August in Favorites.

This month I feel like I wrote a lot, and I've been loving that. But I also did a lot in my real life too! I had a Great Gatsby themed dinner party to celebrate the end of summer. I switched my blog over to self-hosted, which was both excruciating and so great! In the process, I learned how to refrain from verbally stabbing customer service reps. I started a new series about loving your brain and intelligence. I helped some of you lovely bloggers improve your blogs in super simple ways, in less than five minutes (for realz)! I co-hosted the Book Chat with The Tangerine and we talked about required reading books that we've loved and hated. And lots more! What was your favorite post that you wrote in August?



Because we all know bloggers love blogging and reading about blogging, Kenzie from Chasing Happy wrote a To Don't List for bloggers on social media. Jasmine wrote a post with cute pictures overload called Six Reasons My Dog is High-Maintenance. M'lady Kayte got engaged!! Woohoo!!



I'll be honest, school started. Not much book readin' going on in these parts other than school reading. I did read Pride and Prejudice for school (again) and loved it (again). But that's it. Instead, let me share with you what's on my list to be read as soon as I get a spare minute!

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

Have you read any of these? What did you think?



Ophelia // The Band
North Side Gal // J.D. McPherson
Uptown Girl // Billy Joel
Sugar, Sugar // The Archies
You Can Call Me Al // Paul Simon
Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) // Billy Joel
Walk of Life // Dire Straits





Now tell me your favorites this month! What did you blog? What did you read? What music have you been listening to? Share share share!

easy peasy photoshop: make a Pinterest-style collage

Hi everyone! Happy Tuesday! I hope you all have been resting well and enjoying your holiday weekend!

Today I'm sharing something new--my first ever Photoshop tutorial--Pinterest style! Now Photoshop can be really complicated and intimidating, but there's also some really great things you can make with really basic skills. Today we're gonna learn a little bit about 'layers' and how to resize and arrange images.

In the end, I'm going to teach you how to make a Pinterest style collage! I've made a few of these for myself recently and they are just so pretty. You can use quotes and put it on your wall or bathroom mirror. Or you can use fitness photos to keep somewhere that will motivate you! I'm sure y'all could come up with more ideas since you're such intelligent people (:



 

All photos are from my 'Destinations' board on Pinterest.

So we're gonna park on 'layers' for a moment. If you're a little familiar with Photoshop, you can skip these first basics and go to the heading about making the Pinterest-style collage.

Layers in Photoshop is like drawing on a bunch of pieces of transparent papers and then putting them on top of each other. This way you can move around or edit different parts of the pictures fairly easily.

So for instance, the first layer is usually the background, which is plain white. Then, you can put more layers of designs on top. By clicking the little eyeball, you can change which parts of the image are visible. So if you disabled the white background of a picture, it shows a checkered pattern but that means it has a transparent background.

To resize a photo, select the layer you're interested in resizing and go to Edit >> Free Transform. Then you can drag the edges of the picture to make it a different size. This tool is also a great/easy way to drag + drop your pictures.

EXPERT TIP: Watch the percentages of the width and height. You want to make them the same to make sure your picture stays proportional. To resize to a certain dimensions, you can type in the pixels in that little box in the top. Then change your other percentage to make sure it's proportional! Make sure you type in the W/H boxes not X/Y!

And now for the exciting part: making a Pinterest-style collage!

1. Open up a new file in Photoshop. The width should be whatever the width of your text area in your blog is. Mine is 640 pixels for example. The height can be anything, I'd recommend at least 900 pixels and you can crop it later.

2. Select all the pictures you want and copy-paste them into Photoshop. They will all go in separate layers--this is good!



3. In your head (or on a calculator), subtract 30 from your text area width. Then divide it by three. You can round to the nearest whole number; it doesn't have to be that exact. For example: my blog is 640-30 = 610. Divided by 3 is 203. That number is the width that you want all of your pictures to be.

4. Resize all of your photos to that width, using the method above. Don't forget your proportions! I don't want to see stretched pictures. This, below, is bad. Please don't make anyone's eyes look at this.



5. Now, rearrange your pictures (with Edit>>Free Transform) into three columns. Leave a little space between the columns and each picture. If you used my number method, you can have 15 pixels between each column, but you can just eyeball it.

6. Click the little eye next to the BACKGROUND layer. Then click the little arrow on the layer menu and click Merge Visible. And save!

Ta-da!! There you go, your own beautiful Pinterest-style collage.

I think they're prettiest when you mix up vertical and horizontal photographs but it's all up to you!

Get fancy! Make your background a different color! Do not click the little eye (step 6). Instead, select the background layer. Click the little magic wand in your tool box and select magic eraser. Make sure your tolerance box says 1. Click anywhere on the canvas. Press Shift + F5 and select a color!

Now go forth and Photoshop! If you post any to your blog, share the link here so I can see your pretty new skillz! And if you want to be super lovely, you can tweet or pin this lovely tutorial with my icons floating on your left. (:

Weekly Wishes #13: gelato + exercise + antarctica

Is this picture not the most gorgeous thing ever? It's from a NatGeo Expedition to Antarctica. Have you ever seen so many shades of blue? It makes me a bit weak at the knees; I want to see it in person so badly.

