NEPA Arts & Crafts – April 2012

Hey, internet! Last month I kicked off with a little post, located here, regarding all the arts and crafts events local to Northeastern PA for March 2012. Here’s another great schedule for what’s going on in April!

3/23 – 5/20 NEPA Crafters Unite @ The Laurel Mall, Hazleton, PA
4/13 – 4/14 Hazleton Art Youth Expo – entries displayed along Broad St, Hazleton
4/14 –        Home & Garden Expo @ Laurel Mall, Hazleton, PA
4/14 –        Flea Market & Bake Sale @ Hawley Fire House, Hawley, PA
4/15 –        Spring Crafts Show 2nd @ Danville Elks, Danville, Pa
4/21 – 4/22 Earth Day Celebration @ Downtown Jim Thorpe
4/21 – 4/22 Spirit Mind Body Expo & Affinity Psychic Fair @ National Guard Armory, Lehighton, PA
4/22 –        Spring Dollhouse Miniatures Show & Sale 22nd @ Farm & Home Center, Lancaster, PA
4/25 – 4/29 Arts & Crafts Show @ Viewmont Mall, Scranton, PA
4/28 – 4/29 Cherry Blossom Festival @ Kirby Park, Wilkes-Barre, PA
4/28 – 4/29 Art + Craft Show & Mount Haven Country Resort, Milford, PA
4/28 – 4/29 Home Garden & Business Expo 30th @ Memorial Hall, Jim Thorpe, PA
4/28 – 4/29 Whole Earth Holistic & Psychic Fair @ America’s Best Inn, Pittston, PA
Daily –       Merchant’s Village Indoor Market Square @ the old Wal-mart in Pittston, PA
3/31 – TBA Schuylkill Haven Spring Fling & Children’s Art Festival @ Schuylkill Haven, PA

Resources:
http://www.pavendors.com/events
http://www.hazletonchamber.org
http://www.artscraftsshowbusiness.com

Thanks for reading, internet, and feel free to email me or leave a comment to let me know about any NEPA Arts & Crafts events that I may have missed for the month of April!

Web design for beginners? Pt. II

Today, I would be so happy to announce the release of my very first website design project for a client. Said client was none other than the flagging company I work for, Safe-T-Zone! Ta-da!

This is especially exciting for me because I have absolutely no formal education or training in web design or development but my own hands-on experience, aaand, in the near future, I’d like to share with my you, my faithful reader, just how I did that in a rather extensive how-to, or maybe several shorter, less-extensive how-tos.

For now, I’m looking for some constructive criticism, as everyone that has seen the site has complimented it without mentioning any of the things I think is wrong with it.

First off, I’m having some kind of trouble with hyperlinks. While navigation links are working just fine, the links to the flagger certification website on our Employment page do nothing when clicked in Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers. I’m having the same issue with the download link for our .pdf application.

Second, our application is a .pdf, and I personally hate having to download and print .pdf files. I chose this option, however, because the office manager didn’t ask me to include the app until I was nearly done with the project, I took the easy route.

Anyhow, I’d love to hear some feedback from someone who knows what they’re talking about, so I have some idea as to whether or not I went about making this in an acceptable manner. As always, feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think I could have done better, and thanks for reading.

This week’s card is a twofer

This week is an exciting one! Tonight I’m coming back from my carder’s block, I guess you’d call it. As per the usual, I’m entering this card into the weekly challenge over at The Play Date Cafe, as well as taking a step in another direction and submitting this one to the Mojo Monday Sketch Challenge! This is my first entry ever on the Mojo Monday blog, and it looks like I’ve got quite a lot of great competition on that one already. Here goes…

I chose to leave this card blank, because I’m considering listing it as the first item on my Etsy shop and I’d like to leave customization options open.

The textured paper here is actually light grey on dark grey, but in this picture the fuzzy parts of the paper reflect the bright yellow color of the cardstock I’m displaying my card on. Here’s the inspiration photos with direct links to this week’s challenge pages. As always, thanks for reading, internet!

Don’t let anything hold you back!

Tonight I took a step in a new direction. Up until now, I never really shared the creative side of myself. Sure, I’ve got this blog here dedicated to all of crafty hopes and dreams, but I enjoyed the anonymity in documenting and unloading my progress, always cautious to how a reader may judge my work. Or worse, what  someone I actually know would think of my work. My disorganization. My botches and corners cut. My stupid hopes and dreams.

Let me clarify. This gets pretty lame.

Until today I was so ashamed of the work I hadn’t achieved towards my dream of opening a business – the crafts, the blog, everything – that I avoided sharing any of this on Facebook. It seems I’ve had some preconceived notion that there’s nobody on FB that wants to know what I’m doing. While this may be true, I know for a fact that there are friends of mine on the site looking to make their own handmade businesses.

So, internet, today I exposed myself. While I’m not feeding my blog posts through my Facebook account, I did take the first step in putting myself out there by uploading bunches of pictures of things I’ve made into a new album. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted, that I’m finally showing my true colors. I’m happier already.
Eat it, social anxiety!