Review: Bumper Sticker from bulidasign.com with The Rainbow Bracelet Project.

So I was recently given the opportunity to review bumper stickers from the awesome buildasign.com. I have been anxiously awaiting their arrival and they arrived today! So without further ado here is my review!

When I was approached about doing this review my first thought was "What the heck am I going to do with 50 bumper stickers?!?"  but after some thinking about it I realized this would also be a great opportunity to help promote an organization that I whole-heartedly support. That organization is the Rainbow Bracelet Project.

The Rainbow Bracelet Project (http://rainbowbraceletproject.com/) is an Oregon-based organization  started on 03/20/2013 aimed at bringing together LGBT and allies to show support for equality for all LGBT people. These bracelets offer a way to open communication doorways to talk to people about where you got the bracelet and where you got it. As an outspoken straight ally I also see these bracelets as a silent but constant show of support to my friends and family that are fighting for equality. When you purchase a rainbow bracelet you are not only able to pick the size you want/need (plus keychains and anklets!) $1 from each bracelet is donated to an LGBT organization (aside from a short promo after the Boston bombing). They are donating this month to Athete Ally and Oregon United for Marriage.
To date they have earned:
Pride NW: $327
Born This Way Foundation: $158
Boston Marathon Victims Fund: $50
Oregon United for Marriage: $48
 I am so happy that I have the ability to help spread the word about this wonderful organization through this post and being able to have these stickers go to good use once I have finished with this review. I cannot wait to be able to place my order! Here are some pictures of the bracelets being made and worn! I took these pictures from the website so if it is your picture let me know and I will credit you!

As for the stickers themselves they are fabulous. As you can see in the pictures the colors are vibrant and the lettering really stands out. It's hard to tell in the pictures but my counters are a really light blue/gray color. The adhesive is nice and strong to the point where I don't have to worry about the sticker peeling off within the first month. They are also pretty thick which is a really good thing for anything that will be exposed to the elements. The website was SUPER easy to use and made designing these a breeze! The shipping was fast through UPS and very, very well packaged. I am extremely happy with my order and I will totally be ordering through Build A Sign again.

If you have not already please check out the Rainbow Bracelet Project at the link above to see the beautiful bracelets they make as well as the good they are doing. Also over there >>>> on the side is a button for Build A Sign to go check them out! They do all sorts of stuff from business cards to huge banners and everything in between!

And now.... Pictures of the sticker!!! (Please excuse the crappy cell phone photos I can't find my camera)

^ This is the design I sent them^

^ This is the finished product^

^ This is the front and the back of the stickers^

Today's topic: giveaway entering.

...okay so maybe I have kind of. That darn life thing happening and whatnot. So I think in this post I will write about entering giveaways. I started getting into giveaways because I am in the process of planning a wedding and HOLY CRAP THESE THINGS ARE EXPENSIVE!!!!! Like oh. My. God. I grew up not having tons of money so when I first started planning it about made my eyes bug out of my head that the average wedding is in the neighborhood of 10K areyoufreakingkiddingme!??!?!!?!?!?!?!!?!?! Our budget is a whopping $1000. You know what that is in the wedding world? Peanuts. I literally had a person laughing in my face when I went to a wedding show after they found out my budget. I was really scared that we wouldn't be able to pull this shindig off and then one fateful day on Facebook I saw a wedding giveaway.

When I first started entering giveaways I really shied away from a lot of them because I was worried about getting tons of spam emails or cluttering up my Facebook and twitter to the point that I couldn't use it to stay in contact with my friends. The solution I had is that I actually have 2 accounts for pretty much everything. I have a separate hotmail *shameless plug I love hotmail* email account that I direct all of my giveaways entering through. It is linked to my main account too so i  still see everything but if it gets a bit overwhelming I can easily sort through things. I should also add that the mass majority of things I subscribe to I really enjoy. It is not worth that one extra entry to follow or subscribe to something that you don't support or you disagree with the content. The same goes for product reviews. If you are not interested in the product you are asked to review then DON'T DO IT. It's not worth the stress of trying to put a positive spin on something that you really don't care about and it's not fair to the person giving you the product to review because they will be out the profit for the product (which may not seem like a lot of money but for small businesses every dollar counts) but they will have a lackluster review of a product that you just were not that into.

