Frozen Key Lime Pie

Easy, No Bake Frozen Key Lime Pie

 

A super simple summer dessert. This key lime pie has no raw eggs in the recipe. Cool and tangy with a zesty lime flavor. Perfect for a hot summer day!

Ingredients:
1 8 oz container Cool Whip-thawed
1/2 c key lime juice
1 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk

1 prepared Graham cracker crust

2 limes
1 cup heavy whipping cream
2 Tblsp confectioners sugar

Directions:
In a medium sized mixing bowl, whisk together lime juice and sweetened condensed milk. Gently fold in Cool Whip, mix until well blended. Pour mixture into a 9-inch prepared graham cracker crust. Freeze 3-4 hours or overnight until firm.


Zest 1 of the limes, and slice the other lime thinly for garnish. In a chilled bowl, Mix whipping cream until thickened. Add the confectioners sugar and lime zest. whip until the cream is thickened and stiff. Garnish the pie with the whipping cream and lime slices.

Serves 8

This is a super easy no fail recipe. It's always a hit at summer cook outs. Light and full of lime flavor. I prefer to use key lime juice, but regular lime juice can be substituted. I hope you enjoy this!

Industrial Revolution. I think you need to join me.

My new studio home on the web is a wonderful place called Artfire.I've been so happy to join a talented group of artisans and craftsmen. Artfire has been having a promotion in which they feature a daily Collection curated by a  member-and in today's email...what a surprise! My collection, Industrial Revolution, was chosen! I enjoy making the collections, not only do I get to showcase some very talented artisans, I get to see many types of craftwork that I would not normally look for.

And don't forget-if you use my referral code to join up you can get your third month free! How great is that!

industrial revolution

Curated By: FishPrincessD...

ArtFire.com

Unique Gifts

So need five great reasons to join me?
Here's my top five:

1. A fabulous group of quality artisans. I used to sell on Etsy and always felt I was competing with resellers and millions of other pieces of jewelry. Here on Artfire you notice the difference in quality as soon as you start browsing.

2. Reasonable usage fees- low monthly fees and you can list as much as you want-no more paying relisting fees just to get your product higher in the searches.

3. A commitment to the artisan members by the staff. I can't say how important this is. I think Artfire is continually working on its site and giving us all the tools we can use. The staff is quick to help out and answer questions and give suggestions. A great help to those of us how are fairly new to online selling. They listen to their community and implement many of our suggestions.

4. Feeding our items into the search engines-If you're a seller you know how important it is to be "found".

5.You'll make friendships with many talented artisans. If you need some help you can just give a shout out and someone will give you a hand.

I hope you will think about joining me on Artfire. I can't wait to see your studio.

Working my way through the 45 Day Success Guide-Week Three

Well it's been a bit over a month that I've had my Artfire Studio up and running. I'm still working at my own pace on the Artfire 45 Day Success guide. I've been taking my time to set-up my shop, join some guilds and do a bit more in the way of promotion. Here's some of what I've been working on:

• Day 15-Setting up your SEO testing. SEO? anything like REO? What the heck is SEO and how do test it? SEO means search engine optimization. In other words, it's how people find you in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. Each search engine has it's own way of ranking your listings. It's usually a combination of your product title and description. By testing different ways to write your descriptions you can help determine what descriptions work best for you. I try to vary my titles-especially when I list similar items. Today I listed 13 pairs of sea glass earrings. In some of the listings I started off with the words "sea glass" in others "beach glass" in others I started out with other descriptions. This way I hope to capture the attention of people searching  using different terms.
• Day 16-Has you listing some of your prior work. I listed some things I've listed when I was on Etsy, but that I haven't listed yet on Artfire. Many times people will list things from their art or craft shows or prior sold items.
• Day 17-Meet the staff. The staff often posts in the forums-hey it's nice to know that frittering away some of their day hanging out with us too! Tony, one of the co-founders is usually checking in daily. If you have a problem just ask. I had an issue come up this week with my studio announcement and they we right on top of it. Good work!
• Day 18-It's a work day. Hey it's fly fishing season for me around here. I think I'm heading to the stream. Work can wait. The trout won't.
• Day 19-Setting up your Rapid Cart and Facebook Kiosk. If you look to the right side of my blog you'll see a Rapid Cart feature. I've got it set up to view 6 random items from my studio. The cool thing about it is, that instead of just linking to my studio, you can actually purchase something without navigating away! I haven't had any on try it yet. But for my type of blog, which brings in a lot of people looking for things likes recipes or tutorials, I'm hoping it will be a nice feature. The same thing goes for the Facebook Kiosk-it's a check-out application on your  business page.
• Day 20-More SEO-by now you should be starting to get more comfortable with writing titles and descriptions. The one thing to remember is that your not really writing nice flowery titles naming your products. Think of them as you would try to "Google" an item.I suggest searching on a couple of different search engines on how your titles show up. Here's a good example. If you search "strawberry jello pretzel desert" in exactly that order you'll find my recipe number 1 in Google-and I might as it's been in number 1 (or very close to it) since 2009! I even beat out places like cooks.com and allrecipes.com! On Bing and Yahoo it doesn't come up until page 3. It also places on the first page on Ask.com.. So you can see I'm happy most people use Google and I try to optimize my titles for Google searches. One of the things you'll notice in my posts are links. Click on my titles and the highlighted words and you 'll be taken to something I've mentioned. Did you know that having these links in your posts actually improve your credibility? I didn't. But having links in your posts increase the likelihood that you will increase your ranking in the search engines. But, don't over do it. You want to be credible without selling every word to an add or link! Don't you just hate it when you get to a post and just about every word in the post is an ad!

