We’ve set our away messages, synchronized our watches to Central Daylight Time, and hit the dusty trail (A.K.A. I-5) to Sea-Tac airport. Today, we three ladies of Picnik are boarding our flight for the Windy City!

What’s with the globetrotting, you ask? Lisa, Sarah, and I are off to reveal the superhuman photo editing powers of Picnik to the ladies of BlogHer at their 5th annual conference! We’ll be demoing the best of Picnik out of Booth #112 alongside our trusty press rep, Bridget, while giving away some choice Picnik swag. Come find us!

Don’t worry, we’re leaving a few days early to scarf some deep-dish, cruise the Magnificent Mile, catch a few bars of the blues, and rofl to some world-class improv.

Along the way, we’ll be posting photos to a Flickr stream here. Follow along on our whimsical forays and misadventures in America’s 3rd largest city, Chicago!

Picnik passed another big milestone this week, with every more millions of happy Picnikers using the site to add a little fun and awesomeness to their photos. We’d like to say we’ve been doing our part here at Team Picnik to boost our numbers, because we’ve got a little happy news.

Team Picnik is thrilled to announce that Charlie, our QA Manager and Community Relations Guy is back at work. Why was he gone? Because he had a baby!

That’s right, baby season continues at Picnik World Headquarters with baby Wyatt, the third baby this year. First Brian, our Quixotic Softographer, then CEO Jonathan, and now Charlie. Congratulations, Charlie and Kristi!

Justin (our Penguin Handler) and Mike (COO) are in San Jose this week for the annual Velocity Conference on web performance and operations. Keynote speakers this year include Jonathan Heiliger of Facebook, Marissa Mayer of Google, John Adams of Twitter, and Justin Huff of Picnik! That’s right, Justin gave a keynote today on “2 Years Later: Loving and Hating the Cloud,” and Mike went along to cheer for him.

Most of our users might hear about “the Cloud” and wonder, “Why would Justin hate the Picnik clouds?” but actually the Cloud is where most of Picnik is stored! It refers to all our offsite data storage, processing, flexibility, and not making Justin install all that hardware himself. That way, it’s where we don’t have to look at it, as if it were hidden behind big white fluffy clouds. So Justin was down there to talk about love, hate, and laziness.

They’ll be there for the rest of the conference, so if you run into them, say hi!

Update: The video is now online!

Today Yahoo! has launched a whole new set of applications inside Yahoo! Mail, and Picnik is launching right there with them!

That’s right, the internet’s most gigantor webmail provider is now offering Picnik as the photo editor for their users! And without having to go digging in an application directory, either, but right there in the applications menu at the left.

Similar to our integrations with Facebook and Flickr, having Picnik inside your email brings Picnik’s photo editing awesomeness to where so many of your photos are kept anyway: in your inbox! Just click on “Edit Photos” next to the Picnik icon and hit connect, and Picnik automatically grabs all the images attachments in your Yahoo! Mail. Can’t find something? You can also Get From Computer, a Website, a Yahoo! Search, a Webcam shot, the list goes on. Then edit, add Effects, Stickers, Text, and Touch-Ups to your heart’s content, and when you’re done, Save to your Computer, Flickr, Print, other third party storage sites, and, of course, email!

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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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!

Last week Brian, our Quixotic Softographer, told his incredibly pregnant wife about our latest additions of Stickers and Fancy Collages, and said that it was therefore safe for her to have their baby, because they were all set up for the announcements.

That’s right, for Picnik Premium members, we have two whole sets of Baby Fancy Collages! One for baby boys, and one for baby girls! Each set has a dozen adorable and tastefully laid out spaces for either single or up to three photographs of your little bundle (or bundles!) of joy. Plus, for the Customization-enthusiasts amongst you, or those who prefer to put together their own adorably-adorned baby photos, there are thirty cute and cuddly baby-themed shapes in the Stickers list.

And, sure enough, on Thursday last week the newest (and by far the smallest and cutest) member of Team Picnik came into the world: little baby Rowan. Congratulations, Brian and family!

Those of you who use the microblogging sensation Twitter are probably already aware of twitter.com/picnik. From that chirpy perch, first Steve and now a whole flock of us watch every Twitter mentioning “Picnik” go by, and have built up a whole colony of happy Picnik users to follow. Those of you reading this blog post on the blog can see to your right the handy Twitter widget that keeps blog readers abreast of our past 5 tweets. And those of you who are looking at our Twitter page will notice that the most recent Tweet was posted from (be still your beating wings) Picnik!

That’s because the most recent addition to our covey of connections is Twitter! Now when you’ve completed Picniking, say, your photo of finches, you can Save & Share directly to your Twitter feed, while tweeting about it, all inside of Picnik! All this is possible thanks to our new partnership with Twitgoo, a media-sharing service created by Photobucket for posting pictures on Twitter.

But twittering isn’t all that you can do from inside of Picnik! You can also post your perfectly Picniked Profile Picture, or set it as your Twitter background! Happy Twittering!