Princess baseball?

I know girls are often an odd mix of girly and tomboyish. I know I was - playing forts with my brother one minute, Barbies with my neighbor friend the next.

But this combination has my head in a bit of a spin. A Disney Princess baseball set? Seriously? It's not like they even redesigned the princesses to be wearing baseball uniforms. Nope. They're still in full ball regalia, complete with tiaras. (I'm surprised the set doesn't come with a tiara baseball cap.)

I suppose I could see my niece, even at the age of six, using something like this without the slightest sense of irony. (She's all about princess power.) But in general, this just seems to be stretching it a bit with the branding. (Course, at the rate Disney's going, they'll soon have enough princesses to field a team.)

Am I over-thinking it again? Or are we agreed that this is just plain weird?

Dressing cool with iCarly shirts

(UPDATE: Looking for the shirts Carly and Sam wear on iCarly? Start here for some ideas. And go here for iCarly merchandise. The shirts shown in this post are no longer available.)

The TV show iCarly is quite the hit among the tween set, making stars of Miranda Cosgrove, Jennette McCurdy, Nathan Kress and Jerry Trainor. And that popularity has spawned hot desire for the fashions worn by Carly and Sam. I get several hundred visitors a week to my lens on dressing like Carly and Sam.

However, there are some additional options for the iCarly fan. Limited Too has an exclusive deal with Nickelodeon for a iCarly gear, including tote bags, school supplies and more. But let's just look at the cute shirts for now. First up is the long-sleeved iCarly tee ($26.50), perfect now that fall is in the air. Or, if you live farther north than I do, you might want to look into the iCarly graphic sweatshirt ($44.50) that just came out. The first shirt that was available was the pink iCarly Butterfly Tee ($24.50), although I never could figure out why they called it a butterfly tee when it doesn't have any butterflies on it. Just Carly and Sam. Hmm.

Anyway, check out the cute iCarly gear over at Limited Too. More on the way soon!!

Sesame Street birthday - get the party started!!

Happy Birthday to Sesame Street today! The show went on the air Nov. 10, 1969 (just a few months before I arrived!) and has been going strong for 39 years now.

So today seemed an appropriate day to finally get around to sharing one of my new ventures. It came out of a lot of work I did as part of the Thirty Day Challenge and learning more about keyword research and so forth. (That was a great learning process if you're interested in internet marketing and need a crash course.)

What I developed as my project was a niche blog, Sesame Street-related, of course. It's Sesame Street Birthday, where I'm talking about all kinds of birthday-related Sesame Street stuff. Developing games, coming up with party themes - it's right up my alley. And, of course, it wouldn't be complete without a Squidoo lens to partner with it, right? So here's Sesame Street Birthday, the lens.

Political lenses were very good to me

Happy election day to you!!

I hope you're going to vote today. (Debates on whether I should be encouraging anyone who might not be an informed voter to vote aside. Although I'm sure none of my readers would be uninformed, right?) We went to vote last week in early voting. And while I'm extremely happy that the election is finally here and about to be done with, I've had a good run with political lenses this year.

My favorite one was on throwing an election night watching party. And not just because I made good money on it. Actually, I think I raked in more than $200 combined for the month just from my political lenses. But this one was just a fun little idea that I totally never expected to actually take off. If I had had (and taken) the time, I could have done a lot more with it. But it just took off on it's own and did great as it was, attracting some pretty good traffic. For future, I think I'd like to add a playlist of appropriate songs as well as a real menu based on the candidates.

Add to that my Proud to be a Democrat and Proud to be a Republican lenses, which I kept finding cool stuff for but didn't quite take off like I thought they would. I think I made less than $4 on them, though. Hmm. Not entirely sure - outside of a little better promotion and the fact that they'll have a little more age on them - what will make them better for the next round.

And last comes my Sarah Palin lens, which gave me my second lens of the day, first #1 lens and set a record for a single day's traffic. Plus, I've made about $50 in sales off of this one, mostly because of books, which don't bring in a lot.

Having gone through this election now, I have a few new ideas for next time and great hopes for success with the lenses I have now finding new life. (No comment as to whether Sarah Palin will have hope for life in 2012. :-)

Skelanimals shop - new hoodies, tees and more arrive

I swear, if you ever see something you like in the Skelanimals line, don't wait for a sale! Grab it right away because in a couple of months, they won't even be offering it.

I've never seen a line of clothing that turned over designs so quickly. Their design team must stay really busy. As a result, there are a ton of new items in my Skelanimals apparel and accessories shop. (Just in time for Christmas if you have someone who likes the goth kind of look. Or me. Hint, hint. :-)

Just wanted to show off a few of my favorites of the new items, including the Skelanimals rib cage hoodie to the left here, available for $44 from Hot Topic. There were actually a lot of new hoodies I added, but this one was my favorite.

On the t-shirt front, there were some really creative new designs and a lot of blue in the new designs. My fav was this zebra print pink tee from Tilly's at $21.99, although I also loved the new top with the 3/4-length sleeves for $26 from Hot Topic.

There were some new hair bows and other accessories added as well, but my favorite was this houndstooth skull cadet cap I found over at Torrid for $12.98. I had a couple of hats some time back, but this is the first one I've seen in a while. I don't get why they don't have more hats, actually. I think some ski masks with the skull on the face would actually be quite cool. Particularly with the ears on top. :-)