Celebrate July 4th!

{photo via Pinterest}

Today is a wonderful day! I love July 4th almost as much as I love Christmas! It's in the middle of summer, my favorite season, there are fireworks, and many times this holiday involves going swimming, eating barbecue dinner, and visiting with family. What will you do to celebrate July 4th this year?

The Great Blog Train #7

Wow guys we made it to seven months!! You all are awesome!

Have a happy 4th of July weekend!

RULES

1. Follow the Hostesses. Use GFC, Twitter, Pinterest, Bloglovin, Linky, Networked Blogs, or Facebook. Just let us know how you follow!

  

Here's how you can follow me:

2. Link up your FAMILY FRIENDLY blog using your HOMEPAGE URL!

3. Connect with the person in front of you! AKA leave a comment on the blog who linked up in front of you and tell them the link party you came from!

Now that you have your ticket you are

ready to board the rest of the train!

OPTIONAL: You may grab our "Great Blog Train" button and post it on your side bar or linky page. Also, feel free to spread the word! The more the merrier!!!

<a href="http://blueeyedbeautyblogg.blogspot.com/search/label/TheGreatBlogTrainBlogHop/" target="_blank"><img alt="Blue Eyed Beauty Blog" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihM3Zzb620T9mhjgdaGbKXGWQRgVyOPS3jCBnYGKiB3v-QNslglOCrkWR8m5zVl544QGo7aYLRb0Nhft0LwJvdf68_TsBpZh2ieAzP0rZ_JnBG8BMU_RflnpaRqB4ducCZgDee6hUYyls/s1600/BlogTrainFinal.jpg"/></a>

The Featured Caboose

Memories By The Mile

Here's what she says about herself: I'm Wanda Ann, I have been married to David, aka Oly, the love of my life and my best friend for 35 years. I am the proud mother of three terrific kids, two sons: James & Dustin, and our daughter Deena, who is also a blogger. I am also a grandmother (or Mawna as they call me) of seven beautiful, smart, amazing, talented grandchildren.

Receive A Heads Up Next Month!

I send out 'reminder' emails for this hop.

If you'd like to be on the list just leave me a comment!

OR email me @ mrshelenstafford {at} yahoo {dot} com!

Thank you!!!

Blogging Tips | The "Follow Me Back" Curse

One HUGE pet peeve of mine is when bloggers leave comments on my posts and the phrase "follow me back if you can" or "follow me, I've followed you" or "stop by and follow me" anything to do with FOLLOW ME needs to go! People, that just turns me off. I am 90% LESS likely to stop by your blog if you have that phrase in your comment. I know this seems mean or rude of me to say this, but it's RUDE to ask for a follow from ANY blogger!!!

Why you need to drop it:

1. Leaving comments shouldn't have to do with building your blogger reader base. Yeah, leaving comments helps get your blog out there, but DON'T use that as a way to try and build your followers. Leaving comments with the "follow me back" curse (as I'm going to call it) makes your comment very non-personal, regardless of how long or how nice of a comment you write. Just drop the phrase all together!

2. It's Rude! I think I already covered that, but JUST IN CASE...people it's RUDE to ask other people to follow your blog!! What are you trying to do, build a fan base of empty follows? (empty follows = numbers in the followers, but few people actually leave comments = might as well not have the numbers!)

3. Don't follow a blog just because you want the person to follow you back. Again, this isn't how growing your readership works! Follow blogs you really care about reading. Right now I've got a HUGE list of blogs that I'm 'following', but I don't read all of them... I probably should go through the list (at some other point!) and remove the blogs I'm not reading at all. No one wants an empty follower base (or if they do, they're one of the few I think...).

4. It's just not cool. This goes along with the being rude point I made above. It's NOT cool to write comments for self gain and it's not cool to ask other people to follow your blog. HOWEVER if you actually have something useful to share that relates to the topic OR if the bloggers post has a question in it which you've answered in a blog post of your own I think it's ok to share the link TO THE DIRECT post, but again...don't do this as a way to gain readers!

I'm sure I could go on and on about this. It aggravates me a great deal. Now I will confess that I think when I FIRST started out I probably left a few comments with the 'follow back curse' in them, but I quickly realized how annoying it was to get those kinds of comments on my OWN blog so I quit using that line.

What are your thoughts on this?

This Post Was Shared!

• Inspire Me Wednesday #37
• I Gotta Try That #60

Apostolic Style | Summer Knee-Length Skirts

Before hubby & I left for vacation to Mississippi in May I had some major shopping scores which led to me making some really cute knee-length skirts for me to wear while we were on vacation. Of course at that time I didn't know I was pregnant so now half of the skirts don't fit me, but I think two of them still do! :) Rue21 was having a clearance sale on patterned skinny jeans, I made a haul at the thrift store of about 10 pairs of regular denim jeans (which I plan to make into skirts to sell on the shop) for $2 each, and then WalMart had a few pairs of colored skinny jeans on clearance as well. Here's a few of the skirts that I made:

This beautiful skirt was made out of skinny jeans from Rue21.
A similar tutorial for a knee-length skirt can be found here.

This was my first some-what successful attempt at making a straight front knee-length skirt.
Sorry, no tutorial for this

This skirt was made from skinny jeans bought at WalMart.
A similar tutorial for a knee-length skirt can be found here.

And my favorite skirt! This one was made from skinny jeans from Rue21 as well.
A similar tutorial for a knee-length skirt can be found here.

What do you think about these skirts? I think they're super cute! I wish the jeans hadn't cost so much so I could've been able to buy some to sell on the shop. Oh well. Maybe one day. :)

Cooking For 2 | Baked Potato Casserole

 

This is a recipe I created awhile back. Hubby really enjoyed it, which was a good thing. It's pretty much a fancier version of baked potatoes! Seriously, that's it. We like ours with ranch on it, but of course you could use sour cream or something else as a 'sauce' of sorts. That's all up to you!

Ingredients

5 potatoes

5 pieces of turkey bacon

1 large Tablespoon of butter

3 oz. sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

Ranch to taste

Directions

1. Wash the potatoes to get all the dirt off.

2. Microwave the potatoes 2-3 at a time for 5 minutes each. You'll want to be able to easily stick a fork into them.

3. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

4. Put the butter in a 9x13 pan. Stick it in the oven to melt.

5. While you're waiting on the pan go ahead and slice the potatoes.

6. When the butter is melted, pull the pan out and spread the sliced potatoes along the bottom of the pan.

7. Break the cooked bacon oven the potatoes. Sprinkle everything with salt and pepper. Lastly sprinkle on top the freshly grated cheese.

8. Bake the potatoes in the oven until the cheese is melted.

9. Pull out the pan and sprinkle it with ranch.

10. Serve hot or warm.

Featured Post!

This post was featured on the Adorned From Above Blog Hop #61.

July 23, 2013.

This post was featured on the I Gotta Try That Link Party #61.

July 29, 2013.

This Post Was Shared!

• Marvelous Mondays #55
• Wednesdays Adorned From Above #60
• I Gotta Try That #60
• Creative Mondays
• Creative Mondays