After the dust has cleared from Squidoo ...

I had been wondering what to do with this set of blogs, you may have noticed that The last post was nearly three months ago. A combination of factors really but two closures for me have finally stung me into action.

First of all, long term illness in the family together with my own hospitalisation for a total knee replacement meant that I had to cut down on time spent on the internet. However, the two factors which have pushed me into action were:

1. The closure of Squidoo, which had been my main writing site and
2. the continued lack of payments by Bubblews for as far as I am concerned no good reason.

I have always maintained that I wrote on-line to share my hobbies / interests but even so if a site offers to  pay for content and a writer sticks to their rules (where many do not) I simply got too frustrated to bother to carry on with that site. Also they changed their rules so that only one image was possible and in doing this destroyed a few hundred short articles which I had written on the site. It has become a very spammy site and more of a place for social chit-chat than well written articles. I have had more than enough of the attitude of the admin team to their contributors. It has become a total scam.

I wrote on Squidoo because it was available in 2007 when I wanted a free-hosting site to develop web-pages without too much knowledge of HTML, etc. I found out I could earn money on there, and over the past 12-15 months, despite issues with Google Panda, I started earning a small but regulaar amount. They are to close by the end of this month and articles (lenses) are to be transferred to HubPages. It remains to be seen wether this will be an easy process, but I fear the worst.

I will be spending far more time writing on my own sites; blogs and web-pages where the content I want to write / show will not be decided by others. I will not be trying to make lots of money from these sites although I do have a few adsense adverts around the page. I will be keeping adverts strictly limited.

The major difference for this blog is that I will be explaining the processes and methods I use to create the art which I show on here. In the recent past, I have shown  (mostly) collaged ATC's, but I hope to widen the scope of my artwork now that I have more time and talk about the why's and wherefore's.

Just to add a little imagery, here is a  new ATC created for one of my challenges in the ATC group on PDA

Very little to say about this one. I had to create a couple for the challenge and still not feeling well I chose a very simple design. The whole picture, background and beauties was layered down onto the backing card. This was then decorated by using a piece of ribbon stuck down and also held by a couple of brads. The text was created using a collage sheet which I purchased as a download from Lisa Vollrath a few years ago and had never used. Do you do that? Collect stuff you think may be useful and then forget why you bought it. I guess many of us crafters/artists do so, that is surely why we have such a large stash of materials in our studios.


Anyway, please look out for new posts in the near future, I hope I will be seeing you.