally and it always turned out to be colder on our thermometer! My coldest day was -12 celcius and there was the most amazing frost everywhere. It looked like it had snowed in our garden. For my family it was a great spectacle as like I say it's not a temperature we experience often in the UK so I was really happy to capture some new images of the bizarre happenings in my garden. The best find was the frozen spiders web. That was a stunning sight! I have lots of new images to play around with for my photography store... that's something I have wanted to do for ages so I was really glad for mother nature to provide something different for me and my camera to enjoy. I'm not sure when I'll get to work on it as Babamoon has kind of taken over things but I hope to have it sorted by early January. We'll see how that goes!

so for the remainder of my weekend I am going to get on with orders, and hopefully have a nice night playing chess with my other half. Looking forward to that!

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

Short and Sweet!

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...



Just for today... I am gonna have to have that love ya and leave ya mentality relating to this post. I have LOADS of hat orders to get through for Christmas which is a really nice feeling as I don't think I've been this busy before with either of my stores. Since Black Friday things have just continued to pick up and it's bloomin' marvelous! Besides a bit of sleep deprivation I feel really good about what's happening and praying that it's not just because of the holidays, but because i spent over a day last week changing every single listing and tag in my shop to improve it's internet SEO. And by golly if double my usual shop views have anything to do with it then I need to continue nurturing what's currently going on! So until next Sunday my dears!

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

moonangelnay x

Trip to Santa

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...

Blog's 'Fourth Giveaway' winner! Congratulations to "BananasAreGross". You have won yourself a custom made adorable mouse headband! I have contacted you via email :)

Trip to Santa! ... I was in a bit of a stressful polava yesterday trying to navigate my way through stationary human traffic in my City Centre through what is quite possibly the busiest shopping day I have ever dared set foot in... ever! And boy did I wish I didn't after a few hours lol! We were there from 11am to 5pm and I really couldn't believe how much shopping time we had in those hours. It was so bad we actually spent more time squashed between people at the Frankfurt Market trying to go from the museum to the Bullring then we did actually browsing any market stalls (of which we only managed to glance at about 4) and shopping down the high street. It was absolute chaos! My poor kids were freezing as it had plummetted to -7 degrees celcius in the day which is highly unusual for Birmingham at the best of times, and everyone had that 'ploughing mentality' where they just look at the floor and bowl themselves through the crowds. My son who was being a very good boy despite everything was being knocked all over the place, and trying hard not to loose the Christmas spirit I was feeling pretty crappy about why we hadn't forseen such a thing coming. We decided to cut the shopping short in the end and I'm going to go back, armoured and ready for the crowds to do a bit of people ploughing myself and finish my Christmas shopping when I get my last orders out of the way. I wouldn't put my kids through that again, it's disheartening to think that people can be so rude, ignorant and cruel knocking a 3 year old to the floor many times without apologising, or half the time even noticing when all we did was courteously make way for people trying to set a good example to the children. *Sigh*

At least the best part of the day was spent when we had initially arrived into town and made our way to the Museum and Art Gallery to have cultured morning looking at the exhibits and to visit our favourite Santa that always sets up his grotto at the Museum every year. It was so wonderful. Because he had only planned to be there for 2 days, we expected to be queuing for ages upon arrival but we were actually pretty much first in there!

We were greeted by a Christmas Fairy who was very sweet to my son who at that point had melted away all of his brave Santa list chatter and gone very shy, and managed to coax us into the lovely little grotto that we could hear Santa Ho Ho Ho-ing in to himself. This being my daughters first Christmas was an extra special occassion and Santa was very sweet picking up on that and having a discussion with my son about it. My son at the best of times when he is in shy mode tends to just stand glued to the spot but was very quickly warmed to this lovely man's kindness and way with words which made the whole experience very exciting for him, and gave him that bit of independance and confidence that we crave for him when it comes to talking to other people. He can sometimes be heavily reliant on us for being as shy as he is, so was a revelation for him in his ability to be a big boy and talk about his little sister and wishes with confidence. It was the perfect trip! And after we had a wander around the museum and let my son direct us to all of his favourite exhibitions like "the Cry" bronze sculpture and Ancient Egyptian area. I guess things always work out that way just to balance things out. Well... despite the hullaballoo in town, my kids are in fab spirits today, so I think seeing Santa was enough to keep everything positive for them this weekend :)

Regarding work I am super busy with hat making this weekend as Black Friday has been and gone and my Babamoon sale is going on until the 13th of December anyway so people have started getting their Christmas orders in. If you are interested in purchasing a hat from Babamoon this weekend then there's 25% off everything! If you want a further 10% off, join my Facebook Page and look out for my FB Fans Coupon Code on the page :) Note that I am not running this sale in my photography store.

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com

That's it for now. Have a great weekend all!


moonangelnay x

It Takes Two!

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...

