Naomi, Sage – Author at Plaster & Disaster

Man, today is a big day, filled with a lot of dread and disaster.

Yes, that’s right, today is Plaster & Disaster’s 300th post! Wait, what did you think we were talking about?

But really, today is a rough day that marks the intensification of a negative, threatening, and hate-filled period of time for our country. The coming years will require a lot out of everyone who is part of the fight for social justice and progressive values. We’d be lying to say that we aren’t scared.

We therefore have really mixed feelings that today is ALSO a big, fun day for us on this blog – it is the end of our 2-year blog anniversary celebration and also the 300th hard-hitting post that we’ve put up here on Plaster & Disaster!

(In case you missed it, check out the rest of our blog anniversary celebration this week – our awkward photoshoot, dual craft duel art project, house plans for 2017, and the bloggeriest party that we threw for no one.)

When we launched this blog on a whim just a little over two years ago, we knew basically nothing about each other or whether we would work well together. It has turned into a wonderful and hilarious partnership and friendship. (Check out last year’s posts for more about how we started working together and how we work together as a pair.)

And, with most of our posts averaging about 1,700 words long, that means that we’ve written a collective 500,000 brilliant words for you all! You’re welcome.

The blog has certainly grown over this past year – although we are not exactly sure by how much since our statistics plugin broke and we’ve been too lazy to replace it. We love our regular commenters who follow along with our stories and give us much-needed ~~validation~~ encouragement and perspective. We love that people come back day-after-day to read our silly thoughts. We love when we get a comment on an old post, which means that someone from the internet stumbled upon our archives and found it helpful.

We’re not a huge blog by any means, but our increased traffic and growing archive has led to an increase in revenue from our two sources of income – Google Ads and Amazon Affiliates – both of which are up about 270% over last year.

Since we made a commitment to each other and the world not to do sponsored posts, these are our primary sources of revenue from the blog, and they are certainly not big dollars. However, it does mean that we are covering the costs of hosting and running this site. Hooray!

We didn’t sell any furniture or win any reality TV shows this year (even though our reality show victory wasn’t broadcast until this year, we actually won and got the payout last year), but we’re happy that the passive income from doing what we already like to do (posting on this blog) is growing. For a full look at our finances last year, and a whole lot more that you never wanted to know about us and this blog, check out here.

We feel great about where we are, and are excited to keep writing and causing horrible disasters in our homes for your enjoyment in the year to come! Which brings us to…

The 2017 Plaster & Disaster Reader Survey

As we close out our anniversary celebration and get ready to write the next 500,000 words, we want to know more about you, the loyal reader. You’re not necessarily the only reason we do this (sorry) but you’re certainly a big part!

Please answer these questions to help us be better bloggers for you, and comment on this post with any other thoughts and suggestions:

Thank you all for reading Plaster & Disaster, and for celebrating with us! Now we’re off to bring our incredible arts and crafts skills to some posters for tomorrow’s march!

Disclaimer: This post is satire. If you don’t like sarcasm, or if you think Pantone’s “Greenery” is a beautiful color, you may not want to read it. Any statements about brand partnerships made in this post are lies intended as humor. Don’t sue us. Thanks.

You didn’t think we were going to do a week of blog anniversary posts without including some ridiculous craft projects, did you? For some inexplicable reason, spending our precious and limited free time on making satirical craft projects is our idea of a productive way to spend a weekend — and, thus, our “Bloggeriest” series was born!

In past installments we have inspired you with our bloggeriest autumn crafts, winter holiday decorating, crafts inspired by the upcoming trends of 2016, and we even assisted our Tiny Blogger friends in decorating their (doll)house for Halloween. However, there is one thing we have never done that has been seriously damaging our reputation as real bloggers: we have never had a party as a vehicle for blog content. So today we wanted to share with you a recent party that we decorated for, inspired by the trends we see ahead for 2017.

