Do you know what I found this morning, by accident?
This!
Isn't it ADORABLE??!! It's a tute for a felt stocking Christmas Advent Calendar by Cindy at Skip To My Lou. Cindy has wonderful stuff on her site and I can spend way too much time there, but this post was from 2008!!!! At my worst, I don't typically spend THAT much time there.
And I also found this...
This one was from Maya Made, another place to get lost in. Christmas, candy, crafts, and recycling -- what more could a girl want? But this post was also from 2008!
If I hadn't stumbled on these by accident, I doubt I would have ever found them. How sad is that!
Now, to be fair, it DID come up in the 1,200,000 links under Google images, sort of, at least this image did...
... not that it's particularly appealing amongst all the rest, or even obvious what it is.
But so did this...
And ... well, no. I'm not going to post a link to a picture of a mostly naked man with a little gift wrap in the appropriate area, on a website that's aimed toward children and crafts. You can google that yourself if you'd like -- just search images for "advent calendar."
Please don't misunderstand my point -- I'm not knocking Google! I spend way too much time there too. (Which might explain why my chair seat is getting smaller all the time ...) But, it's just not filtered and not always appropriate for children and the images may or may not be helpful and the links are duplicated or missed altogether and there's too much for sale when I'm looking to "make" and ... well, let me just say that there are issues.
The bottom line is that I don't want these links that I love to get lost or overlooked, or grouped in with some almost naked pictures (or worse!) when I go looking for it later. And I'm heartbroken over the ones that I haven't "accidentally" found, or haven't found because I haven't paged back to 2008.
I'm afraid they're going to be LOST IN CYBERSPACE!!!!
It would be different, too, if blogger or wordpress had a tag search that would cross blog boundaries. That might help, but also be a little dangerous and unmanageable (re: or worse!). And the fact is that they don't have one. So even if I had already found and loved Skip to My Lou, what if I hadn't yet discovered Maya Made?
So I'm reaching out to you to help me. I need your tutorial links. Old, new, and everything in between! Don't let your fabulous links get swallowed by Cyberspace! And it doesn't even have to be your link -- you can even link up someone else. As long as it's a tute (not just something for sale) that's craft related and not inappropriate for a children's site, then link it up!
Done a link party before? It's that simple. Just click here. And your efforts won't be lost in a couple weeks just because your link-up rolls off the front page.
Want to see what you would currently find at Childmade under advent calendars? Click here. I can assure you that you won't find any half-naked pictures.
And if you link-up, you might even be featured in my weekly top-10, my weekly newsletter, or on the website scrolling gallery. What could it hurt to try?
And btw, I love to hear from you. Comments are the icing on my cake. I'm not a big corporation -- I'm one person. I WILL HEAR YOU. I love input on what I can do to improve my site, or what sort of links you would be looking for. I can't always manage to do it, but I will certainly consider it.
