29 on the 29th!

Look what my dear husband sent me all the way from Afghanistan?

Menu Plan Jan 29 - Feb 3

I'm scrambling this week to get my menu plan done.  I left some blanks and am just finishing up the meal plan for the week, after I've already completely my grocery trip.  It's nice to leave a few options open to make room for vegetables and meats that may be on sale.  You'll notice too, that sometimes we just don't get around to having what I planned to cook, so then I try to schedule it early in the week for the following week so that my veggies don't go bad.  I'm going to start using the ads that come out on Sunday to plan the meals for the week and figure out what sale items to stock up on.


Sunday
Breakfast: Breakfast burritos & breakfast mini sausages. We have the burritos almost every Sunday now.  It's just a great way to fill up the kids before Mass.  I make them very simply, by first cooking finely chopped onion in butter, and then adding beat eggs to make scrambled eggs.  I wrap it up in a flour tortilla and serve with mild salsa and sour cream on the side for the kids.
Lunch: Beef stroganoff with green beans
Dinner: Oven pizza for the kids & out to special pizza place for Elisa's birthday!

Monday

Lunch: Pumpkin Soup
Dinner: Meatloaf, sweet potatoes, broccoli.


Tuesday

Lunch: PB&J for the kids, regular ham & cheese for me. =)
Dinner: Chili & cornbread (Recycle meal: never soaked the beans last week!)


Wednesday

Lunch: Leftovers
Dinner: Burgers & Chips


Thursday
Lunch: Soup & Sandwiches
Dinner: Chicken, rice, and vegetables.

Friday

Lunch: Who knows. Something yummy.
Dinner: French Onion Soup


Saturday

Lunch: Lemon Crepes
Dinner: Lasagna & Italian Salad (Olive Garden style)

How to Make a Photo Collage Blog Header

Okay, I'm finally going to share with you how I made my blog header for free and without any fancy (and too expensive) photo programs like Photoshop.

Before we start, all my tips, etc. are for blogger blogs.  I have no idea how other blogging platforms work, although I imagine they are similar.

The first thing you need in order to make a blog header is a photo program.  There are a gazillion very expensive photo programs out there, and I've tried most of them and they are great, but for most of us non-professional-mom-blogger types, it's completely unnecessary to own an expensive photo editing program.  You just need two little free programs.

Paint.net:  I've been using this for 2+ years.  You can get it at http://www.getpaint.net/.  Watch out at their download site.  Don't get distracted by all the big download signs, don't click on them!  They will download other junk to your computer.  Only click on the stuff that is circled in the pics below:

and

and

Paint.net is absolutely free, but I think it runs on windows only.  It's a mini-photoshop type program.  I use is most of all to resize my photos for my blog.  I never upload the huge photo files that come off my camera onto my blog, because they make your images take longer to show whenever someone visits your blog.  I also use it to crop and fix photos and I use it to make little buttons with words on them for my blog (I promise to show you how I do that too, in another blog post, it's easy peasy.)

Picasa 3: This program is free, very handy, and will make the collage-header-making a piece of cake.  You can download that here for free: http://picasa.google.com/.  This is a program that goes on your computer, just like Paint.net and it's different from Picasa Web Albums, where all the photos uploaded to your blogger blog are stored online.

Now you need to do some pre-collage work.  You need to figure out (1) what your blog width is in order to figure out (2) what size your header needs to be.  Now, to make things easier, I will tell you that I use the Simple Template from the blogger template designer.  Within that template I chose the farthest one to the right (circled in red below).  I found that this one is the widest, and I like my blog to fill up the computer screen.

1) How to find your blog width settings.  

• Go to your design page.  It should look like this:

• From the design page click on the following: Template --> Customize --> Adjust Widths

Still with me?  Mine looks like this (below).  Entire blog: 1190 px (stands for pixels), Right sidebar: 310 px.  It's weird. I don't really understand why the numbers have to be like this, but in the end my sidebar is actually 250 px, and that is exactly how I like it.

2) Figure out what the size of your header should be to fit your blog template.

It's not the best habit when it comes to blog design, but I mostly never write things down while I do them.  (Except for this tutorial.)  And, because I recently got a new laptop, I can't find the folder that I keep my blog headers in, which is why I have no idea how large the one I have right now is.

Thankfully, that's easy to figure out.