There is a thrill factor to giveaway entering I must admit. That feeling when you win something that you really, really want but could not have afforded otherwise is really hard to beat. BUT there is a flip side to this. There can also be great disappointment. The greatest disappointment I have come to experience is when I find a giveaway and I do EVERYTHING to enter and I do it everyday and I win. Sometimes it happens on the bloggers end and sometimes its on the vendors but somewhere along the lines the ball is dropped. That thing that you were so excited to win never shows up. It is frustrating and discouraging and admittedly it makes me lose a lot of trust and faith in the blog/vendor in question. You can be damn sure that I'm not going to recommend them to anyone if this is the way I am treated. It may sound silly since I am getting something for free but I see it is I am putting in quite a bit of time and effort to give you free promotion and if you agree to reward one of the people who is giving you this tons of free promotion then you should follow through with it.  I also want to add here that this happening is a pretty rare thing but it DOES happen. There are some people who really go beyond the call of duty to track down contest winners and they are amazing but that is a post for another time (and more pictures!) .

One of my biggest pieces of advice for anyone who wants to get into reviews and giveaway entering is to find a friend to get into this with you. Or heck, make a new friend who is already into it too! I met one of my now closest friends through the  wedding forum site WeddingBee because we both really liked giveaway entering and were planning weddings on a budget. Turns out we had a lot of other things in common too (sometimes it's almost scary) ! It makes it so much more fun to have someone to help you find new giveaways or to share in the excitement of a win. Also being able to share wins is pretty fantastic. For my friend's wedding we have won a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff for it  between the two of us.

Well this is getting pretty long so I think I will end this here with the intent to make a part 2 somewhere down the line. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments or even suggestions on what you would like to see in the next part of this! I am working on a lot of exciting things in the next couple weeks for this blog so stay tuned!!!!!!

Oh and I really love T-Rex jokes so be prepaied for lots of things like this....

Review time! Garnier Fructis Hydra Recharge

It's review time! Today I will be writing a review on the Garnier Fructis Hydra Recharge collection. I will start off by saying I really enjoy garner products in general and this was an exception to that. This collection is designed towards people with dry hair. The shampoo has these cool little micro beads that burst as you rub the shampoo in and it has a really nice later to it. There is a nice thick conditioner in this set plus a 1 minute treatment that is basically like a conditioner on steroids to make your hair all super spiffy and stuff. anywhoo.... Let's get to the review! 

 Do you want to know a secret? *drum roll* i don't really have dry hair. In fact my hair tends to be on the oily side when left to its own devices. HOWEVER, I spend a decent amount of time in a chlorinated pool and so I get the dreaded "pool hair". You know, hair feels dry and greasy at the same time (how does that even work?) and if left alone and not covered by something you either look like a dirty bum or like you have been through a tornado of hairspray to get it to stick straight out behind you. Trust me if you have ever been in a chlorinated pool before with hair longer than an inch you know what I mean. Ugh so gross I pity my bandanna that had to cover that mess.

I should mention here that I am also the mom to a 2 year old with EXTREMELY dry hair. Seriously its like straw. He likes to use the "big boy" shampoo (aka mine because hey it's a spiffy green bottle with cool blue things inside) so I used some of the shampoo on his hair and it's amazingly not like straw anymore. This also brings me to my next point. As I'm sure any mom can tell you, when you have a small child getting a shower everyday is not normal... At all. So I was really pleased that my hair didn't get all nasty and get that whole greaser look going on. When I had to go 2 or more (yeah that's right I said it OR MORE yuck I know) days without a shower my hair stayed nice and pretty and still smelling fantastic so that is a huge thumbs up from me.

So now i will get into some specifics about a few things:

1) At first this shampoo was really hard to get used to. When you first put the shampoo on your hair it feels like you didn't use enough because the micro-beads have not all burst open to create the lather. I thought to myself "well that's crap I'm going to have to use a ton of this stuff" learn from my mistake! if at first when you apply the shampoo to your hair and it feels like it just got soaked up DO NOT USE MORE! Once you get it to work on it will later up nicely and you won't be overwhelmed by suds! 

