On January 9, 2015, we launched our blog Pixels, Plates, and LOLs!  It was born from a friendship that grew from our mutual participation in Capture Your 365, an online community that provides inspiration and support for those who wish to document their lives by taking a photo a day.  Through the daily photos and narratives that we posted over a period of about nine months, we realized that although our lives looked very different on the surface, we had much in common.  We decided to explore our shared interests in food and photography by co-authoring a blog that celebrated our friendship by sharing our stories and experiences of cooking, taking pictures, and our quirky lives.

Initially, we began by sharing a personal recipe every Friday.  We are both “practical” cooks in that our everyday cooking is meant to make our families happy; it is in no way to impress the culinary elite.  After about a year and a half, we realized that we had posted most of our family recipes and thus found ourselves scrambling for a direction with our food posts.  We tried some random recipes from favorite cookbooks and magazines.  We tested some mixes.  But still, we were struggling to generate content.

Because we were expending much of our creative energy to figure out our Food Friday posts, we posted nothing else during the week.  Too little content causes almost certain death for bloggers.  We knew that we needed to step back and regroup.  In October of 2016, we began some serious soul searching.  We both agreed that we wanted to continue blogging together but that redirection was needed.

For any of you that have been around babies and toddlers, you know that around age two is when a child’s personality really starts to shine.  That is where we are.  Our venture together is two years old and its unique personality is finally starting  to emerge.  We have reached the terrible twos!  And, we are ready to show our true colors to the world.  You only need be a little scared! 🙂

As our adult selves conversed with our two year old blogging selves, we made a list of things that we want our blog to be:

• We want it to be a lighthearted read (most of the time).
• We want it to honestly represent who we are as individuals – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
• We want it to convey the beauty of our unique friendship.
• We want to share our love of photography.
• We want to share our love of food.

Then came the hard part…figuring out a plan to accomplish these things.

Creating a lighthearted read is fairly easy for us.  Though we both battle perfectionism, we don’t take ourselves, or life in general, too seriously.   We are both guilty of sending hilarious text messages to the other that have resulted in spitting or snorting coffee upon reading.  We agree that spitting coffee is a waste of a precious commodity, but laughing is more valuable than almost anything so we continue to exchange such messages on almost a daily basis.

We are goofy.  We are sometimes irreverent.  We make silly mistakes in the kitchen.  We forget things.  Sometimes we are defiant. (Remember we are two!)  We are survivors.  We are caregivers.  We are honest.  We wear are hearts on our sleeves.  The bottom line…what you see is the real deal.

We have never met face to face.  We have never even talked on the phone!  Yet, there is a level of trust between us that is beyond measure. Tracey is a stay-at-home mom living in Northern Michigan.  Kris is an empty-nester and college professor who lives in Texas.   We are both confident that we can share with one another what is on our mind and in our heart without fear of judgement, criticism or ridicule…well, maybe a little ridicule, but it is always done with love!   We each know our strengths and weaknesses as far as our blogging relationship and respect each other for both.

Photography is where it all started and it is still the tie that binds.

And then there’s food.  What emerged over our two years of writing Pixels, Plates, and LOLs!  together is that our real shared passion when it comes to food is for baking.  Once we came to this realization, we found the direction that we needed to go forward.  From now on, the recipes that we share on here will all be baked goods.  Even with that, we still needed a bit more focus.  After several weeks off bouncing ideas back and forth, we had an epiphany.  In a random conversation, we discovered that we both use King Arthur Flour baking goods and have made many of their recipes.  King Arthur Flour has recently started a monthly Bakealong Challenge that intrigued us both.  They also have a regularly published magazine called Sift.  King Arthur Flour website has lots and lots of recipes that we have wanted to try.  That’s it! The ah-ha moment!  We found our niche!  The decision was made that our Food Friday posts will be based exclusively on recipes from either the King Arthur Flour website, magazine, or one of their cookbooks.  We have no affiliation with or support from King Arthur Flour.  This was a personal decision made by us and us alone.  During the final months of 2016 we tested this concept and it worked well for us.  So for now, it is us and King Arthur in the kitchen!

By using the King Arthur recipes, for which we can simply give links, a little more of our time is freed up and we can share more about our approach, struggles, and successes with the actual photography of the recipes, something that we both know has been missing from our posts.

With our new concept, we also felt that we needed a new name for our blog, one that more accurately reflects our new focus on baking as well as the nature of our friendship.  During the same period in which we were wrestling with “what we wanted to be when we grew up,” we were also trying to name ourselves.  That is much harder than you might think!!  Unlike naming children where it’s OK for there to be four Michaels and five Marys in a classroom, a blog name must be unique.  We came up with several names that we thought were both clever, fitting and unique only to discover that our ideas were not or as clever or as unique as we thought; many names that we entertained were already being used by either another blogger or business.  We spent many frustrating weeks trying to figure out this piece of the puzzle.  In our frustration, we came up with a “B-list” of names that definitely reflected our terrible two’s stage and our slightly rebellious selves.   Fortunately, we returned to adulthood before we made any inappropriate decisions that we might regret.

We finally came to the name, Sifted Together.  We feel that this describes how our friendship came into being and how it continues to grow.  It also speaks to our focus on baking..two ingredients poured in a container and sifted together so that they are mixed and work well in a recipe.  That’s us!  Individually we will still share our own quirky views on life through our Monday in Michigan and Tuesday in Texas posts.  We also have a few surprises up our sleeves!

Thank you for reading and we hope that you will come along with us as we bake, photograph, and laugh our way through life!