Kaleidoscope Kreations the website, gets a spruce up!

I've felt for some time that my Kaleidoscope Kreations website at http://www.charmainezoe.net was in need of something of a spruce up. I keep this website to feature my kaleidoscope and mandala art, of which I now have a number of galleries in which I also include my animated kaleidoscope YouTube videos, as well as a section for featuring my designs on items for sale such as t-shirts, greeting cards, ties, gifts and even shoes.



I've improved the home page by changing the header graphic, tightening up the text and adding more graphics which give it a clean and tidy appearance without looking boring ( I hope!) and expanded to about 30 pages, so lots of content. Still got a few pages to complete next weekend (should have enough time, although I haven't decided whether to go in to Birmingham for the St Patrick's Day Parade & celebrations, guess it will depend on what the weathers like) and then it's finished - for the time being anyway :-)

I'm getting a lot more exposure these days as I get a lot of visitors via Google, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Zazzle, YouTube, Squidoo etc. and my kaleidoscope designs are selling well, I recently got an order for 400 photo cards and another for 100 invitations in the same week! I now have customers in the USA & Canada, Europe and Australia & New Zealand and I'm looking forward to getting my first Brazilian customer as my Zazzle Store just went on line there too.

In the meantime I am still adding new designs and just introduced a lovely line called Ice Crystals, in delicate blues on t-shirts, stickers, magnets etc. This is one of the 6 patterns available

Ice Crystals 3 Mandala Designer T-Shirt by CharmaineZoe
View other Kaleodoscope T-Shirts

A New Year and a New Blog!

Happy New Year, I can't believe it's 2010 already, doesn't seem that long ago we were celebrating the Millenium!

I've got my daughter and grandson staying with us for the weekend, which is lovely as I haven't seen them since August! We had a nice evening yesterday and got to bed about 2.30 this morning! Max our Scotty dog woke us up about 7.30 but I shooed him back to bed and he let us sleep in until 8.15! Thought we'd find Kieran, my 6 yr old grandson downstairs before us watching TV but it's 9.30 now and still no sign , so it's lovely and peaceful :-)

The weather here at the moment is lovely with blue skies and sun, although very cold, which is very cheering, especially as the weather has been pretty grotty most of the week. We will just be chilling for the rest of the day here, although Ian will be cooking us a lovely leg of lamb for our New Year lunch which I'm looking forward to.

I've started a new blog, Free Patterns 4 U, to showcase some of my designs and help promote my website Kaleidoscope Kreations. these are tileable repeating patterns which are free to use however you like. With each pattern image there is another panel showing an example of the pattern tiled.

Does your Blog own you?

I knicked this quiz from Archies Archive and got an interesting result. It would appear my Blog does own at least 75% of me - so I am very close to full assimilation - as my Hubby can testify! Which makes me largely Cyblog (I 've suspected as much for quite a while now:-)

75 %

My weblog owns 75 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

BFF Gold Card Awards!

I was just awarded this beautiful BFF gold card by my friend Ivana over at Ivanhoe.com. Thanks a lot, Ivana, I really appreciate it :-)


The terms for this cool BFF Gold Card are described as follows:

1. Only five people allowed

2. Four have to be dedicated followers of your blog.

3. One has to be someone new or recently new to your blog and live in another part of the world.

4. You must link back to whoever gave you the award.

Ivana awarded this card to all of her new buddies and I would like to do the same and pass this award on to the following bloggers that I met via Entrecard:

1) MammaDawg

2) Grubs and Rambles

3) Scrappy Mommy

4) Red Pine Mountain

5) Nothing but Purple

Getting to Know You 2008!

Welcome to the 2008 edition of 'Getting to Know You'!! Copy & paste then change all the answers so they apply to you, & then tag 5 of your friends, including a link back to the person who you got it from. This is a good way to let your readers get to know you better, and amuse yourself for half an hour. Feel free to ignore any questions your not happy with!!