• To figure out how large my blog header is, I go to my blog and click on my current header and save it to my desktop.  Then I open my handy program, Paint.Net.  I make sure it is set to pixels (below).

• It tells me on the bottom right hand corner exactly what size my header is (above).  It' odd that it's 1120 x 502.  I bet I meant to make it 1120 by 500, but somewhere in the editing process it ended up a tiny bit larger.  As long as it looks fine on the blog, I leave it.  
• Now that you have your numbers in pixels, jot them down.  They will be useful to you any other time you want to create an image for your blog header.  

3) Open Picasa.  If this is your first time ever opning it on your computer, you'll have to show it where to find all your pictures.  I keep mine in the My Pictures folder.

• In Picasa, click on the following:  File --> Add Folder to Picasa.  
• Then click on your My pictures folder, or whatever other folder you keep your photos on your computer in.
• Then give the program a while to import all the photos. {Potty break!} 

4) Navigating through Picasa is easily done by clicking on the folders on the left that contain your photos.

• When you find a picture you want to include in your collage, pin it, by clicking on the tiny green pin on the bottom of the screen (below).  This will keep the pictures you are working with "pinned" while you leave the folder to look for other photos.

I'm going to chose maybe 12 photos for my collage.  If you're not sure which photos you want to use in the  collage, pin all your favorite and a few extras. It's easier to erase them from your collage than to search for more and add them later on.  A good way to save time on this is to chose your favorite images ahead of time and put them all in one easy to find folder on your computer and then just go to that folder through Picasa.

5) Time to COLLAGE!  Once you've pinned all the photos you want to use in your collage, go to the top menu bar and select Create --> Picture Collage.  You'll see something like this: the picture pile (below).

7) Chose your collage.  Picasa is going to throw all your pictures in a pile on the table.  Cool, huh?  Now it's time to customize.  On the top right, below the menu bar, you should see a dimmed tab with the word Settings (below) on it. Click on that.

From the dropdown menu, select what type of collage you want.  I'm choosing mosaic.

8) Before doing anything else, I need to customize my collage to be the size of my blog header.

I like to make my collage and then put my blog title and a quote on top of it, so I will make my actual collage size 1120 x 385 pixels, which translates to 11.67 x 4 inches, which are the numbers you'll need to know for Picasa.  (I got that number by selecting the collage area of my current blog header in Paint.net.  I then copied and pasted it to another page in paint.net and changed the pixels to inches, like so:

• Go back up to the top of your screen in Paint.net and switch it to inches (above).  Then look at the dimensions in the bottom left hand corner.  
• Thank you Paint.net, I now know that 1120 x 385 pixels = 11.64 x 4 inches.  
• Go to Page Format of Picasa and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the dropdown menu, and click on Add Custom Aspect Ratio...  Click on that and enter your numbers in inches (below).

9) Finishing up.  You are almost done!  This is where your creativity comes in.  Just mess around with it until you get your perfect collage.

• Move the grid spacing bar around until you get the space in between the pictures that you like.  I like the background to be white so that it fits invisibly onto my blog (below).

• Remove photos you don't want.  Click on the photo you want to take out of your collage and then hit "remove" in the bar above the collage, or you can just drag it to the left (below).

The only thing I don't like in mosaic mode is that you can't scramble your collage! I sometimes get it in my head how I want the photos to lay, but, unfortunately, the layout of the shapes are set.  You can actually only scramble the collage in picture pile mode.

• In mosaic mode, just hit Shuffle Pictures a bunch of times until you get it just how you want it.
• You can also move the pictures around into the larger or smaller spaces by dragging them.

10) Final step: When you are all done creating your collage and it's just how you like it, click Create Collage on the bottom left.  Picasa will save your collage in a special folder named Picasa in the My Pictures folder.

Now all you have to do is go into blogger and upload it.  Just in case you don't know, here's how you do that:  

• In blogger, go to Design --> Layout.  
• Find the header gadget and click Edit.
• Customize your options, and voila! You did it!

Disclaimer:  If something is not working for you, or you just have questions or my tutorial is very confusing, then just leave a comment below and I'll answer below in the comment form, so that your question can help others. 

PS: If you end up making a cool blog header collage, let me know so I can see it! =)

PSS: Adding words onto your blog header image (like my buttons on the right) is another very short tutorial I will write up soon (God willing).  If you're too impatient to wait for me, I'll give you a hint: I do it all in Paint.net.