The Downside of Blogging

"The Downside of Blogging"

When we started our blog, we were so excited to share our ideas and projects and work with you. We also were so inspired by so many other amazing and wonderful people and artists and absolutely love sharing their work and stories as well. As with most blogs, it took us a while to start growing and getting a readership, but as we did it just became so exciting! We’ve made some wonderful blogging friends, and we really started to enjoy blogging and sharing with our readers.

Although, over the past year or so, we have run into some upsetting issues that we never discussed publicly because we have always said from the beginning we wanted to remain positive, uplifting, gracious and true to who we are on our blog...no matter what. We really went back and forth on whether or not to write this post, but we feel that it is time to share how we feel. We have had actual products from our shop completely replicated and used for sale and profit. We have seen photos from our parties on other people’s websites with full credit taken for them and no link or credit given back to us, when they were literally photos that we took. We have seen our diy projects used with absolutely no credit given back to us.  We try very hard to create fun and easy projects that people will love and be able to easily replicate for their parties. But the least we ask for is credit to be linked back to us. We have even re-created projects that we have found to be fun, interesting, or have been inspired by and created them in our own style. However, you will always see a disclaimer at the bottom of our post that reads “this is not our original idea, it is just the way we choose to recreate it” and credit back to the original source.

We are both stay at home moms that do Icing Designs on the side as a part time job. But between all of our orders, emails, keeping up with facebook, pinterest and our blog, it definitely seems like a full time job. We started Icing to have fun, sell our unique product, express our ideas and be part of an amazing community of artists and other bloggers. If we could inspire anyone along the way, then we feel like we have done our job. But over the past couple of months it has been hard to find the 'fun' in blogging! Our dear and amazingly creative friend Katie, {who is also a diy correspondent for some of our projects}, created the most amazing ruffled ice cream cone tutorial for a party that we did for my twins birthday this summer. We were blown away by the response from it. We were so excited that our readers love it so much; it was even pinned on Martha Stewart’s pinterest page! We have seen people starting to recreate them, which we were thrilled about because they always linked back to our tutorial. However, just recently we've seen replicas of them, one person taking credit for the idea and another shop that wanted to starting to selling them. The projects on our blog have always been intended for personal use only and not for resale and profit. 

We are sure we are not the first people that this has happened to and we are sure other bloggers have run into this problem.  We would love to have your feedback and learn how you’ve handled these situations. 

Please know that we struggled on whether or not to write this post, as we truly do just want this to be a happy place and a place for inspiration for our readers. We truly believe everyone is creative and has something special to offer, just...

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{print by Emily McDowell available here }