ta da!

Boy, I had NO clue what I was doing to myself when I started playing with the look of this blog a few days ago. That first look I tried was really pretty, and I thought, "well, that's that." Until I could not get some of the font colors to work right, and I realized that my photos looked terrible against that vintage blue background. I thought, "well, this can't be the only site that offers free blog backgrounds, I'll just check out another site and pick something from there."

It's not that easy. Once you start really looking, there are just more and more to see and try. I thought I would like something greenish, but wasn't finding anything quite right. Then I found that CUTE bird header and really liked it, but the backgrounds that I found on various sites that matched it had other problems, like being too cutesy, or having too dark or distracting backgrounds for the text, or also looking terrible with the photos.

While doing all that looking, I realized that the people who make these backgrounds change their look whenever the urge hits them. Comparable to, say, picking out an outfit for a date. I, however, have no interest in doing all this work again, and just* wanted a background that I loved that would be my "forever" background. Comparable to, say, choosing your wedding dress. Talking it over with D last night, getting his opinion on a few specifics, I realized I was expecting a lot of this new design:

* whimsical
* not cutesy or pastel
* but nothing too formal or pretentious, or like I take myself too seriously
* D and I prefer light color behind the text to dark
* something other than plain white behind the text
* no weird buttons or designs intruding into the reading space
* had to make my photos look good
* preferrably something vintage, shabby chic or distressed
* would look good with my bird header, since I liked that and had not found anything better
* had to be easy on the eye for reading
* had to be colors/pattern that felt like me**

Ridiculous, I know. I should never have ventured into this area of "self-expression" and just stayed with my simply attractive generic blogger template!

After looking for several hours over the course of several days, I was beginning to despair, and decided this afternoon I would give myself about 30 min to look at a few more sites and then give up and go with the best of what I had found so far. But within 20 min, I found it. It was not like anything else I had been looking at--but when I saw it, I really liked it.

It was the one.

OK, so I guess I should live with it a few days and make sure. But after all that looking, I think I love this look just because I really like it, if that makes any sense.

And these colors work amazingly well with photos! Click on the "pics" link if you want to see for yourself--even the garish "speak no evil" pic and the black and white prairie girls look good! Believe me, that is much harder than you think.

So if anyone is interested, the two most helpful sites were http://hotbliggityblog.com/index.php which is where I found the background I finally used (and it had the most runner ups too), and http://simplyblogitbackgrounds.blogspot.com/ which had a highly useful list of links to high quality free background sites.

Now that it is all over, I am glad I did this playing around. It was fun, once I got past the whole frustration and desperation and despair parts.

I hope you like it (or at least don't hate it) because it will be around for a looooooooooooooong time.



* ha!

** in other words, borderline obsessive compulsive, stubborn and way too picky