It Takes Two! ... I am quite familiar with that number this week as it been encompassing a lot of the goings on in plenty of the situations befalling me. Like my spam happy commenter has stopped using their old alias to riddle this blog full of crap (number twos... ho!) and started using a NEW one... for which I dont even want to dignify with naming it... I wouldn't want to give them a fighting chance in the searching engines, they've ticked me off too much now. That's the most negative number two of the week thankfully. The remainder has been a much more positive with double the effort I make in the day to run my Babamoon store as I now find myself constantly nurturing both the Etsy one and my newer Artfire one. Still haven't done the Zibbet one although I will do eventually. I think that I'm going to try and strenghten the presence of my Artfire shop first both outside and in. I am really happy with how it's working out but I have needed to tweak all my imported listings which is time consuming, although having said that it has made me evaluate how to try improving on my listing SEO. I have also made two new headbands this week that are very cute. Two hearts, one red and one green. Perfect for Christmas I think :) The intention was to make a host of colors, but realistically I think a project like that is best saved for over the holidays when there's less of a Christmas panic! Speaking of headgear, I also purchased two new pinks in the Sirdar Snowflake yarn that I normally make the animal hats out of in response to a customer that was looking for a softer pink for a potential order... but couldn't decide which was better, and for one of my orders in the week I had to make 2 bear hats which isn't usual as i normally find the bunny hats dominate my orders. Then there's been my two children and spending more time than usual in their comapny as my partners has had a busier than normal week working. That's been the nicest part as although I am with them all of the time anyway, just having that little bit more has given more thought as to how to spend the extra time together so I figured that as my daughter is more alert now I would reintroduce baby signing into the household. So out came my sons old DVDs and I got a fab app with all the BSL signs that are helpful on hand for doing this with children, and I've been signing away with my sons help trying to teach her how to communicate with us along with speech. She's taking to it well, although rather than trying to sign she's doing an amazing job of copying sounds which is wonderful, and in all of this she has worked out how to say Dada and associate the word to her Daddy :) It's really cute, whenever he's in the room she'll give him the biggest smile and say "Eyo Dada!" I tell ya, he's been on cloud 9 all week... she loves saying it to him. She's 6 months old today so I'm really pleased with her achievement :)

Well that's it for now although I just want to quickly mention that the is 10% off everything in Babamoon until 11pm GMT tonight! If you're looking for Christmas gifts for baby then this is one opportunity before Black Friday to take advantage! Best wishes everyone and Happy Thanksgiving for those that will celebrate on Thursday. Ta ta!

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com...

Have a great weekend all!


moonangelnay x

Spam Alert!

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly mommy babble and handmade goings on...

Blog's 'Third Giveaway' winner! Congratulations to "asuka". You have won yourself a custom made adorable flower sun hat! I have contacted you via email :)

Spam alert! ... I am holding my breath a bit at the moment. I'm not so certain if it's because of the weekend but a certain spammer under two names (Gucci Outlet and Coach Outlet) has ceased tormenting my blog archive full of irrelavent comments linking back to their commecial *shudders* web stores. I dont wish to be a turd about the fact my site is for handmade goods and handmade artisan features, but I was a bit perplexed at the fact they tried to exploit my page loads of times to promote their commercial stores whilst completely ignoring my warnings for them to stop it. That's just plain offensive. I think when you spend a lot of time doing things to help people and maintaining a blog on a daily basis, it's kind of rude for someone to come along and post blatently unrelated comments onto posts that are not only recent, but ones that are from the distant past as if posting them deep into my blog means I won't notice them??? HA! is all I have to say.

I left my comments open a while ago to make it easier for my genuine readers to post for things like my giveaway, and I did wonder when someone would try and take advantage of it. I thought "Hey, at least if I contact them and tell them to quit it, they'll get lost...". And I tried that... And you know, they completely ignored me and carried on like I didn't say anything??? That peed me off big time and prompted a bit of a rant message which I am HOPING is the reason they've left my blog alone. I think that their tactics were a bit thick headed though. I knew they weren't reading my posts because they had a variety of types of comment. Some were exerpts from various posts of mine (yeah! I know LOL), some were so off key from a post topic only bats could of appreciated them, and to top it off they didn't actually notice that I DELETED every one of their spam comments every single day, only to repost more crap on the same posts they may have posted on days before like they had "never read them before". It's been driving me nutty all week. But yes, twice I have had to contact them and only since yesterday they stopped. I do heavily moderate my comments and to all of you out their who read my blog I swear I have never once had to delete comments due to spam so to all of you thankyou for your relevant and kind words, whatever topic they may have come under :)

Well that was the only bad part of the week thanks goodness. The rest has been pretty productive. Looks like we have the house we want! So plans are underway to pack and dump things which I MUST crack on with today as much as my little arms can speed through my junk, as the local council are having a rare dump collection tomorrow morning which should save me and my partner a few thousand trips to the local tip yard... OK I'm exaggerating, but man after seeing all of my piled up boxes upstairs I'm beginning to sweat, so that's on the cards today I think. On top of a visit from my dad who's bringing up a few of my siblings for a visit! Eeek! So lots to do!

