Quite an honor!

Story time. 

Bear with me.

I am a faithful reader of the blog Design Mom.

I find the information on Gabrielle Blair's blog to be well written, beautiful and inspiring.  She finds things on the Internet that are lovely and worth sharing.  She has children who she writes so eloquently and honestly about, and she just seems to be all around cool.

A few months ago when reading her blog through my blog reader she issues a call for DIYers.  She said she was interested in responses from crafty types who have done some interesting projects and are good at photographing their projects.  I stewed on that for a few days.  I occasionally do interesting projects.  I take good photographs of my projects.  I am proud of most of the stuff I end up making so on a whim I decided to send her an e-mail.  I told her a little bit about myself, shared a link to my blog, and provided a short list of 3 projects I'd done since moving to the new house that I thought were sort of cool.

Right before Christmas a form e-mail was received in my inbox, one she probably sent to the thousands of men and women who submitted e-mails to her (I can only imagine how long it takes to go through so many e-mails!) informing me (and all the others) that she was going through all the submissions and would get back to us.

Cool, I thought.  And then thought nothing else of it.

Fast forward to Friday.  Every Friday on the Design Mom website is a short list of links to carry readers into the weekend.  Things that Gabrielle has found to be clever, interesting, beautiful...you get the idea.  On Friday, just like every other Friday I read the post and clicked on a few links and then went about my business of the day.

Then last night, after a busy crazy day of birthday parties for the five year old, Ross told me he'd written a blog post about his work trip to Chile and Argentina.  I opened the blog to read the post and noticed that my "top 5" post feature had a new top two.  My cousin Jodi's wedding had been bumped to third place - it had been in first since May.  But, I didn't think much of it at the time.

I logged in to the blog and saw that I had three comments awaiting moderation.  I turned to Ross and said, "Wow!  You have three comments on your blog post already and you just barely wrote it!"  He was rather proud until I opened the comments and read them.

It was confusing.  The comments were legitimate comments from profiles I did not know for a crafty post I had written at the end of August about the wall art installation that I made and hung in my bedroom.  Huh!  Curious.  Still every the dunce I asked my husband how he thought people found this post and made comments - one even putting a link on HER blog.

I was totally dumbfounded.

Then I went into my stats.

Duh!

There were 3,800 hits on this one blog post in less than 24 hours.  For my little goofy blog that's intense.  3,800 people looked at and read this particular post.  How did they get to my goofy little post?  Well, the numero uno referring link was the Design Mom website.

Still being ever dumb, I clicked on the link and it took me back to the Friday post that I'd already read.  I stared at that post unable to figure out how that post was leading to my blog.  Finally because like I said, I'm a bit dense sometimes, I just decided to click on every single link.

The fourth link down on the post, I hit the jackpot.  The "clever idea for displaying a quote" on the Design Mom post is a link to me.  TO ME!

I grinned from ear to ear.  I was so excited.  After telling Ross the whole story he of course told me I needed to figure out a way to monetize my fame.  What fame I asked.  Then, I called my mom.

To make a very long story short.  This is a very cool thing for me.  My silly little project recognized on such a big blog by such a neat woman.  I am truly honored and very, very surprised.  This totally made my weekend.

Obviously, right?  I just wrote one of the longest blog posts every about it.