Etsy, being in need of promotional videos, cleverly turned to its very own community of creatives to create 15 and 30 second spots around the theme of “handmade moments”. The contest accepted entries through August 31 and Etsy has since selected 10 finalists. The rest of us get to vote for a winner. We have until October 4.
I have delighted in watching every single one of the 25 semi-finalists‘ videos. True to the assigned theme “handmade moments” many of the clips feature handmade props of all sorts and a sort of naïve art execution that is absolutely endearing. Lots of [...]

Very cool free photo apps that empower Photoshop-disabled people, like moi, to render basic photos into something you might just want to place on your wall. In this article I am going to show you even more websites where you simply upload your photo and start playing. You can add one element or more, depending on what you like. If you don’t like what you see, you simply undo it.

I’ve shown you this before, and hate repeated myself, but seemingly Eastern European performance artform seems to be worth another mention. This time, a new artist, Kseniya Simonova tells the Ukrainian WWII story on sand, bringing her audience to tears. She’s a beautiful performer in every way.

You can see an equally moving previous performance here.
Happy Friday.

I am deeply embarrassed to be sharing this but I can’t help myself. If you haven’t heard of it already, you might want to visit the website that pretty much everyone will be talking about real soon: PeopleofWalmart.com.
It’s just not not right to make fun of people like this. I know. But, when I came across this site last night I was, at the same time, completely appalled and folded over laughing. Yes, this is happening in our very own country.

The really admirable part of this website (as if that was of any relevance) is that it was launched less [...]

By Shari Bonnin, Contributing Editor
Maybe you’re like me and haven’t quite got the whole layers, cropping, lassoing and all other Photoshop intricacies and just want to find easy ways to achieve certain effects with photos or maybe you are great at Photoshop but want some shortcuts.
Recently I’ve become very nostalgic because of Facebook; re-connecting with many old friends, digging into my old photo boxes, pulling out my Polaroids and thinking how cool that would be to be able to have that look again. Well, I’ve done some research, and here are some *FREE* photo effect websites that can help [...]

Wow! I love this woman. Sarah, thank you for being a voice for so many of us who just get to roll our eyes when we see the ridiculous commercials aimed at women. For example:

Sarah’s got a very effective form of soft feminism that mocks the female stereotypes portrayed by advertisers, in a compelling and just perfectly right humorous manner. OK, oftentimes LOL hilarious. Here’s one of her “Target Women” clips that covers pretty much every cliché about women: can’t be single, has to be saved by a man, wants to be married…

Or this one about the trials and tribulations [...]

Shoe lovers rejoice. There is a new “curated” way to window-shop for shoes. Newly launched LuckyToes.com is a free-to-use website where shoe fanatics (and shoe stores) can submit pics of their recent proud shoe purchases. Style experts (they call them “dictators”, guess that’s a shoe thing? Not sure) then evaluate submissions and may choose your pics to share on the site so that others can benefit from the glorious styles that you’ve unearthed.
The site is still relatively new, so there is not a huge selection of shoes yet, but I bet that it will catch on. A sister site is [...]

Michael Franti’s “Say Hey”.  I love you. I love you. I love you.

Thanks Robin Rice (BeWhoYouAre) for finding this.

All great stereotypes of husbands as bad gift-givers represented here. I’m guessing that women wrote this script? ‘Cause men are hating this video.  Thankfully, my husband doesn’t even come close to falling into one of these categories.

I love making my own word clouds with Wordle.net. Here’s one for the season! Happy Holidays & have fun!