how to make a pinterest collage

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 (clockwise from top-left)

Pinterest is great. For just about everything. Whenever you need inspiration for crafts, blog design, fonts, birthday parties, fashion, etc.  Pinterest can help you out! It's so much fun to just scroll through oodles and oodles of inspiring images and then collect your favorites into boards.

It's also a lot of fun to share these bits of inspiration! Lots of bloggers will occasionally do posts of their favorite pins. I personally like to do these in addition to craft posts. For example, when I did my series on travel journaling.

Today I'll be showing you how you can make a simple collage to showcase your pins.

First, open up Pinterest and scroll through your boards, opening each pin in a new tab. Then, click on each image to see if it leads you to the original source. It's really important to credit your sources, so if the post you are taken to is something like "10 ideas for blahblahblah" and is a collection of posts from different websites, make sure you click on the original source. Close out of any images whose sources you can't find. For the remaining ones, go back to the Pinterest window.

Now, go through each image, right-click, and select "Save Image As...". It helps to make a separate folder for these images because having them floating around in your desktop makes your computer really cluttered!

Once you're done, open up another tab and head to Picmonkey.com. If you have never used it before, it's a photo editing website that you can use to edit photos, design graphics, and put together collages. So once you're there, go ahead and click "collage".

You'll be taken to an interface where you can drag and drop photos that you have uploaded to arrange your collage. I always like to make the background transparent because that way it blends with the background of your blog/website. You can also zoom in on photos and use pre-made layouts.

Once you're done just click save at the top of the page and head to your blog to upload it.

Now you'll need to link up the pictures. Put something along the lines of what I put at the top of this post:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 (clockwise from top-left), or

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 (left to right, top to bottom), or

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (clockwise from top-right)

at the top or bottom of the collage. 

NOTE: If your photos aren't arranged in a way that you can describe in a few words, then you might have to upload your made collage in Picmonkey, this time in "edit" mode, and add a number to the corner of each photo.

Then, for each picture, go to the corresponding Pinterest tab, copy the link that you found (remember, it might take some clicking to find the original source), and go back to the post editing page. Highlight the first number and click "Link" at the top of the screen (for Blogger). Paste the link, and then do this for each of the remaining photos.

All done! Now you can share your favorite pins with your readers. I hope you enjoyed this post and if you have any questions feel free to comment below.

blogging notebook

As a blogger, it's really helpful to have a place to write down all your ideas, keep track of your stats, and plan posts before sitting down at the computer to write.

I personally have two notebooks that I use for blogging. They're almost the same except that they are in different colors, one is blank, one is ruled, and one has slightly more pages. But they are the same size, which makes them easy to carry around. You may want to take that into consideration when purchasing a notebook (or notebooks).

So my first notebook, the pink one, is the one I use for important information and useful tips that I'd like to keep and look back on in the future.

At the beginning of the notebook I have my pages of ideas categorized into:

1// Craft DIYs
2// Other How To's
3// Blogging
4// Lifestyle
5// Inspiration
6// Community
7// ...and other small categories with only a couple of post-its each

I don't add post-its to it that often. What I usually do is I write down ideas in my other notebook and then set aside time to transfer all of those onto sticky notes.

When I'm working on my post schedule I can see all of my ideas categorized by topic and simply peel them off when I decide to use them.

Also in the beginning of my notebook I have a couple of pages where I've collected tips on different topics. This is really helpful because I can just flip to whatever advice I need instead of trying to remember what "that one website with all those great tips" was, haha!

Lastly, at the end of this notebook is one of the most invaluable tools a blogger can have. A schedule.

This is where I plan out what posts I will have on each Tuesday and Friday. When I'm done writing a post I can simply check it off. There's also a spot to mark if there are still additional links I need to add but can't yet because the post(s) I want to link to are not published yet.

At the bottom of each page I keep track of my stats for that month. I have:

• total Bloglovin' followers
• total Instagram followers
• total Pinterest followers
• total Google+ followers
• views for that month only

This is super helpful and to all my readers who have blogs, I strongly suggest you do this. Not only is it motivating to see your blog grow, but it provides valuable data.

Onto my second notebook! There's actually not that much to say about this notebook because it's sort of a catch-all for ideas, rough drafts, and brainstorms. It's really nice, though, to be able to have all of my messy thoughts in one place, and all of my imporatant notes in another. In this notebook, I don't have to worry about how organized my writing is, or how neat. As long as I can read it, it's fine!

This very post started out in this notebook, which I then typed up and published, and which you are reading right now!

I hope that this post gave you ideas for your own blogging notebook(s) or inspired you to make one. Blogging is a lot more fun when you're organized!

Until next time,
Bela

how to make a blog header (for blogger)

Hello!

Today's post is for my readers who also have a blog. One of the most important parts of a blog is its header. If new visitors arrive at your blog and see one of those generic, boring, Blogger headers, the ones where you type in your blog name and it pops up at the top of the page, they are less likely to stay on your blog.

I know this from:
1// Personal experience.
2// Seeing that the most popular blogs have their own pretty headers.

Now I'm not saying that you need to have a header for your blog to look nice. What I'm saying is, don't leave your blog looking plain and boring. If you have your own cool design ideas that don't involve a header, awesome! If you're wondering what I'm talking about, check out Zali's blog.

But if you want to learn how to make a blog header, then let's get started!

You'll see that the header I am using as an example is from my old design. That's because I wrote this post a long time ago, haha!

First, head over to the design tab in your Blogger dashboard and click "customize".

In the design area, click "advanced" and then select "adjust widths".

Find out what the width of your entire blog is and either write that number down or memorize it. Or, you know, keep that page open and go back to it when you need that number again.

Open up a new tab and type in "picmonkey.com". Picmonkey is a really useful photo editing tool for bloggers so if you don't already use it, keep it in mind in your little "Blogger's Toolbox".

If you're uploading an image that you already created, click "edit". If you want to design your header from scratch on Picmonkey, click "design".

Either way, you have to either crop your uploaded image or resize your canvas to fit your blog. For the width, use the number that I told you to remember.

Once you've designed your header (A.K.A. Masterpiece), click "save". Save it as a PNG file to a location of your choosing.

Now go back to Blogger, select "Layout" from the Blogger dashboard and click "edit".

Upload your header and check the box that says "Replace header with image". Click the preview button to make sure it looks nice and save!



















Thanks for reading! I hope you found this post helpful.

Comment below if you have any suggestions for other posts about blogging. I'd love to do some more posts on this topic!