2) Since it doesn't really have directions on how to incorporate the 1 minute treatment into the shampoo/conditioner routine what I did was use it as a super conditioner 2 times a week in place of the regular conditioner and it worked out fabulously. At first I tried doing shampoo-treatment-conditioner but I felt like that wasn't as effective as it could be and that the conditioner was being somewhat wasted. I also tended to leave it in for longer than a minute. I would apply the treatment, then do other stuff like wash my face and body while it soaked in. I don't know if this helped at all but I can't imagine it hurt. My hair stylist aunt used to always tell me to leave the conditioner on for 5 minutes to get the full benefits so I will just blame that . I also found out that if after everything was rinsed out before I got out of the shower I rinsed one last time with cool water it seemed to make my hair feel softer. Something something sealing hair cuticle *shrug* who knows

3) One of the things I love most about Garnier is that all of their products smell really good while still doing an awesome job on my hair. At first with the initial "sniff test" I thought the conditioner was a little lackluster. I remember thinking that they really dropped the ball because it smelled kinda like a coconut bar of  soap and could have used more fragrance. After I tried it though I realized that the scent is not as upfront as the shampoo and kind of loses that muted soap smell but keeps the light coconut smell. I knew it was a hit when my fiance decided he was going to make our roommates smell my hair because it smelled so good! 

All in all I would totally  buy this again and have already recommended it to a lot of people because its cost effective and does a great job. I'm very very happy that I got the chance to review this with bzzagent! Hope you enjoyed my review! Since I'm not really big with taking pictures of myself have a laugh instead. (Please enjoy this thing was hard as heck to do!)

first review! Glade Expressions collection

So I got the chance to review this collection with the oil diffuser starter kit and the fragrant mist as part of being an agent for BzzAgent and I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it.

 As soon as I got the coupons in the mail and took myself down to Walmart to pick up the loot. I am a huge stickler for "matching scents" as I like to call it so I went with the goal of finding an oil diffuser and spray with the same or complimenting scents and I ended up walking out with the pineapple and mangosteen versions of everything since I figured the house could use a bit of tropical flair and really as long as it worked to get the funk out I would be happy! P.S. Don't ask me what the hell a mangosteen is I have no freaking clue but it smells good!

As a bit of a side note I feel I should mention here a bit about my household. We live in a 1600 sq foot house with a large open living area. We have 2 fat Garfield-like cats, a black lab, a two year old, two women, and three men. Needless to say our house can get really funky real fast. Since I am the person generally in charge of keeping the house clean and presentable its an uphill battle for me to keep it clean let alone smelling good. 

When I got home and set up my diffuser and everything the scent was rather strong but it kind of turned out to be a good thing because the whole house was filled with scent rather quickly. I put the spray in the bathroom so it could combat what I like to call the "high stink zone" and it works really well for getting rid of the more harsh odors when they come around. I did notice that if you use the spray a ton, so like misting a large room that has the diffuser in it, it has a weird smell for a couple minutes. I have now had the diffuser set up in my kitchen for about a month and a half and I can say that the initial strong smell settles down after about 3 or 4 days into a very pleasant scent that is not overpowering when you are inside but when when you step in the door it still has a really pleasant noticeable smell. This last weekend we were all out of town for a couple days and it was so nice to come home and have it smell good as soon as we get inside. 

The price on this is really nice too. It's about $6 for the starter pack which has the pretty thing the scented part sits in and then the refills are about $4 here. I have decided to stop buying the wall plug in air fresheners (all except for the one by the cat box because well.... That area needs all the help it can get) since I have to use 3 to have the same effect and they range in price from $2-$4 each so really I end up saving money. Today I am going to go out and use a few of the coupons I have left to pick up a few of these to give as a gift for a house warming party. 

So there it is. My first review! How did you like it? I like it so I suppose that is all that matters right? 

Oh! Almost forgot, here is a picture of my diffuser! Pretty spiffy huh? It even matches my kitchen!

i suppose its about time

well i suppose its about time that i get myself a blog for all of the reviews and giveaways that i do all the time.  With my start really getting into BzzAgent it has really kicked my butt in gear to get this going so i can review the products i get to try through there.

so i guess here goes nothing and i hope you enjoy my take on reviews with a splash of other stuff occasionally.