1 Year Blogiversary!!

KITTENS!! As you might have guessed by my obnoxious banner, it's my one year blogiversary today!

I actually thought I had a few more days until my one year blogiversary, but apparently it was today! So I'm writing this celebratory blog post more in a hurry than I had anticipated.

Anyway: yay! I did it! I have been blogging for a year! When I started this blog, I didn't really invest a lot of time in it. It was like a second place on the Internet for me, whereas my nail Tumblr came first. This has changed. Like seriously changed so so much: my blog is my favourite medium ever now. It's my home on the Internet, it's my own private place where I can write what I want and show you what I want! My Tumblr, Facebook page and all the other things have become a gateway to the blog: I post pictures and sneak previews there, but I can't really let my heart out and write enormous amounts of text like I can on this blog. And I LOVE writing enormous amounts of text :D

To celebrate, I'm going to take a trip down memory lane with you all and show you some of the biggest and most fun events that have happened with my blog the past year.
The lovely girls from Dahlia Nails recently celebrated their first blogiversary too and I loved how they lay-outed their "look back" post, so I'm kind of stealing their lay-out a bit here! Just so you know :)

FIRST BLOG POST!

25th of September 2013, that was the day!

Exactly one year ago I published my first blog post, about an OPI polish I had won in a giveaway (yes, already then luck was on my side). I had two quite awful pictures included - but I'm glad that I at least sort of cleaned up my cuticles and such then!

FIRST COMMENT!

Next milestone was the first comment I ever got - on my fourth post, at which I now look back in horror. I mean, I guess it's okay but it definitely wasn't as "oh my gosh how great!" as I thought it was back then :D It was so nice of Colleen to leave a comment.



Getting feedback on a design or hearing what you all think of a polish, it's amazing. That interaction with you all is my favourite thing about blogging!

SOME SERIOUS CHANGES!

A big thing for me this year is that I changed the name of my blog! I chose the old one, rexxx did it, on a whim. I totally hadn't really thought about a name: I was like "oh I can always change it afterwards" and I just really wanted to start posting my nail art online instead of coming up with names for another week. We all know how that eventually turned out though! :D I'm very glad I changed the blog name as I love this new one!

Another really big change for me was when I changed my nail shape. In the beginning of my blog I hadn't really thought about the shape of my nails and they were just rounded a  bit. After seeing a lot of square nails (at Lucy's Stash for example) I made mine square too.

Eventually, I loved how Ave's nails looked and took the plunge! A new nail shape was born and it was the best decision ever :D



I recently also learned how to do that curvy text thing around my nails :D And I made a little logo to add to my pictures!


THE NAIL ART COMMUNITY!

I owe Lucy from The Nail Snail a bigggg thank you: she nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award (you can read my post here!) and to me, that was pretty huge then: someone liked my blog enough to nominate me! From that moment on, I felt part of the nail art community, because someone else thought I was part of it by nominating me! (does that explanation make sense? I hope so)

Being nominated meant that other people came to have a look at my blog too, which was incredibly encouraging. So thank you Lucy! You gave me the motivation in my early months of blogging to keep going!



I did several guest posts for people in the past year, all of which were super fun - for me, a guest post is a challenge to create an awesome design. I mean, when people ask me for guest posts, I'm so honoured that they would want me on their blog <3 So big thank you to everyone.


I also need to mention my first mani swap ever! I did it with Becca from Not Your Average Nails and it was totally awesome :D She's so talented, so it was an honour that she wanted to do a mani swap with me!






FOLLOWERS!

My follower count has been growing bit by bit over the past year. I have the most followers on Tumblr right now, and on Facebook. But there are also 95 wonderful people who are following my blog directly!

Numbers are just numbers and such, but it's very nice to know that people want to have my stuff in their newsfeed or in their email boxes :D

WORKING WITH BRANDS!

The first company that I did official reviews for, was Born Pretty Store. I have had the chance to review some great things from them (and will be doing some more reviews soon!).

My favourite has to be this Cats in Space design I created with their cat water decals!




I also had the amazing pleasure to work with Nayll when the company had just started up, and got the chance to design my own polishes! That was a totally awesome experience <3

If you weren't around yet then, you can check out my custom polishes here and here :) My favourite of those was this prrrretty jelly I named Elephant Love Medley!




And then other brands followed: I had the chance to swatch and review for Shimmer Polish and for Mod Lacquer! I never had dreamed that my blog would give me all these amazing opportunities. And that polish makers and companies would trust me enough to give me these opportunities! Big big thank you goes out to them too.


INDIE POLISH!

Aha! This is such a fun part of this blog post!

I recently ventured into the magical world of indie polishes. I have loved polish for a long long time, but it was only when I started my blog that I discovered there were so many more brands out there and so many more polishes and colour combinations that I ever could have dreamed.



Last summer, I bought my first indie polishes ever, and although one purchase was quite dissapointing (yes Tomboyish I'm talking about you), I loved the rest a lot.

I also got super lucky and won a bunch of giveaways, and so I had the chance to try out even more indie brands! I still have to show you so many of those so you can count on it that you'll see plenty of indie polishes appear on the blog :)




I still have A LOT of indie brands to try out and there are so many indie polishes on my wishlist - it's a big big world filled with pretties. I can only be excited about it!


BLOGGING FRIENDS!

There are some people here that are very special to me. People who give me feedback on a design, people who always come and read my blog posts, and people I have emailed enthusiastically with about indie polish purchases (yes Franziska I'm looking at you!). Some of you have been following me for a long time, and others have recently discovered my blog. But all of you are encouraging me to keep going. You make me happy, and I hope you know that! The people I'm talking about know who they are, and I'm afraid that I'll forget someone if I start summing everyone up.

When I first started out, I never thought that I'd make friends here and that "people from the Internet" could mean so much to me. I love reading all of your blog posts, I'm sometimes jealous of the amazing designs you all make and the wonderful pictures you can take of them. I notice that I really have started to care about people here: when someone writes in their blog post they're stressed out or that something bad has happened, I'm really worried and I think about them a lot. You are all wonderful people and I wish you the very best in life! <3


MY FAVOURITE POSTS!

Yay, another really fun part! I have some designs that I just love so much, and this is the ideal opportunity to show them off again :D I have a "My Favourites" tab on my blog where I show you some of my favourite designs, but I wanted to make one big collage as a celebration of my one year!

To sum it all up: it's been an amazing year. My blog has given me opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise, and through blogging I've met amazing people I wouldn't have known otherwise.

I still have a lot to learn about blogging, reviewing, taking pictures... but I am still very enthusiastic about it. I hope to be celebrating my second blogiversary with you all next year! I'm also starting to be more creative in my writing and I hope to write posts that will make people laugh and that will make people want to come back here for more.

Big thank you if you read through all of this! Seriously, I don't know if I would have :D Because I wrote this totally unplanned, it got a bit longer than expected. Oops. Anyway, THANKS!

*EDIT: big oops again, as I totally forget to mention my mega awesome boyfriend!! He's so sweet, always listening to me talk about polish and be excited about some nail art design I saw somewhere. Plus, he let's me borrow his great camera and lights to take pictures every time! So thank you dear boyfriend! <3