The blog title says it all doesn’t it? This post is a direct result of The List post, but with one small change. In stead of crocheting social media icons* I decided to go the easy route and just download them from a website. Job done!

It was Hannah, of Not Your Average Crochet, that actually inspired this. She has the cutest little social media icons on your blog! You can read her blog post about these cuties here. If you read the comments to that post, you’ll see my comment and her response: she got them by searching Google for “free social media icons”. I did the same, but I searched on Pinterest…. As you can image there were loads! So many choices! In the end I settled for these icons inspired by Pantone Fall 2012 colours.

Now the question, is how do I get the icons onto my blog? For that you can follow the very clear instructions by the Geek Fairy in this post. (It’s specifically for WordPress users, so sorry Blogger bloggers I don’t know how you guys get icons onto your blog.)

I followed the Geek Fairy instructions to the letter, yet my icons wouldn’t resize to a smaller than 100 x 100 size. I wanted mine to be about half the original size, so I typed in 50 x 50 in the Advanced settings fields as the fairy said I should, and I could see those dimensions in the text that I pasted into HTML Widget, yet it still showed up as the original size. Very strange indeed.

Thankfully I got around the problem by changing the image size in the Image Library (as opposed to changing the size in the draft post.) Here’s how I did it:

1. Go to the Media Library and find the social media icon. If you hover under PNG, the Edit field will appear. Click on Edit

2. Once you’re in the Edit option for the image, click Edit Image:

3. Now you can scale the image:

4.  Type in your desired size. I chose 50 x 50. Click on Scale:

Save the change and do it for all your icons.

Once you are happy with the size, insert these images into a draft post as the Geek Fairy says you should and follow her instructions for adding the links.

That’s it. You may not even need to change the size in the Image Library. Maybe my WordPress theme is just dodgy, or I was doing something wrong. Who knows. Either way, it really is very easy to add social media icons to your WordPress widget sidebar. It’s so much neater too, don’t you think?

*I you want to crochet social media icons, you can use the patterns I found on the tugboatyarning website here and here. The same principals would apply as described above: Photograph the crocheted icons, upload them to the image library, change the size, use them in a draft blog post, add the links and past the text of the draft post into a text widget for your sidebar.