Eating. Let’s be honest, it’s something we Americans are experts at! And here in Seattle, the home of Pike Place Market, world famous coffees, geoducks, Salumi salami, and the only certified fair trade and organic chocolate factory in the US, we really know how to eat right. We even managed to turn the Space Needle into a restaurant, for goodness sake! So, it was an ideal location for the first ever International Food Blogger Conference presented by Foodista.

Tickets to the three-day event sold out immediately, proving that not only do we enjoy consuming food, we also love talking about food, sharing our experiences with food, and pouring over the digital concoctions of fellow food bloggers. Sarah and I joined a panel called “Food Porn: Food Photography & Styling” alongside chef and author Kathy Casey and food stylist Patty Wittmann. We walked through a quick and dirty Picnik demo, showing the attendant foodies how easy it is to make your food look as delicious as it tastes. We demonstrated how to adjust for poor lighting with a quick auto-fix, resize the image so it fits perfectly on your blog, or flip your pineapple upside down cake upside down! We also showed how to make your alfredo absolutely dreamy with the Orton-ish effect, recreate Mom’s famous apple pie with the 1960’s effect, or sweep away those pesky crumbs with the Clone tool.

What a perfect fit for bloggers who need a little help making their pictures as mouth watering as the masterpieces they whip up! Thanks to all the attendees who asked great questions and offered their testimonials on how Picnik is already as essential as their recipes. Picnik and delicious dishes make a steamy couple and now the word is out.

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Our 14th Featured Picniker is Trevor Reed, head foreman of a three-bay truck wash and detail facility of the largest trucking company in Idaho, aka (in Picnik World Headquarters) “Trucker Dude”. Living in Idaho Falls, Idaho, Trevor grew up in nearby Shelley, Idaho after moving away from the Mt Saint Helens area of Washington as a kid. He’s been working for the same trucking company for 12 years, he was in his high school band, still plays the drums when he gets a chance, and writes science fiction.

We here at Picnik HQ have actually been following his Flickr stream for months, where his photographs of gleaming 18-wheelers, incredibly dirty faces, and wide, “Tatterland” vistas certainly stood out in our Flickr Picnikers group. A lot of his photos are of big trucks with Vibrance effects, but sometimes a little baby in Black & White and Vignette. You get the tough guys looking rugged and mean with HDR-ish over top, but also the tough guys hamming it up with Gooify and Orton-ish. Each picture stands out and it’s obvious that “Trucker Dude” enjoyed taking every one of them. Plus, they actually are really good photographs: well-composed, well-set up, well-lit, well-edited, and each has a personality, tells a story, and actually is worth a thousand words. So we couldn’t wait to get in touch and make him our 14th Featured Picniker!

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Already a year has passed since our last Memorial Day and now we’re up to one hundred and thirty-three years since Decoration Day, the precursor to Memorial Day, was first celebrated in Waterloo, New York, and once again we encourage you all to memorialize WWI, WWII, Korean, and Vietnam War Fallen, as well as those serving in current conflicts and anyone else who served in either of the four branches of the military, by hanging a flag in the front yard, tying a ribbon in honor of family members in harm’s way, or sending hot dogs in to serve the noble cause of the first summer barbecue.

This year, in addition to our BBQ Stickers, Flags and Yellow Ribbon shapes, and the rest of our summery selection of Stickers and Fonts, we also have a whole new set of Birthday Stickers, with cakes, banners, balloons, and little numbered candles. Meanwhile, don’t forget the graduates in your life: whether a PhD candidate, undergrad, high-schooler, preschooler, or even just the kid who aced his third grade report card, we’ve got Graduation Stickers too!

So this Memorial Day long weekend, we’ve got everything you need to create an ecard, invitation, or decorate any photo you take, to create something worth memorializing on its own.

Thank you everyone who voted for us last month in the Webware 100 Awards because we are one of the Webware 100!