1. What time did you get up this morning? 7.45
2. Diamonds or pearls? Diamonds
3. What was the last film you saw @ the cinema? Indiana Jones 4
4. What do you usually have for breakfast? Nothing
5. What is your favorite TV show? Dr.Who
6. What is your middle name? Zoe
7. What food do you dislike? Oxtail Soup
8. What is your favorite CD at the moment? Don't buy CD's but into techno/trance & Gregorian at the moment!
9. What kind of car do you drive? Vauxhall Safira
10. Favorite Sandwich ? BLT (Bacon, Lettuce & Tomato)
11. What characteristic do you despise? No sense of humour
12. Favorite item of clothing? T-shirts
13. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation: Where would it be? Egypt
14. Favorite brand of clothing? Don't go in for brands - on prinicipal!
15. What was your most recent memorable day? Going to see my new born step grandson in May
16. Favorite sport to watch? Darts
17. Are you a morning or evening person? Evening
18. What is your shoe size? 5
19. Pets? 2 dogs (a Westie & a Scottie)
20. What did you want to be when you were little? an archaeologist
21. Any new and exciting news you would like to share with us? Stepson has just dropped out of college and wants to come & live with us!!!
22. How do you feel today? tired
23. What is your favorite candy? Chocolate ( Cadbury's fruit & nut)
24. What is your favorite flower? Roses
25. What is the day on the calendar you're most looking forward to? 13th September - off to the Lakes for a week!
26. What are you listening to right now? office banter
27. What was the last thing you ate? Cheese & onion quiche
28. Do you wish on stars? No
29. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Red
30. How is the weather right now? Blue Sky & Sunshine
31. Last person you spoke to on the phone? Customer
32. Favorite soft drink ? Pepsi Max
33. Favorite Restaurant? Bano Phool (Indian)
34. Hair Color? Varies :-)
35. What was your favorite toy as a child? Sindy doll
36. Summer or Winter? Summer
37. Hugs or kisses? Both
38. Chocolate or Vanilla? Chocolate (with strawberry sauce)
39. Coffee or Tea? Coffee
40. When was the last time you cried? Monday night, while watching Steel Magnolias
41. What is under your bed? Nothing, it's a divan
42. Salty or Sweet? Sweet
43. How many keys on your key ring? 5
44. How many years in your current job? 3
45. Favorite day of the week? Saturday
46. How many towns have you lived in? 12
47. Do you make friends easily? No, I can be quite shy with strangers

ENJOY YOUR DAY!!!!!!

If you do this on your own blog please let me know in the comments or on the chatterbox :-)

Recommended Widget:: Blog Stir

If you run a blog one thing that causes concern is how to show old posts. One traditional way is to use Archive method, but most of us don’t use that because of lack of ease factor.

With Blog Stir from Stuffablog and Widgetbox one can now show random posts on a sidebar widget. You just have to insert a javascript that points to a blog or website URL to make this possible. The outcome is very neat and you can select a keyword for specific JavaScript code for this service.

Customization options are available to use your own background color but there is no border and you can specify title alone or with a snippet. This service is great for blogs with lots of posts. Have a look on the sidebar for an example of the dynamic version.

CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR OWN BLOG STIR WIDGET

Recommended Widget:: PlugMe.net

PlugMe.Net is a very useful widget for your blog, that lets your readers plug in their own blinkies and buttons, saving you the trouble! Have a look at the one on my sidebar for a working example. PlugMe offers free remotely hosted advanced plugboards to use on your very own website or blog. Each plugboard can be easily customized and administered through your online control panel. There's no tricky installation to do and you could have a plugboard on your website in seconds, just register (for free) and enter the code from your control panel onto your website.

