Carrie Loves

Scheduling

May 6, 2013 By Carrie Koehmstedt

buttery yellow flowers from grey likes weddings

I have been on bit of a non-blogging stretch lately. I consider myself lucky to post at least once a week, and sometimes I couldn’t even manage that. There’s just so much “life” happening right now, plus the added responsibilities of being self-employed, it’s been a whirlwind lately. So to rectify that and get Carrie Loves back on track I’m creating a post schedule of sorts, nothing too over the top, but enough to get my mojo back.

Last Friday I posted the first of my new Fabulous Font Friday posts. Going forward I hope to share with you my very geeky fascination with fonts.

Let’s just keep going backwards shall we, I’d hate to start being normal now…

Thursday…

Wednesday…

Tuesday…

Monday I’m keeping free because that tends to be my busiest design day – because Saturday & Sunday are included in that day’s work, funny how that works out. If time allows I’ll post spontaneously on Mondays – that’ll be awesome!

Okay, so I’ve got nothing for Thursday, Wednesday & Tuesday and a whole day to come up with a plan… What would you like to see more of? Blog tips? Favorite Pinterest pins? Bunny rabbits? Naked men? Oh, sorry not that kind of blog.

I need your help!

But seriously, let me know your thoughts, leave me a comment or shoot me an email.

image via grey likes weddings.

Filed Under: Blogging // 6 Comments

Sewing Pattern

May 4, 2013 By Carrie Koehmstedt

simplicity 8352

This makes me smile! I remember when I was much younger spending hours with my mom inside fabric stores pouring over the many different fabric patterns, and not once did one of them start dancing.

I love the girl in the background.

I’m not sure who the creator of the .gif is, a girl can get turned around horribly on Tumblr, but I found it via Poppytalk.

Happy weekend!

Filed Under: Awesome Things by Someone Else //

Fabulous Font Friday // Cathie’s Hand

May 3, 2013 By Carrie Koehmstedt

I recently (like yesterday) switched up the font on my blog & website, I replaced all of the cursive font with FG Cathie’s Hand font. Now all of my post titles and headings are Cathie’s Hand. The font is so pretty and well done I thought it would mesh perfectly with my hand-drawn blog banner (I did that, too, the other day.) Oh, I think it would make really great blog signatures, too!

fg cathies hand font

I used the WordPress plugin Use Any Font to upload the font to my sites – it was a dream to use, super simple, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am!

Inspired by The Titled Blog.

Filed Under: Graphic Design Tagged With: font //

Things I love

May 2, 2013 By Carrie Koehmstedt

It’s my beautiful parent’s 49th wedding anniversary – Happy Anniversary mom & dad!

mom and dad wedding

I’m truly in love with The Voice. It’s the ONLY music show that I’ve been drawn to and it’s solely because of the chemistry between these fabulous four, not to mention the crazy talent on the show – I love the Indie singers!

the voice

Creative Market is a designer’s dream come true.

These extraordinary photos from California (and out West) by Sincerly, Kinsey.

I love the generosity of the interwebs, I recently had a Blogger template order from Megan, who coincidentally works for a big record label in NYC and she sent me 6 CDs… just because. Sweet!

Speaking of sweet, I was also contacted by a marketing company for an auto company (rhymes with schmoyota) to try out one of their new cars… which is really great, because my husband and I haven’t been on a vacation for more than 3 years (I know, first world problems, blah, blah, blah) and I’ll be sure to share our vacation – hopefully with lots of lovely scenic pictures. Living in central North Carolina makes it easy to go to the shore or the mountains… now to pick a destination. Any thoughts?

Filed Under: Just Information //

Font Awesome Icons for WordPress

April 26, 2013 By Carrie Koehmstedt

With the internet being so vast you’re bound to run in to bad folks every once in a while. Luckily my bad experiences are far outweighed by my good experiences. I believe in karma, in what you put out there will eventually come back to you. With that in mind, I answer questions about blogging freely, share code and design tips when I get a request, and I think my pre-made Blogger templates, while not free, are very reasonably priced.

carrieloves13 So a few weeks ago I was shocked to find out that a previous customer had my custom-made, just-for-my-blog, gold glitter icons in her sidebar. She even had my gold glitter heart with the black Wayfarer sunglasses that I used for my design site as her favorites link or some other stupid thing. Seriously, I know I shouldn’t have been so upset, but I was. Maybe I shouldn’t have made something so custom for myself and expected it to remain just mine. Maybe that was selfish, who knows.

But, when I confronted her (replied to her email asking me for a header change) she didn’t see anything wrong with my icons being on her blog & never once apologized.

She actually blamed it on another designer she hired (and conveniently forgot the name of) saying that she referenced my icons as an example of what she wanted… and how was she to know he would not only steal them?!

And, wait for it, said-designer even used my image links – he didn’t even bother uploading them to have his/her server.

I asked her to remove them, and after 24 hours she hadn’t, I ended up deleting them from my media file myself. Which meant she didn’t have them, and I didn’t have them either… oh I could have uploaded them again, but I just wasn’t in the mindset to get taken advantage of again. I mean come on I have free social media icons available for download – 19 different icons + 30 colors. What exactly was her deal?!

During that fiasco I stumbled upon Font Awesome Icons by Dave Gandy and fell truly madly deeply in love. I then found Rachel Baker who understands geek code and made a Font Awesome Icons WordPress plugin, and now I have these super awesome icons in my sidebar and footer.