Other winners in our Photo & Video category include ginormous luminaries such as YouTube, Flickr and Hulu (you may have heard of them), and in other categories Pandora, Etsy, Facebook, Twitter, and this little startup in Mountain View called Google.

So thank you all so much, trusty Picnikers, for all your votes and for rooting for us! We couldn’t have done it without you!

We’re pleased to report that our friends at TechFlash have put out a great list of the 100 Top Women in Seattle Tech and included our very own Lisa Conquergood!

Lisa’s been Team Picnik’s Chief Marketing Officer since February so we’ve long known that she’s an opinion leader, a mover-and-shaker, and a Naval Undersea Warfare interner, but it’s wonderful to see her recognized as all those things by her inclusion in this inaugural list of the top women in Seattle Tech!

I want to talk about the last thing I thought I’d ever want to talk about: Star Trek.

This is coming from someone who only, on Friday last week, AFTER seeing the new Star Trek movie on IMAX with Team Picnik, found out that it was a young William Shatner who played the original Captain Kirk. So you can tell that up until now I’ve managed to avoid all things Trek.

And yet I’ll be the first to admit that I totally loved the movie! I even walked away with a newfound crush on Spock (there’s just something about that inner struggle between logic (vulcan) and emotion (human) that gets me every time).

Star Trek is totally funny, slightly campy and 100% adventurous. It also delivers an important and (unfortunately) underused message. Oftentimes blockbusters like this are more singular in their nature, adhering to the all too familiar “hero’s journey”. The timeless story which revolves around one main character, who (with the help of a few quirky friends) is able to: self-actualize, win the girl and save the world.

Star Trek is different.

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Team Picnik had a great night at the Seattle 2.0 Awards last night and it was all thanks to all you Picnikers out there!

We were nominated for four awards: Best Startup Product Designer (Peter Roman), Best Startup CEO (Jonathan Sposato), Best Boot-Strapped Startup and Best Startup (as in, the best startup in Seattle) and we won every one of them! We’re so excited!

The event was great too: held at the Pacific Science Center next to the Space Needle, it was really expertly put together by Marcello Calbucci and he deserves a lot of congratulations for organizing such a fun evening. As Marcello pointed out in his speech last night, the Seattle 2.0 Awards are important because Seattle especially is such a wonderful place for startups with a vibrant tech community, active investor base, and booming with ideas and entrepreneurial spirit. The technology and startup industry in Seattle is a special, dynamic place, and it’s because of that that this Seattle-specific award means so much to us.

But we couldn’t have done it without all our loyal Picnikers! You read our Facebook updates, our Twitter tweets, and blog posts, and you clicked that badge on the Welcome page and because of your enthusiasm and all your votes we won! And we can’t thank you enough for giving us such a fun night. So thank you.

Saturday, May 2, is National Scrapbooking Day. For you expressive souls who need more than what a drafting table, cutting board, soldering iron, 14 pair of specialty scissors, a compartmented box full of die-cut letters, flowers, leaves, hearts, teddy bears and kittens, glue and buttons can offer, allow us to offer a way to augment your craft: Picnik!

Just about everything on Picnik can be used towards digital scrapbooking greatness. The internet is full of handy free patterns and textures to use as new papers to layer with, and why limit yourself to your box full of die-cut shapes when there’s our huge collection of Stickers? We’ve got tons of fonts to put your memories into words, and for an extra head start there are all our collections of Fancy Collages, organized by theme. There are oodles of things on Picnik that even we haven’t tried yet, and National Scrapbooking Day is a great time for trying something new! And with our easy integrations on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and all sorts of other photo sharing and social networking sites, it can be like attending a scrapbooking party on National Scrapbooking Day, as well!

For inspiration, our own Brenda Anderson, Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, in had a Scrapbooking contest on the Flickr Picnikers group for the month of March, and to help celebrate all the possibilities of this craftiest of holidays, our friends at Blisstree are having a National Scrapbooking Day Giveaway: two free year-long Picnik Premium subscriptions, just for suggesting to her (and us) some clever feature ideas.