I've had this blog for about a year, running the Graphene theme, and have never messed with the css coding directly--just used the regular Appearance options to change things around.
So now I need to make some changes to the colors of the tabs and such, so I learned about child themes. I uninstalled Graphene and put my blog on twentyeleven, then reinstalled Graphene and made a child theme for it--it looks like this:
I have tried deleting and reinstalling again, including with other themes, and every time I preview the child theme, everything is messed up, no matter what theme/child theme I try.
I'm discouraged and could use some help.