* Easy to use.
* Have up to 60 buttons showing at a time.
* 10 buttons secretly archived - They will show if buttons are deleted in your admin panel.
* Ban users IPs including ranges.
* Ban domains from plugging.
* Plug deletion and editing via admin panel.
* Flood control to prevent spammers.
* E-mail notify option - Receive an Email whenever someone plugs on your plugboard.
* Porn protection.
* Disable posting.
* Background colour or transparency ability.
* Customizable sized board.
* Completely free!
* No scripting abilities needed, just insert a short piece of code into your site.
* Works on almost all websites.
* Plugboard directory - Gets your site listed and more visitors.

Coming soon

* Ability to stop a button/url showing on the plugboard more than once.
* Sticky buttons ability.

CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR FREE PLUGBOARD

WORDLE: Create word cloud graphics!

Gotta tell you about this really great fun site I have discovered, Its called WORDLE. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text or URL's that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. There are loads of combinations of fonts, colours and layouts you can create, with a choice of black or white background. Click on pic to enlarge.

To find out more and see some more examples of the kind of word cloud graphics you can create visit News, Views, Thrills & Spills!

Charmaine plays the Needs Meme!

I got this meme from Diane at Much of a Muchness. She found it at Kim’s @ Laketrees who in turn borrowed it from Sandee @ Comedy Plus who was tagged by Mimi of Mimi Writes. Mimi was tagged by Shannon’s Moments of Introspection who was tagged by Dawn’s Daily Life ……

This one is pretty simple and looks pretty silly.
The rules: All you have to do is Google your first name with the word needs behind it and post the results.

It sounded fun so I decided to play along too. I googled ‘Charmaine’ followed by ‘needs’ and these are 12 of the 379,000 results I got. (Not a lot compared to the 17+ Million Diane got!)

1) Charmaine needs a home.
2) Charmaine needs to look this thin. (I wish!!)
3) Charmaine needs to realize that shes old. (!)
4) Charmaine needs our help raising funds.
5) Charmaine needs a place to hide out. (I kid you not!)
6) Charmaine needs one now!
7) Charmaine needs a ride!
8) Charmaine needs help. (ain't that the truth!)
9) Charmaine needs a miracle right now! (Amen!)
10) Charmaine needs an exclusive buddy.
11) Charmaine needs someone to take over.
12) Charmaine needs round- the-clock care. (Oh dear!)

Well that was a bit of fun- mind you it's harder than it looks, especially if you have an unusual name, but I got there in the end! Thanks Diane :-)

Of Bling & Blogs, Peacocks & Weddings!

I hope you like the new look of the Blog.I've had it cream for a while which I was bored with and was playing around with new looks over the weekend. I had put together what I thought was an elegant and restrained colour scheme involving beige and cream diagonal stripes. At the precise moment I finished, Hubby walked past. "What do you think?" I asked.

"That is just so boring, I really hate it, it's just not you, you should have more bling!" was his reply. Needless to say I wasn't best pleased. I had spent several hours assembling all the components and adjusting the html.But it got me to thinking - and I realised he was right. Restrained is not really me:-) So I decided to go with it and pull out all the stops. The obvious answer that came to mind was peacock feathers - you cant get much more blingy than that. Besides peacock has always been my favourite colour. I got married in a velvet outfit that colour, and even the Rolls Royce wedding car I hired was that colour! Most of the carpets in our previous house were also a lovely rich peacock/turquoise colour.

So I knuckled down and this is the result after several more hours searching for the right background pic, the right shades and combos of colours and making all the relevant changes to the html code, testing & retesting until I was happy with the finished effect. Very bling, very me :-) I hope you all like it.

New Blog Launched! : News, Views, Thrills & Spills

I am delighted to announce the launch of my new Blog - News, Views, Thrills & Spills. This will be exclusively for non personal posts while 'Tails of Terror' will be retained for personal postings. Old non personal postings have now been removed from this blog, but are now available on the new one. Please visit my new neighbourhood. Hope to see you there soon :-)

This has been an interesting experience as when I made the decision to split off the non personal stuff I thought I would try a Wordpress.com hosted blog. I transferred all the old posts from Blogger ok, but when I started building the page I realised just how restricting Wordpress is, particularly with what you can put on the sidebar. So I made the decision to start another on Blogger and have now transferred back all the posts that I'd put on Wordpress to the new News, Views, Thrills & Spills blog which is now up and running.

