The Evolution of Our Blog Title and Header

If you’ve been around for awhile, you know our blog header has slowly evolved. I love change, so I’m constantly tweaking things to make them better (in my opinion)!

This post may either be a nostalgic walk down memory lane for you, or it may be a good brief overview of where we came from.

I started my blog the very first week we moved into this house 3.5 years ago. Living in the country and on an acreage for the first time (not to mention being a newlywed) brought with it so many fun/new experiences… and I had to write them down.

I remember how it took us a couple days to get internet set up in our ‘new’ house, and I was chomping at the bit to get my thoughts out. I think I even wrote my first post in a Word document because the words were a-flowin’.

I know every blogger says this, but it’s true for me… I never thought anyone would actually read my blog, other than my parents and maybe my out-of-state siblings. I was really writing for myself. To document my life and experiences, and be able to look back on one day.

It was around this same time that I knew in my heart something was wrong with my reproductive system, but we wouldn’t know the extent for another 6 months. In order to cope with the pain of trying to conceive, I began keeping busy…being creative, painting things, updating our home.

The blog slowly turned into a place for me to share my fertility struggles and creative endeavors alike. And while I still occasionally talked about life on the acreage , the title ‘Life of a Country Girl’ no longer seemed to fit. And that’s when we changed it to Sawdust and Embryos.

I’m not sure how people found our blog, but we started having a small following… many of them were women struggling with fertility, that felt drawn to our story somehow. And I was grateful to feel like I wasn’t alone in this struggle.

We also started accumulating readers that enjoyed our furniture and home transformations, and our following grew and grew.

In December of 2010, after going through A LOT, we were so blessed with the opportunity to add two little embryos to our header full of photos. And when we announced our pregnancy here on the blog, we received an outpouring of excitement and love from our readers who had ALL been with us through thick and thin. It was the best.

The focus of the blog changed slightly at this point, because we had finally finished the chapter on infertility, and were on to the pregnancy chapter. I still felt the pain of infertility in my heart (I don’t think it will ever go away), and I was careful what I said on the blog… knowing that so many of our readers were in the trenches of infertility.

In July 2011, we welcomed Paisley and Adelyn into our lives, and our worlds changed forever. Since then we’ve added photos of our girls and my favorite family photo (both by Molly Long!)

Last summer when we were working on our Ombre Stained Dresser, the pattern of the woodgrain on one of the drawers gave me an idea! The woodgrain faintly resembled those popular ‘bracket’ designs. I know it’s a stretch, but that’s how my mind works.

And I thought… HOW COOL would it be to have this design as part of our title-header-thing? I didn’t even know that they were called bracket designs at the time, so I couldn’t even do a google search for a bracket design to practice on… I cut my own out of paper! Haha!!!

I wanted the ‘woodgrain’ to start out in a perfect ‘bracket’ shape, and then slowly become more distorted as it got closer to the center… like real woodgrain! This is what I came up with with my colored pencils, and scanned the image onto my computer.

I was really wishing we had a graphic designer friend to make this happen, because my plan wasn’t to actually USE my colored pencil drawing on the blog. I was just drawing out my thoughts. But alas, we didn’t HAVE any graphic designing friends. And I liked my design enough to use it as-is.

We suckered Molly into using her photoshop knowledge to create a border for my design… so at least we could ditch the orange highlighter look. And this was our new design! I looooooooooved it! You can still faintly see my woodgrain drawing, which isn’t my favorite… but it worked.

Eventually I decided I wanted our header to be more narrow and not take up so much room ‘above the fold’. So I went back to my original scribbled design and resized it so it would be ‘chunkier’, and set it on the left side of the header. We also changed the tag line from ‘Design in the making… BABIES in the making!’ to what we have now: ‘DIYing our way through life, love and infertility. (because some things need to be done manually).

I love this… because it’s asymmetrical and feels artsy and original. I love the clean ‘whiteness’ of this design, and how it doesn’t feel so heavy. But I still wasn’t happy with that shawty  ‘woodgrain DRAWING’ I had made and scanned in. I wanted it to look like actual wood… instead of someone playing with crayons.

That’s when we met Jenn, who turns out a long-time reader of ours! And although we live several states apart, she offered to help out and contribute her incredible graphic designing talents! A couple hours and a few emails later… SHE NAILED IT! I mean, look at hers next to that sad drawing of mine that’s been live on the blog all this time.

It’s like she read my mind. And it looks so professional! Like a big hunk’o’bracket-shaped-wood!

So we popped it into our already existing row of pictures, added the text of our title… And BAM there you have it! Needless to say, I’m EXTREMELY excited about this. It feels so fancy and… awesome!

OH! And did you notice I changed the little picture of myself in the header? I figured it was TIME since I haven’t had short hair for quite awhile now. This photo was taken by my friend Autumn, and I was holding my nephew… he got cropped out… HA!

And here is my shameless plug for Jenn… because she is seriously talented and has a knack for graphic design, and obvious knowledge of legit graphic designing software.

And that my friends, is how our blog header has changed over the last couple years. We’ve been so blessed through blogging, and wish that we could meet every single one of our readers. We hope you stick around for future changes as well!