I'm still learning the hard way about some things. Yesterday, after I submitted my blog post to publish and clicked a button to share my post with my social media accounts my entire post that I had been working on just disappeared!?! I was NOT happy! So I contacted my customer service group and am still waiting for them to respond. I saved the post within my Weebly editing blog section but after I click the "publish" button the program automatically takes the saved post out of my view and access.  

So this time my lesson learned is to save my blog post text in a secondary place on my computer so I hopefully won't loose all my work again. It sure would be nice if I hear back from them that they can find it and retrieve my post. I'm crossing my fingers.

Here's my Valentine Basket for your sewing Valentine. Cute with bear, pink thread, candies, and "Love is the Thread that Binds us Together" block decoration. Your sewing Valentine will love this adorable unique gift. #cute #rexburg #byui #byuidaho #southeastidaho #gifts #giftbaskets #pleasingiftbaskets  

Gifts  from the heart are sweetest when we can give one-of-a-kind gifts personalized for the one we care about. At  Pleasin' Gift Baskets we care about creating each unique basket to comply to everyone's love of giving something extra special to all of the people we care about. 

I've had fun designing & creating for this Valentine's Day. And as always - I have learned a few more technological things to make my currently local business grow. :) Now I can't help but  cross my fingers to see some more results of my fruit of this labor to hopefully grow as I know and wish it will by me learning to speak out more. I would be honored if you let me share my service & love of gift baskets with you. 

 This past week life's mishaps gave me some more new lessons.

Last Thursday started off normal. I woke up so I could wake up my two sons for school and also get myself ready to be able to attend my choir practice for the Upper Valley Women's Choir that I belong to and currently serve as president. Hence I needed to get up and stay up so I can get to practice early to unlock the doors and start our set up. When I got back from practice I had a headache and was extra hungry. So I treated myself to lunch in the warmth of my basement and a movie. After eating I felt better but sleepy. A couple hours later I woke up without a headache, which isn't always the case, and was ready to start my day again. Naps are wonderful to give you a fresh start of things again. Well, it was after I woke I that I discovered that my internet was down. But it wasn't just my internet but several companies in the area were without services because a cable was cut and broken. We ended up without internet for about 2 1/2 days. We were the lucky ones though - some were without phone service or TV/cable service too. 

What did I learn and what was my new lesson? I learned that it is not good enough to know how to schedule future blog posts but that I should use this tool regularly even if I think I won't need it for the next day because I'll only know I should have scheduled a post till after the time that I miss out and can't. Also, I discovered that my scheduling tool is set for the pacific time zone which is one hour behind me. This time difference is to my advantage but key to remember if I need to check if it's working and edit scheduled posts.

So for those detailed individuals out there you'll now know why I have my January 11-16 posts of quotes all posted on the 16th. Life took it's turn and then I wasn't ready to jump back in the game when the clock started clicking again.  

Generally, I’m not a new year’s resolution type of person because my “natural man” traits lean toward procrastination and short term thinking. At best, I’m a due date person; I see the value of goals and have set goals but find it easier to remember and do things if there is someone to report to, submit the assignment or be reviewed on a assigned date. If I think of something I want to do or even need to do then I work that out in that present time and don't wait for a new year. But once in a while I find that starting a goal at the first of a new year necessary. 

As this new year was creeping up upon me I decided that I wanted to take on the challenge of following through on an idea that has been on my mind for quite some time. For a while now I've wanted to digitize some quotes from a bear calendar that I have so I decided that I'd post them on this blog in hopes that doing this would also help me be more active with my online endeavors. 

I've decided that this year I'll share my family's bear calendar quotes. I've learned to schedule posts so this task of posting a photo of each quote one per day is realistically manageable for me to do now. And if I have extra thought or story pressing in response to the quote of the day then I'll try to share them too.

How is this doing and how am I doing? I started creating gifts and established my own gift basket business at home and online because it makes me happy to create fun and beautiful things and be able to share my talent.  Giving gifts is a way to show our love, friendship, and appreciation to one another and that will always be something that I want to be a part of. So, an old goal to find and make happiness in my life and the lives of others around me is still strong as can be. This year I'll just add a quote a day in hopes to give us all motivation and a smile. 

I find my peace through the knowledge of Christ's gospel, The Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints. Through that I have come to know my Savior, take upon me His name, and use his freely given gift of atonement for everyone.  In short - I want to be happy. I want to live so I might qualify myself so that I might be able to live with my Savior and my Father in Heaven again along with my perfect stillborn daughter, Rosalin, and all my other family members who follow in their footsteps as eternal families. I mustn’t lose this goal but must find ways to be active and not reactive in life and remember that stopping to smell the flowers along the way is ok. One motivational thought or religious thought each day I think can never be overdone. 

