Every life has a story wins for the General designs with 53% - 74 votes

I simply wish for one more day won for this year's Personal shirts with 56% - 77 votes

I have one collage finished for 2008 and a little over 60 photos already for the second collage. If you would like to submit your SIDS baby's photo to be included in the collage, please visit the T-Shirt section of the site and follow the directions there. Thanks!

To receive notification of when to participate in the polls, just join the T-Shirt mailing list if you haven't already. Then you'll be able to take part in deciding what goes on the t-shirts each year too.

I have put up a second round for voting already and because it was so soon, I thought it only fair to post here to the blog as well as to the T-Shirt mailing list. The first round had a slogan choice to vote on which was almost identical to one we had already used a few years ago so I removed that and some of the less popular slogans.  There are now 11 options for each the General and Personal. 

General


Personal

Happy voting

I've been working on the 2008 collage and hope to have it finished up soon. This year has flown by so fast!

Please ensure you're subscribed to the T-Shirt mailing list to receive further updates about the 2008 T-Shirts.

Judging by the number of pictures I already have, I won't have much wiggle room this year for latecomers. I have already taken the submission form down.

I've got the Round 1 polls set up for the slogan votes. I've included some of the more popular ones from previous years as well as some new ones for this year. If there's a clear winner we won't have any further votes, but if it's close we'll have another round of voting but I won't post it to the blog, just to those on the mailing list.

Click for the general slogan vote

Click here for the personal slogan vote

If you have any slogan suggestions please email them in and I can add them to the list.

Thanks!

I thought that this announcement from CafePress might interest some others here.

Nov 12th, 2008
11/13: Localized Sites for U.K., Canada, and Australia

We’re thrilled to launch CafePress sites localized for the
following markets: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia. Visitors
coming from these markets will access a localized CafePress site
with the following:

* Priced in local currency
* Relevant topics specific to that market (no American holidays, politics, etc)
* More shipping options to include faster delivery time

Economy
Standard*: 4-5 days faster than Economy (includes Custom’s duty and Tax)
Express: 10 days faster than Economy (includes Custom’s duty and Tax)

* Available late November

Over the past couple of days I've been corresponding with Tina, a nursing student who is working on a project that she will soon be presenting which will include information on SIDS. She would love to have a collage of SIDS baby photos to use in her presentation and I offered to make one for her.

Snippets from some of her emails:

Our instructor gave us a presentation project to work on to present and educate to other students and prospective parents regarding SIDS.

Nurses are teachers as well as healthcare providers to our patients. In the role of an obstetrics' nurse, we want to teach our patients safety care practices for their newborn. Research is also part of a nurse's role. By my researching the internet on SIDS, I found your site which provided support, resources, and education for parents who lost a child. The information also made me more aware of the predominance of SIDS and more reason to help educate new parents. Other sites we will be using for our presentation include NIH's Continuing Education Program on SIDS Risk Reduction and at least four articles from authentic nursing journals.

As nurses, we, in no way, want to present false information to our patients or to the public. The following outlines our goal for our teaching/learning presentation to parents:

Goal: In a nursing role, to educate new parents on the safe care of their newborn and to provide risk factors and recommendations that could help "reduce" the chance of sudden infant death (also known as "crib death" ) and
to provide safe sleep practices.

Included in our presentation, we will be defining SIDS, presenting statistics and the newest research (based on authentic nursing journal articles - AJN, The Internet Journal of Advanced Nursing Practice...), safe sleep practices (including "back to sleep" ), elimination of soft objects and toys from baby's sleep area, take smoking outside, to communicate to childcare providers, grandparents, and siblings on these safe sleep practices... We will be presenting this information on a presentation board, along with a written outline. After the presentation, we will ask the audience to verbalize/reiterate what we presented, so we know they have a clear understanding of the recommendations and sleep practices which could help reduce SIDS. I will stress the importance of not using the words "prevention of SIDS", as the word "prevent" does not apply.

We do need to educate as many new parents as we can.

I felt by adding the collage to the presentation, that it would help others realize that SIDS is "real".

TO SHARE YOUR BABY'S PICTURE FOR THE COLLAGE FOR TINA'S PROJECT:

Simply email ONE PHOTO of your SIDS baby to jacobsmommy@sidsfamilies.com, and include your baby's name and dates, and please put "Tina's Collage" in the subject line so I can spot them easily amongst all the other emails I receive. If you'd like, you can also let me know if you'd like the photo saved for the next SIDS Families T-Shirt as well because I'll be starting on the 2008 collage shortly.

DEADLINE: Saturday September 13th, 2008

Thanks!

I've taken down the form for adding a baby to the collage because I've received so many that I believe I have enough photos now to complete a third collage for this year. As always I'll update the T-Shirts mailing list with the progress. I hope to have this collage available before the end of the year.

I'm currently working on requests made on the 1st, (except in cases where I'm waiting on a photo or clarification on a request made prior to the 1st). If I've counted right I have about a dozen requests left to finish up.

I've sent out quite a few coupon codes to the T-Shirt mailing list, every time I receive one I send it out, unless the code is the same as one already sent out. The codes are good for $5 off a $50 order if used by the expiry date. Receiving the codes is one of the bonuses to being a part of the T-Shirt mailing list so if you would like to receive those, just visit the main T-Shirt page and use the sign-up box to join the list.

I realized today that I had a duplicate on the collages so I've exchanged one of the duplicate photos with a different baby whose family had just barely missed participating in this year's collage. I've updated the collages at CafePress and have also updated the names on the back and uploaded that to CafePress as well. I will use the updated collage for any personalized requests I complete from this point forward but I won't go back and change the ones that were already created before I realized there was a photo of the same baby on each collage. I'm normally pretty good at catching the duplicates but this one slipped right past me, and also my girls who helped me go over everything. Sorry for the mix-up! Hopefully everything is all fixed up now. I've updated the 2007 listing but for some odd reason the server keeps showing me the old page, hopefully it'll get caught up shortly and will show the new listing.

I have 17 more personalized requests to finish and I'll be all caught up. Some are additional requests for a baby I've already done 2007 graphics for, and some I won't be able to complete until I receive a higher quality/larger photo from the families.

I've left off on requests dated May 31st, so there's a week gap now between submission and completion.

Two of my girls are in track and field events tomorrow, and then it's weekend, so I may not get much time to work on these until Monday. If you're waiting on your designs, I'll get them finished up as soon as I can, and don't worry about going to the shop a bunch of times to see if your baby's things are there, once everything's all ready I'll send an email to the person who submitted the request with a link and some coupon codes if I have any valid ones.

Night all!

I've finished quite a few designs now. I have one pending request from May 27th, then I'll be starting on the ones that were submitted on the 29th and onward. Currently there's about a week and a half gap between submission and completion, but that's just a guideline, it could take less or more depending on how many I have received and how much time I have to work on them.

I've sent along four coupon codes now through the T-Shirt list. If you've missed them you can join the mailing list and likely another one will be posted. Also, please remember to send a code to me if you go through the CafePress checkout system.

I'm off for some sleep. Good night everyone....