New Name Change, New Blog, and Plans for 2018

Hi everyone! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and their new year is off to a good start! Since this is the first post of 2018, I wanted to start the new year off by talking about some new things in my life. I’m anticipating this year will be a year of huge changes for me both in my career and in personal life, so I wanted to address some changes that will affect this blog and blog post in the future.

First, I’m changing my online name! Now, before anyone starts to panic, I’m not changing my screen name, Essie of Who. I’m actually changing my name from Mary Ruth Anderson to Mary Blanche. When I started writing my blog, I decided to use a pen name for my blog and social media sites. I settled on the name Mary Ruth Anderson because Mary is my first name, Ruth is the first of my two middle names, and Anderson is the last name of very good friends of mine. When I asked them if I could use it, they didn’t mind, but as the years passed, I began to feel uncomfortable my friend’s last name as my pen name. After talking to them and other close friends about this and what I should do, I came to the conclusion to change my pen name’s last name.

When I decided to change my pen name, one of my friends suggested I change my last name to “Blanche”. At first I was not convinced, but after many months of considering other names, I agreed that Blanche is a good fit. There is a story behind why my friend suggested Blanche, but I won’t go into that right now.

I already began to change my name on my social media accounts, but it’s taking longer than I anticipated so I don’t know when I’ll be completely done with the name conversion. So, if you see that I did not change the name on some of social media pages or here on my blog, that’s why.

Second, I have a second blog! This blog, called The Estella Initiative, is a lifestyle and travel blog I started in June 2017. I started it after a (Ok, multiple) suggestions by friends to start a second blog that does not talk about sewing, photography, or my art. So far the blog is doing well, but I did not do a lot of traveling in 2017 so there is not a lot of travel posts there. On the other hand. I do talk about fashion trends, makeup, and other “lifestyle” topics. The reason why I decided to mention my second blog is because I plan on writing crossover posts between the blogs this year. Because of this, I wanted to let everyone know what is going on and why there will be links to another blog I run. If you want to read The Estella Initiative, you can find the blog here!

And lastly, I wanted to mention a few plans I have for this blog in 2018. I created a youtube channel a few years ago but never used it until recently. I would like to use it more to post videos I recorded not just at conventions, which is what the channel has right now, but also videos showing how I sewing clothing and costumes. I already began work on a tutorial last year, but I could not edit it because I had some issues with my video editing software. I have new video editing software that works much better than the old software, so I plan on posting more sewing videos on there.

Well, that’s about it! Thank you for reading!