I never thought this day would come and then it sort of snuck up on me. I hadn’t really thought much about my Blogiversary because I didn’t want to jinx anything. I start a lot of projects and have good intentions for all of them, but a lot of them never get finished. I didn’t want that to happen with this blog. Blogging was something I wanted to do for four years before I started Detroit Duchess and I wanted this project to be successful. Fast forward one year later and Detroit Duchess has gone beyond anything I could have imagined. I never thought anyone would even read this blog and in the past year I’ve had nearly 33,000 views! That is just unfathomable to me. So I wanted to say THANK YOU to all of you out there who are reading this. I feel so honored that you like the blog – your comments, likes and shares inspire me to keep this crazy blog going. For today’s post, I wanted to do a couple of things:

• Take a look back on some of the past year’s highlights
• Give you a preview of some of the new things to come
• Announce my Blogiversary Giveaway

Year One Highlights

My first blog post: The City of Love The first post was definitely the hardest to write. It took me four years to get started, but once I did it was easy. This was our anniversary trip to Toledo and I can’t wait to write about our upcoming Toledo trip. Top Post: Grow Your Hair with Biotin I think this post is a Pinterest favorite and sort of evergreen so it gets a lot of views. I’m still using Biotin, which I highly recommend. First Link Party: June Pinspired So thankful to Shay at MixandMatchMama, Sheaffer at Pinterest Told Me To and Mel at The Larson Lingo for providing the opportunity to link up. First Partnership: Sip Happens Party Val from Chicken Scratch graciously reached out to me to participate in a fun event. I loved that she found me and this sort of developed on its own. I’m a celebrity: Weekend Recap: Wedding Fun So at the wedding this past weekend, one of our friends came up to us and asked if she was going to be on the blog and was so excited about it. This sort of blew me away. I knew people were reading it, but I guess I didn’t realize our friends were reading it. That sort of made it more real and inspired me to make the second year better than the first.

New Series

In the vein of making things bigger and better, I have a couple of new series that I want to introduce. Splurge vs. Steal I’ve sort of already been doing this with my looks for less, but I wanted to make it official and do more of it. Who says you need to be loaded to get that awesome bag or fabulous shoes? Throwback Thursday Posts If I would have started this blog when we got engaged, you could have followed along with all of our adventures. I want to take a look back and share some special moments with you like our engagement story, shower, wedding, honeymoon and lots of other fun stories. This won’t be every week, but once in a while. Beauty Tutorials I’ve been a little nervous to start doing videos, but I’ve also been saving some great tutorials that only a video will do justice to. I just need to pick a day and do it. There are a few other series that I hope to start, but we’ll see where life takes us.

Blogiversary Giveaway

To thank you for reading, I am planning to give away six weeks worth of prizes! Enter the giveaway below and each week I will choose another winner. Week 1 – May 23 The winner of Week 1 will receive Kate Middleton’s Zara Necklace, you can read my post about it here.

Update: This awesome necklace goes to Amber Louchart from Metro Detroit Mommy. Thanks for entering!

Week 2 – May 30 The second winner will get the Forever 21 Romantic Rose Tote, one of my looks for less. Check it out here. Week 3 – June 6 The third prize is something I just ordered for myself, the Forever 21 Free Spirit Natural Stone Necklace that Clare Crawley wore on The Bachelor Week 4. Week 4 – June 13 Week 5 – June 20 Week 6 – June 27 Winners of Week 4, 5 and 6 will all receive the Forever 21 Horseshoe Necklace that I gave as a favor at my Sip Happens Party as well as their very own Haley’s Corker:

Forever 21 Horseshoe Necklace

Please don’t forget to enter the giveaway here: a Rafflecopter giveaway