Sprinkle a little Old Bay on your deviled eggs for an amazing taste!

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Use paint and Mod Podge to decorate boards for a chili cook-off voting system.

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First, let me congratulate Anna Maloy, the lucky winner of our latest giveaway. Anna will be receiving a My Friendship Bracelet Maker Kit. We know she’ll have such fun creating lots of friendship bracelets with this handy tool.

Now I’d like to announce our next giveaway!

Is it just me, or has summer flown by super fast this year? Without me realizing it, it’s almost fall, and around here, fall means crazy time! All the kids are starting school again, and they also have plenty of after-school activities. Little Jo is in gymnastics and my niece is starting soccer this week. All of this means lots of appointments and driving back and forth. Then there’s the upcoming holiday season, which means even more craziness. Thanksgiving has its own set of planning required, and then there’s Christmas shopping to do. It piles up, and fast. I cope with the insanity of the fall (and all year, really) with lists. I love my lists, lists, lists!

Nothing makes lists more fun to deal with than having them on pretty notepads, right? We want you to have pretty notepads, so we’re giving away a notepad making kit.

We were inspired for this giveaway when we spotted a fun set of clear stamps in the store. The “Take Note” Perfectly Clear Stamp Set by Stupendous has simple and quirky designs that make it easy to make any notepad or list so much cuter. Just stick these to an acrylic block and you’re ready to stamp your own lists. And to help you make those lists into a notepad, we are throwing in one of our padding compound kits from our store.

If you have never made your own notepads before, it’s really easy. We have a make your own notepad tutorial that tells you how, and we’ve got done several other notepad projects, too, like photo notepads and gin rummy score sheets. The key to making your own notepad is a special type of glue called padding compound. Jo and I use it all the time, and it’s one of our favorite items in our store.

So how do you win this awesome prize?

I’m sure you’ve all got your lists just like I do. And I’ll bet there are a few things on there that you’ve just been dying to mark off. Just leave a comment below and tell us what item you just can’t seem to manage to get off your to-do list.

(By the way, my to-do that won’t go away is reorganizing my recipes into a binder.)

The deadline for entries is Wednesday, September 8, 2010, at 11:59 PM, EST.

RULES: One entry per person (determined by e-mail address). One winner will be chosen at random from all valid entries received by the deadline. Winner will be contacted via e-mail within 48 hours of giveaway end date. Winner must reply within one week with a shipping address or prize will be forfeited. If a winner’s shipping address is outside of the USA, that winner will be responsible for shipping costs.

Decorate a bucket for Halloween trick-or-treating with quick and easy duct tape letters and shapes that are cut out with a Cricut.

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We recently asked you guys for feedback about ChicaAndJo.com so that we could better plan for some changes and improvements we want to make to the site. You met the challenge happily and gave us some great feedback! Thank you all so much for taking the time to tell us what you like (and don’t) about our site.

We also invited any of you who completed the survey to leave us a comment, so that we could give one of you a prize package of crafty goodies as a thank you for your time. The name we drew is Lue Hamrick. Lue, we’ll be sending you a box of all sorts of inspirational stuff!

Now on to the results. We are so glad we asked you guys for input, because it has really helped us decide which ideas to pursue, and which to abandon.

• First, we asked you what crafts you like to do. The top three, by a landslide, were sewing, knitting/crocheting, and scrapbooking. Clearly these are areas we need to try to focus on a little more. Jo has been asking me to teach her how to knit for a while now… maybe this is just the push I need to finally do it. (We really loved the reader who said that “collecting craft supplies” was her hobby!)
• Our next question asked how you found out about us. Most of you happened upon us by accident, and liked what you saw so much that you stuck around. Yay! Quite a lot of you found out about us from friends who recommended us to you, and those are our favorite types of new users! In fact, I’d love it if you’d each go tell a friend about us today.
• Next we listed various aspects of a user content area, and asked which ones you might like. The most-loved idea (with 84% of you saying you must have it) is the ability to flag your favorite projects. Okay, we hear you loud and clear, and that’s something that we will definitely put in place as soon as we can! You also really liked the ideas of being able to list your favorite tools and upload your own project photos, so we’re going to work on those, too. The rest of the options didn’t seem to matter much to you guys either way, so we’re going to put them on the back burner for now.
• We asked if you wanted a user forum to discuss things amongst yourselves, and about half of you said you do. Hmm. We’ll have to think some more about that one. It will probably happen, but won’t be a priority.
• Then we asked you what types of projects you’d like to see us do more of on the site. It seems you guys really like green projects, useful projects, and organizing ideas. Gotcha. We’ll take that into consideration and try to do more along those lines.
• The next question asked you to tell us what you loved most about our site. I think I can sum the responses up in one word — variety. You guys love that fact that we have a huge variety of projects on our site, and I have to agree with you. Frankly, if we didn’t have a huge variety, then we would get bored ourselves. We’ll keep giving you more of what you love, even if that means everything!
• Our most complicated question asked what we could do to the site to make it easier to navigate. While many of you said “nothing – it’s great like it is”, which we appreciate, there are definitely some areas for improvement. The biggest change we’re planning to make is to create a “project library” interface that’s easy to navigate with lots of categories. It’ll be so much easier for you to find exactly what you’re looking for. We’re also going to tone down the colors a bit and try to remove some of the clutter, while still keeping all the info you need close at hand. (P.S. A special note to those of you who asked for a site search — there’s already one at the top right corner of every page. Clearly we need to move that to a more noticeable location!)
• We next asked if you wanted us to keep the Toolbox on every project page. We’ve been slacking a little on that lately, but an overwhelming 91% of you said you want it, so we’ll definitely try harder to always include a Toolbox in the future.
• Then we asked if you followed us on Facebook. About half of you do, and half had no idea we had a Facebook page. Many of you left comments asking why you should follow us on Facebook, and I’d love to answer that. The biggest reason is that we talk more there. You can interact with us on a more personal level and hear what we are doing in between our big project posts. We also post a link there every time we publish a new project on our site, so if you don’t want to have to keep checking the site every day to see what’s new (or if you don’t subscribe via e-mail or RSS), you might like updates on Facebook. And I’ll let you in on a little secret — we are thinking about having some store specials that we only tell you about on Facebook, so if you want the scoop on those, be sure to LIKE us on Facebook!
• Our last question asked if you were interested in receiving an e-mail newsletter. Unfortunately, we worded that one a little weird, and it wasn’t clear to lots of you what exactly we meant by that. We already offer an e-mail subscription to our project posts, and many of you have signed up for that (thanks!). What we were talking about here is something in addition to that, with different content that you wouldn’t find on the site. We’re still trying to decide if that’s something we want to pursue or not, but in the meantime, if you’re not subscribed to our regular daily e-mail updates, you can sign up here.

Like I said before, this feedback is invaluable and is really helping us to guide the changes we’re going to make. We promise we will do our absolute best to make sure each change actually improves things and doesn’t take away any function you like. When will the changes happen? Well, all I can say for now is “soon”. It’s going to take us some time to get it all planned out in detail and then implement it, but we’ll keep you posted and will deliver something as soon as we can.

See how our friend's robot-themed birthday party turned out, complete with centerpieces, cupcakes, and custom water bottle labels.

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