If you have nothing better to do....

Yesterday I experimented with my blog and created a new heading for it. I really liked the way it turned out so I decided to do another for a new blog my sisters & I created. I liked that one way better. (Click here to see it.) Now I want to do mine over, but I'm not letting myself just yet. Anyway, it was not that hard. You actually just start off with a Word document. I'll explain how I did it, but I don't know if everyone else's settings on their computer are the same.

1) Inside Microsoft Word or Word Perfect, type up what you want your heading to say. Use the fonts & colors you want.

2) If you want to add in any shapes, go to insert and click on SYMBOLS. That's where I got my hollow circles, my solid circles, & my lines. Since I wanted different sized circles & lines, I just copied and pasted everything for as many different sizes I wanted, then I changed the font size. Also copy and paste the symbols for as many colors as you want and then change the colors. You don't have to arrange the symbols the way you want them here. You will do that later.

3) With your word document, you will want to turn it into a PDF file. In my Word Perfect, I do this by going File -> Publish to -> PDF. Then just save it. (Save as a word document also in case you need to go in and change anything later. I don't think you can change it once it is in PDF, but I don't know for sure.)

4) Now go in and open up the PDF file. With the little camera icon, select everything. A little message will come up saying something like "copied to clipboard". That's all you need to do with the PDF file. It has turned your word document into a picture.

5) Now go into your picture files and create a new picture. Click paste and everything you selected from PDF will be pasted. Now you can use this picture to piece together your header. You can copy and paste things here in the picture editing. To get my lines of stripes, I put a bunch of stripes together in a random order and then copied that group and pasted it over and over to create a long line of stripes.

6) If you're wondering how I overlapped the circles on top of the stripes, there is a way to do that in the picture editing. Let's see if I can explain it to anyone who might still be reading. Click on the selection tool (top right of toolbox - dotted line rectangle). On my screeen, I see two little boxes at the bottom of the toolbar. Both have shapes in them. When I click on the bottom one on my screen, it allows me to select something and then move it and place it over something without covering anything up, but overlapping it instead.

7) So get your picture just the way you want it, and not too big for your header space. Save it.

8) Log into your blog and edit the template. Click on edit for the header. There is a place to enter an image, and that's where you will browse your computer for the picture you just created. Once you enter the picture, make sure to choose that your picture replaces the blog title & description.

I think that's all. If anyone really read this whole post, get a life! What am I talking about? I took the time to not only create 2 new headers, but then to write out all of the instructions. I wouldn't be such a computer nerd if it weren't for She's Got It All. I learned a lot about editing pictures as we were building the website. Speaking of the website, I'm posting our first project idea tonight. So if anyone is interested in reading a-whole-nother set of how-to instructions, check it out. Or just check it out for pictures!