Why the New Look?

You might be wondering, Why the new look?, and I certainly wouldn't blame you. 

I have been mulling this over for three, almost four, months now...kind of like mapping out plans for spring cleaning. 

And now I am just going to ramble and hope that maybe at least a little bit of it makes a tiny bit of sense.  Stick with me, please.  :)

I started blogging in September of 2008.  I had no idea what I was doing and when I signed up, I used "ang4332" as my url because I knew that it was something I could remember.  This is why...

4332 were the last four digits of the phone number where my mother worked when I was in middle school and high school.  I was home by myself every afternoon and the first thing I had to do when I walked in the door was to call her at work.  When I turned 16 and opened my first checking account and had my first ATM card, I used 4332 as my code (not to fear, it is no long my code for anything...sheesh...I wouldn't be sharing this story with you if it was) because I knew it was a four digit number that I would never forget.

In, I don't know, 1999?  2000?  Whenever it was when I signed up for my hotmail account, it was the rule of thumb to not use your name in your address.  So, in order to be clever, I chose "ang4332" as my email address....because I would always remember it.

Etsy user id?  Yep, you guessed it...ang4332....because I would remember it.

Now, while I have often beat myself up over this (because really, who else in the world is going to remember ang4332??? And from a business/marketing stand point, surely that can't be a good thing!), it has allowed me this one luxury...  I can change my blog name and my shop name pretty easily at this point.  And everything matches - my email, my blog, my shop.

So, back to the lecture at hand...

I wanted the names of my blog and my shop to coordinate.  And I couldn't make either of them bend to serve double duty.  So the brainstorming began.

Life With Ike {and a husband, twin girls and a wild little boy}.  I went round and round with it in my head before I even got a few other people to weigh in on it.  It came down to this and one other (which I am not going to tell you)...I had hired the blog designer and a decision had to be made.  So, I made it.  And here we are.

Ike and Co.  {handcrafted for stylish women}.  Modern.  Fun.  Hip.  That's what I was going for. 

I'm sure that I could go into much more depth about how I came to these decisions, and maybe some day I will, but for right now, I think that's enough.  I don't want to completely bore you.  :)

There will be some more changes in the next weekish or so.  {Both in the shop and the blog!}  I hope you like it...I sure do!