Are You Swaggin?

Man! Did you know that there's a site that allows you to find and earn vitrual dollars that you can turn into cash and prizes?

It's for real!  All  you do is go and sign up for your free Swag Bucks account (no credit card required), use the SwagBucks search engine to search the internet as you normally would and you'll randomly receive bucks.    If you're an online shopper, you can go through the Shop & Earn section of the website to get to your favorite online stores and earn at least 1 swag buck per $5 that you spend on that site.

For example:  If I decide to purchase a new digital camera from Best Buy,  I can go to the swag bucks Shop & Earn section, look under electronics and find the link to Best Buy.  There it tells me that I will earn 1 Swag Buck for every $5 I spend at bestbuy.com.  The camera that I want is $150.00.  By purchasing it, I'll earn 30 Swag Bucks which I can redeem for prizes and gift cards!

  ( you have to go through the swagbucks site though- if you just type in bestbuy.com or any other site with out going through the Swag site, you won't earn bucks cause Swagbucks won't know you went there)

I think that it's been about a month since I discovered this site through a connection on facebook.  So far, I've gotten $20 worth of amazon.com gift cards, a restaurant.com certificate worth $25 towards a meal, a $5 paypal deposit, and have donated some of my swag bucks (which they turn into real bucks) to the Christmas toy drive and most recently to the Haiti Disaster Relief.

At first, it seemed like a scam or something that was too good to be true. But of course, the idea of free things is very appealing so, I decided to try it out anyway. There really is no risk- You're not sending in any money to participate.

Also, I've seen the SwagBucks site mentioned on some news shows in a good way. I can't embed the actual video of the coverage, but here's the link for you to check out.
ABC news Swag Video


If you'd like to give it a try, please sign up using the links I've given here so that I will get credit for referring you.
 Get your Swag on!

So, I Tried to Dye

And failed... Horribly.

Last year, I plied a small skien of yarn. It felt almost perfect and it was even in more places than it was not.  I loved that little skien and was saving it for something very special.
I finally set aside some time to do very special things to this yarn.  I got out the bowl, the vinegar, the food colors, and my hopes for something so beautiful that I'd want to keep it all to myself.
I was expecting  Valentinesy type yarn with which I could make a felted coin purse out of and got this:

I used purple, pink, and a bit of yellow.  I over cooked it it =-(  and I think I used too much vinegar =-(
But- I didn't know any better because of lack of experience.  I think that after this, from now on, I'm going to leave the dyeing to the pros.  Or maybe I'll try a wet method and use just one color (you know,  the thing they do where you let the yarn sit in colored water until it's clear?)
yep.