I've been also pinning my photos of each quote per day too. When I am done, January 1 next year, all my quotes should be then digitalized as photos on my Pinterest board. You can check them all out here:

    Ugh! I just want to scream. No wait, I can’t ‘cause screaming would hurt & damage my voice so I’ll change that to I want to yell really loud and smack something.  I confess that sometimes learning new things is over rated. Each time I try to make a step toward enhancing things with my business I feel like I’m going uphill and sliding down several times. It serves me right for trying to figure out everything on my own.  But I’m slowly getting it.
    I haven’t considered sharing all of my real-time up & downs of how all of this is going until while reading several online tips through Pinterest links I realized that I should be writing more and allotting time in my schedule to switch this from hobby status to a functioning business.  I have found a few more helps such as www.canva.com which allows me to improve my social media look on Facebook to design my cover photo.  My not so momentary frustration today has come through learning how to make an image transparent.  Granted that I’m still learning and only got part of it down which is making me repeat a somewhat easy task several times (over a ½ hour) to get an image right. The program that is almost working for me (almost because I haven’t learned yet how to do some undo and other commands in it) is through www.online-image-editor.com . Anyway, I’m slowly getting it but wanted to get it a long time ago. I can’t tell exactly how much real time I’ve struggled with this today because I’ve had many interpretations to walk away from the computer to fulfill my mom duties to kids. It’s probably a good thing though so I can’t really focus and know how much time I’ve really struggled today.
   Now I will just need to remember to write when I have some more successes to balance all of my frustration from my learning curses. Oh wait again, that's a good reason for me to have other categories within my blog too.  I've added two new categories for my posts. They are: Feel Good Stories & Gifts For The Soul. I want this & in general myself to stay on the sunny side and hope to balance life's frustrations with  posts for these categories too.

I'm still plugging along with my baskets. I broke even with the two craft shows I debuted  with but better than that I gained some new business contacts and lots of positive feedback. I've temporarily lost my shopping cart since Google switched there shopping cart options. Because of that, I'm back to about square one trying to find a shopping cart function that'll best work for my baskets. Talk about frustrating but I'm still learning and still in business.

Wahoo! I just combined over 40 baskets for this Saturday's Craft Fair I've entered. And I'm running out of baskets & work space to do anymore for now. Next step,  price them and take pictures and then the final assembly with wrap.

Help. I  have started my very own online gift shop business at www.pleasingiftbaskets.com and I need to get the word out. I need more  "friends," "likes," "sharing," plus tips to get on top of  my advertising  learning curve. In a few weeks I'll have my official logo completed and can seek out other advertising forms, but for now I still need help. I have supplies to
create several more assorted gift baskets and want to develop other types of baskets that I can duplicate and even ship but I am running out of room to store my assembled baskets. Will you  help me via Facebook and word of mouth share or  refer people you know who might like my gift baskets or even buy them for someone who'd like them?

Good Grief ...... but HOORAY. I fixed my email and "contact us" page so I can now find, receive and read emails sent to me via my "contact us" section of my website. I never thought that setting up my business website would take soooooo long to get going.

I fixed the problems that I was having awhile back. After having done that I found and solved many other issues within my shopping cart set-up. For awhile whenever someone would click on the "add to chart" tab nothing would happen and no one could buy anything....AARGH. But now everything looks good from what I can see and is working. My excitement from earlier when I started setting this website up and thinking it was ready to work has worn out. It took some time to research some of these issues and fix them. But with all that said, today I felt warm inside and so happy that my eyes became teary because after all of my work and effort I accomplished what I set out to do. Now several hours later after my ah-ha moment I am just ready to be done for the night and hope I don't forget everything I've done and what to do next.

Okay, so I have now come across my first public hiccup. I  was able to fix some behind the scene problems between last night and now but have discovered that I still have some other problems. My order/checkout tab and my Google merchants/checkout isn't working. I'm hoping to have this resolved sometime tomorrow. I never thought this website stuff would be easy or confessed any real skill with creating or running websites. This is suppose to  be first and foremost a fun hobby of mine. With that said, I really do hope to  get this technical stuff under my belt so I can focus on the part I like best.  

Okay...so I've purchased, assembled, wrapped, taken pictures, and uploaded pictures. I'm as ready as I'm going to be to publish my site. I'm not done adding all my baskets to my product page but want to see how this is going to work. I can't tell how the google cart is going to work since I haven't been able to submit my quantity yet. Remember I only have one of everything now.

I am totally excited!!! I completed two baskets and they look great. I even impressed my family with them; I don't think they really knew how professional they'd look. The shrink wrap and heat gun I used are wonderful and really give the baskets a good final touch. After my dinner break I'll finish the final assembly and wrapping of three more. Unfortunately, I've been on stand by to do any more because my daughter who happens to have the nicer camera has been busy and the family (no one knows for certain who) has lost our other digital camera so I can't assemble any more tonight. As soon as I can get a hold of a camera, I'm going to take the remaining pictures of my first group of baskets and then I can make the final touches to them. I sure hope to be able to get this batch of baskets done so I can upload the photos and info to start selling them. I don't have any more room to make any more until I start selling a few. It's hard to say which I like best, shrinking the wrap and seeing the final product or finding the items and creating a new basket. It doesn't really matter because doing all of this is just fun and I'm glad that I finally came up with the idea to do something that I like as a business.