I then made the mistake of thinking that as I liked the new template so much I'd use it for this blog. After hours of wrestling with all the settings and code, losing all my widgets and generally tearing my hair out I came to the conclusion that this WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA!! I have now reinstated most of my widgets, but I've lost all the visitor locations on Clustrmaps so have to start again!

Blog has New Look - the pink is gone!

I've been working on a new look for the Blog for nearly a week now as I felt it was about time I got rid of the pink - not everyones taste I know! Having trawled through a large number of possible replacement backgrounds I initially settled on a rather busy modern arty one and used a light turquoise for the body colour. I rather enjoyed the fun of this for several days (some of you may have seen it if you have popped in recently), but really it was far too busy and distracting and really detracted from the blog itself. I have got quite good at editing the html of my blog now

So today, I determined to find something more cool, calm and collected. I started by choosing a body colour and went through a whole gamut of options before settling on the one you see (Hex colour FFFFCC), a lovely soft creamy shade and definitely easier on the eyes than previous colours!

Next on the agenda was to find a background that would look nice with the cream. After much searching and trial runs I settled on this lovely one of blue spheres and stars from www.moobackgrounds.com. I think the effect is rather nice. I have also pruned several of the wigets from my sidebar so it is not so busy, only keeping those I really like. What do you think? Is it an improvement, do you find it easy to look at and read? I would love to know so please leave a comment if you like it (or even if you don't!).

Sharing my sense of humour with you

I seem to be posting a lot of humorous stuff lately and not a lot of personal stuff. This is only because I am getting a lot of good stuff in my email and like to share it with you, my good friends. (Also I dont have a lot of time at the moment as I am working more on my new blog

Family History for Beginners

- feel free to drop in:-)I appreciate that not everyone is going to share my sense of humour, but I hope that you enjoy it. I only post what makes me laugh personally. It's all fairly harmless stuff, with only the odd joke that may not be in the best possible taste. I will continue to post anything I think will raise a smile among my readers and hope you continue to enjoy them.

My New Blog on Family History

I have just started a new blog on family history called Family History for Beginners which I am very excited about. Genealogy and family history is my main interest and I have been doing it for about 10 years. This site is my attempt at providing the information I would have liked to find when I first started. I have tried to make it as easy to understand as possible and will be adding regularly to it with a lot more information. Please check it out and and let me know what you think.

My First Post!

I was clearing out all the clutter on my side of the study on Saturday when I came across a guide book of the Brighton Pavilion which I'd visited a few years ago. Showed it to Ian and he suggested driving to Brighton the next Day. So on Sunday we were in Brighton (only took 2 hours from Poole) by 12 o'clock and went straight to the Royal Pavilion (www.royalpavilion.org.uk). What a place! The Banqueting Room with the huge Chandeliers suspended from Dragons, the silver gilt plate displayed on the sideboards. The whole huge room decorated completely in the most lavish and ornate Chinoiserie style has to be seen to be believed. Then more beautiful rooms until you come to the Music Room, even more stunning! Then upstairs to see Queen Victorias apartments. There was even a micro mosaic portrait of the Prince Regent made by the workshops of the Vatican out of tiny pieces of coloured marble. You couldnt tell it was a mosaic unless you looked really closely. I couldnt resist pointing it out to some ladies behind us who were amazed when they realised what it was.
After lunch in the Princess Adelaide Tearooms we wandered around The Lanes, a maze of little alleys full of jewellery and antique shops. Although it was cold it was a beautiful sunny day and we had had a lovely afternoon in Brighton.