During the week I made a few new things for Babamoon like my super sweet crochet cable santa hat, and my sparkly Tam O' Shanter which has to be my absolute favourite. It looks totally awesome on my daughter. I'm going to work on other colors soon too as I have a bajillion ideas that have resulted from the design. I LOVE how they have turned out, and they are now both listed in my shop in various sizes for made to order purchases. I also managed to finally list and manage my Artfire store which I have been absolutely pants with for way too long. But now at least it is being as loved and nurtured as my Etsy shop. Hey I had even made my first sale on it :) Good going I think. I am planning to now open up a Zibbet shop exclusively for babamoon to hopefully give it a bit more stretch on the web as it's still a bit of a baby and I could do with a few more venues to spread the word without having to spend as much time as I have with my photography store inputting the shop link into loads of places. I will have to do that some time but for now I think another selling venue will be enough. Zibbet is pretty new and looks quite promising so I'm excited about what I can do with it. I'll probably have more on that next week.

Recent Altered Photography And Baby Accessories
Posted to moonangelnay.etsy.com and babamoon.etsy.com...

That's it for now. Have a great weekend all!


moonangelnay x

PR Friendly

PR Info, Sponsored Giveaways and Advertising...


I would like to give the opportunity for handmade sellers and other businesses that may sell Art/Craft related items and supplies, jewelry, childrens toys, clothing, accessories, household items, home decor, womens items etc a series of affordable options to show off products on my blog. All received entries will be exposed to a large following on both this blog, my RSS subscribers, Twitter via @moonangelnay and my Facebook Page.

I love to help new businesses which has been the primary function of this blog to date, to showcase new and innovative products from mothers, students, grandparents and enthusiastic entrepreneurs from all sort of backgrounds, and have dedicated a 7 day week stream of features to help bring traffic to these handmade artisans. I now want to extend this further out to established businesses that will want to reach a steady audience of niche traffic for their products via the use of Sponsored Advertising, PR Reviews and Sponsored Giveaways.

Please have a read of my Disclosure Policy.

My usual format for helping new businesses for free will remain the same which will include exclusive features on Mondays and Fridays. I will also continue to offer the reciprocal gratitude shopping guide on Wednesdays, and Etsy Team Features on Tuesdays that are a response to features of my own businesses.


Moonangelnay Handmade Blog Statistics
(Updated November 26 2010)

Between the 25th of October to the 25th of November this blog has received:
4664 Visits
2115 Absolutely Unique Visitors
5827 Pageviews

All of these figures have been steadily improving each month between 10% and 15% at a time so the blog is ever growing.

I also have a growing number of followers:

945 Followers Via Google Friend Connect (GFC)
835 RSS Subscribed Readers
353 Facebook Fans
3980 Twitter Followers

My audience demographics are as follows. My readers are mostly:

Female
Aged Between 18-65+ but mostly over 45
Are a mixture of people with and without children
Browse from home
Have Some College Education to Graduate Education
Mostly from the USA and United Kingdom

My Alexa Traffic Rank is 123,944 and in the US I am ranked 77,551


Sponsored Giveaway, Advertising Rates and PR Reviews

For advertising rates or if you want to forward your product for a review or giveaway on my blog then please send me an email at moonangelnay [!at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk to make arrangements. (Details will be available in this post shortly).

Sponsored Giveaways will have their own dedicated post on Saturdays with a limit of 3 reviews per Saturday that will all appear on the blog homepage exclusively on the day of feature. I ALWAYS write detailed, constructive posts when it comes to reviews so you will be guaranteed to receive a positive post for your product. I ask that you please allow up to 4 weeks for your entry to appear unless there is a waiting list then you may have towait a bit longer. In exchange for this exclusive feature I will retain the products sent to me. For rush entries I charge a flat rate of $20 for these dedicated posts to appear in the nearest available slots, of which I would invoice you the amount through Paypal via email. Your products with be used and tested by myself and my family consisting of my other half and my two children (6m and 3). Please make sure your items are family friendly

Advertisements will run by the week, month or year above the fold of the page and will run on rotation. Image size must be 125x125.


Submit Your Giveaway

If you have an interest in listing a giveaway on my blog then please read my rates below and fill in the form. If you DON'T want the upgrade then please don't submit images, descriptions or rules. I aim to post entries within 72 hours but I can rush submit entries for $1 to appear within 24 hours guaranteed.


Basic Rate (Free) : A small text ad and link for your giveaway that will be posted on the right hand side of the blog beneath the upgraded basic rate giveaways in a scrolling marquee. This will consist of a title, duration, price and the title will use a hyperlink.

example:

Win a customized baby mouse headband
Value $14 Ends 11/27

Basic Rate (Upgrade $2 per entry) : A small text ad and link for your giveaway that will be posted on the right hand side of the blog directly beneath my blog sponsors in a scrolling marquee. This will consist of an image (max height 125px), title in bold, description (150 characters), rules of entry (150 characters), duration, price and the title will use a hyperlink.

example:

Win a customized baby mouse headband
Handmade crochet baby headband in gray and
pink, customized to your stated size.
Leave comments after completing each of the relevant
tasks mentioned in the giveaway post
(eg: blog, tweet, FB posts, follow the blog host etc).
Value $14 Ends 11/27