I hope you're finding my journey interesting and helpful. I'd love to hear how some of you are doing setting up your shops and studios. If you have been around for a while, I'd love to hear your suggestions.

Nobody trips over mountains.  It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble.  Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain.  ~Author Unknown

Working my way through the 45 Day Success Guide-Week Two

Well, I'm working my way through the Artfire 45 Day Success Guide, albeit it's going a lot more slowly than the 45 days. Like many others, my Artfire Studio isn't my only job. I have to fit it into my schedule as time permits. I check in daily-I'm hoping to see that first sale on Artfire-I usually post in the forums, check out facebook when I can and even sneak in a couple of tweets. When do I have time to create? So here's the second weeks goals:

• Day 8-Listing and Starting your blog. One of the features of Artfire is that your studio has it's own blog tab. I find this a bit redundant for those of us who already have outside blogs such as this one. I have posted a couple of articles, but I'll stick with this as my main blog. The upside is that Google seems to like blogs when it crawls for content. The goal is to post 10 more items and 3 posts in the forums.
• Day 9-Studio Clean-Up-silly me-I thought this meant the cleaning genie was going to appear at my house and clean up my studio-A prayer answered! funny thing, that's not what Artfire had in mind. Their idea of studio clean-up is to add categories to your studio. Lucky for me I had them already in place. Oh yeah list another 10 items. Well, I'm still working on that.
• Day 10-Work Day! Yeah a day off to create....or just catch a few extra zzzz's. This is the kind of a day I can enjoy!
• Day 11-Social Media Set-up Day. Now I know why they gave me that day off yesterday-Artfire want to lull me into believing I was sailing right along. Yea, more like a moth drawn to a flame. Here's todays goals: Set-up a Twitter and Facebook Fan Page. But if that wasn't enough How about 3 tweets and 2 Facebook posts, 3 Forum posts and just for good measure post 5  more items. Hey these people aren't fooling around! Well I may not be the most Social Media savvy person on my block, but I do manage a tweet now and then, and Facebook-I don't like to be too spammy. In fact, The fastest way to have me "unfollow" you is when I see dozens of posts from your shop. 
• Day 12-Social Media Day Two-What there's more? Actually Artfire recommends an outside blog...like here on Blogger. Well at least I've got that covered.  Maybe I should tweet about it...
• Day 13-Listing and Interacting-Hey isn't this Social Media Day 3? List 5 more items-Tweet one and feature another on Facebook. Didn't I say something about not being spammed with all those look at this item I listed today posts. Really people, I don't mind looking at all your things, but not all in one day. And make it a bit interesting for me.
• Day 14-Work Day! thank goodness. I need to take a nap.

Actually, following the 45 Day Success Guide  has done a few good things for me, it keeps me off the streets, out of the bar, neglecting my family, shot my diet all to Hell...no really, I find myself at least trying to maintain a bit of a schedule of working on my studio daily. I just need a bit more time to create and photograph my items-it isn't easy to get natural daylight at 9 pm in Michigan this time of year!

So if you're new to Artfire...How goes your Week? For the rest of you lucky souls, why don't you go check out some of my latest designs. And how about leaving me a link to your Facebook Fan Page or your Twitter Link. I promise-I won't spam you! And for all you lurkers-Hey leave me a comment!

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.  ~Thomas Edison

It's A Handmade World: A Glimpse of Spring

It's A Handmade World: A Glimpse of Spring

If your looking for some spring gifts, or just some inspiration, how about going over to the blog It's a Handmade World. She put together a blog post where artisans with handmade goods can post there items. This weeks theme is spring. It's quite a collection.

No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.  ~Proverb