Every good party requires a color scheme, so the first thing we had to do was pick one out. That was a pretty easy task, as we had no choice but to use our sponsor were inspired by Pantone’s god awful effervescent color of the year, Greenery.

With that settled, we had a few key projects to work on, without which no party (photoshoot) is complete: decorations, food, and a signature drink.

First up: decorations. According to Pinterest, nothing says “this is a sophisticated adult dinner party” more than balloons. After all, balloons are the new donuts of 2017 – as in, the way that bloggers signal that we are whimsical free spirits. So we dutifully got to work inflating balloons and then painting on fun designs. We’re so grateful to our partner Pantone for providing the paint for this project!

Picking out the designs was easy, we just thought about what would best remind our party guests how on-trend we are. Parties, after all, are about making the hosts look good.

We featured all of the 2017 trends, from lips and to adorable deer. Plus we used a few fun and thought-provoking phrases like “GOLD!” and “sparkle!”

We also painted one with our favorite motivational phrase of them all: “lady boss.” We love this one because it’s such a great reminder that in 2017, us girls can do anything we set our minds to! We have lady pilots, lady doctors, lady lawyers…did you know there are even lady businessmen? It’s true. (Not lady Presidents, of course.) Personally we find nothing more empowering than to be reminded we’re not just bosses — we’re lady bosses!

With decor taken care of, it was time to move on to food. With all of the balloons that we had to paint, we didn’t have time to cook, so we headed out to buy some snacks. We were sure to only pick out things that would photograph well, since we know that’s what’s important.

Fortunately for us, Pizzelle cookies are adorable and go super well with trendy gold palm leafs.

Even though we didn’t have time to cook, as bloggers we definitely took the time to decorate our store-bought cookies with store bought icing in our favorite untinted white and Pantone’s Greenery.

If you’re eating greenery, it is basically a salad, right?

We just drew on some fun patterns and phrases, letting inspiration guide us. And, of course, it guided us toward all of the current trends. Because we naturally like those things and are not just being trendy. Because we’re hip but also authentic.

This whole cookie project probably only took us 5 hours from idea to execution, practically no time at all in blogger party prep!

This gave us time to create a signature mocktail for our party. (You could also make this a cocktail, just don’t have so much that you have to call in sick to your lady job tomorrow!)

This was a serious matter because we all know that the signature drink will set the mood for a party. So we sat down for a heart-to-heart about what we wanted the mood of our first party to be. To be honest, at first it was a little contentious, guys! Naomi wanted the mood to be “SMILE” but Sage felt that might date it when it showed up as a tagline in our scrap book about the party, and wanted to go with something timeless like “Gold Kisses” instead.

It was really hard, but we came out the other end and we think our relationship is stronger for it. After talking it out, we realized that the mood we were both actually going for is “Greenery!” It is both current and timeless (because humans will always need plants to live).

To capture “greenery” in a mocktail, we decided to feature the harmonious flavors of green apple (which is green) and rosemary (which is greenery). For a little contrast, we added some blueberries (because they look good in photos).

It’s Easy Being Green Mocktail (serves 6):

Pitcher of water. (Ours was warm. You could use chilled seltzer if you plan to actually have a human drink it.)
2 drops green food coloring and 5 drops yellow food coloring. (You could use green apple flavor syrup if you want to drink it.)
Slice of green apple, sprig of rosemary, 5-10 blueberries, for garnish.

It sure looks delicious! (We don’t actually know, because we didn’t taste it. If you make it and try it, let us know!)

With all the hard work done, we had nothing left to do but step back and admire our lady handiwork.

After all the decorating and cooking we were frankly exhausted and not really up for a party. Our bad mood was compounded when the first guest to show up brought a party gift that was so 2016.

Donuts, Tiny Blogger? DONUTS? Sadly we had to ask him to leave.

What a fun and super productive way to spend a Saturday! We can’t believe that no other guests showed up to enjoy our party with us, but we sure had a blast decorating for it. Happy, trendy 2017 from Plaster & Disaster!