Anyways, today, I’m linking up with The Nectar Collective for Weekly Wishes. Yada yada, I do this every week. The Weekly Wishes is where we all can share our posts about goals, challenges, and wishes for the week! 


Last week, I wished for a few things and was fairly. Here’s a recap in order of how successful I was: Basically my goals were to stay on top of my school work and life. I more or less did pretty well! I didn't turn in anything late and even got some decent sleep. I was born to ace this whole school thing.

So it was a pretty good week! I'm not dead yet! Here are my weekly wishes for this coming week:

Exercise! I have gotten really bad about this lately. I'm working on getting my gym membership back up but until then I've been doing Blogilates. That lady is craaaazy! I did Playa del Plank (along with others) and literally had to stop it half way through because my abs were crying. It's sad but it's motivating me to work harder!

Work on my big project with Aukele! I've got something big coming up soon with Aukele and I'm really excited about it! We haven't set a launch date but it'll be up within a few weeks hopefully! We've got some big steps to take this week and I can't wait to see where they'll take us.


I’m just sticking to two goals this week but I think that will be challenging enough!

__________________________________________________

I’m also linking up with Erika for Grad-itude again, a link up about being grateful! I loved looking through everyone else's happy thoughts last week so I'm in it again. Here are three things I’m grateful for right now.

Again, H. Saturday night, I was all alone and had a terrible migraine and the sweet boy drove to three different grocery stores to find me my favorite pistachio gelato (which is also way expensive) just to surprise me and make me feel better! How nice is he?! I told him it deserved a shout-out on the blog--I think he was excited about that.

The day off! I know this is a bit overdone because it seems to be the thing people are most happy about around here, but still! And I have fun plans for today. H is out hunting so I'm hanging out with my mom to sew a little and then my dad and I are hopefully going to choose my senior trip destination and do a little planning. Woohoo! This girl's excited.

Umm well there's a lot of good food in my house...I'm slightly ashamed about this one, but it's making me quite happy right now. We have good tea, good ice cream (thanks H!), good popcorn and good fruit! Happy Allie.

Now head on over to The Nectar Collective & Chimerikal and join the link-ups.

What do you wish for this week? What are you grateful for?

Weekly Wishes #12: pushups + not being dead + bagels

Hey! Announcement! I’m trying to get together enough benjamins (that’s coolspeak for money, y’all) so I can get me a yearlong Passionfruit subscription. If you’re thinking about getting any sort of blog redesign (header, social media buttons, or anything else!), consider me your girl! I’ll even give you $10 off any package until September 1st with code ‘prettyblogsftw’. Help me get my passionfruit! Truly appreciated, guys. Anyways….

 



Hey all. It’s 4am on Monday, you know what that means! It means I can't sleep so why not blog! Yayz. Anyways, today, I’m linking up with The Nectar Collective for Weekly Wishes. The Weekly Wishes is where we all can share our posts about goals, challenges, and wishes for the week! 


Last week, I wished for a few things and was somewhat successful. Here's a recap in order of how successful I was: Firstly, I wished to not die in my first week of school. I passed this one with flying colors! I mean, it wasn't fun and my brain might be dead, but I'm still kickin' y'all! Secondly, I needed to contact teachers about tutoring. I did this! And I already have one student to tutor basically weekly. So that's good!

And thirdly, I made a goal to exercise more which I just horribly flopped on. I did maybe, uh, twenty pushups? And I speedwalked to class. That's about it. I definitely think I underestimated how crazy school would be. But I've got a pickup soccer game scheduled for tonight so it'll be nice to dust off my cleats and kick some balls! (Sorry, I just love saying that--not classy, I know.)

I'm also doing something new--linking up with Erika for Grad-itude, a link up about being grateful! Hers is on Wednesday but it made sense to group it together with my weekly wishes. Here are three things I'm grateful for right now.

The boyfriend, H. He's been really nice to me the last couple of days. I mean, he always is, but he's just been extra nice, and I really appreciate it, especially since I've been stressed about school, which I'm not usually.

My biology class! It's tough, but I am really really loving it. The first day, I had to go catch roly-polies (that's right, the bugs), and I was SO not happy, but it's definitely one of my favorite classes! I really feel like I'm absorbing a lot of information and that just feels splendid.

A busy day by myself and with friends on Saturday. I had been feeling really funky on Friday night so Saturday morning I treated myself to Manhattan Bagel for breakfast, by myself, which I love, followed by Barnes & Noble (erhmagerd, berks!!) and shopping at a little consignment shop near me. Then I had frozen yogurt with an older friend and we talked about her trip to Israel. How awesome, right?! Then H and I wrapped up the day by grabbing the best barbecue ever and watching New Girl.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

So it actually was a pretty good week, now that I think about it in that way. Here are my goals for this coming week:

• Be proactive about getting schoolwork done, aka not at the last minute.


• Keep things tidy. And I mean this both mentally and literally. My room and house needs to be clean so I can be productive but I also need to keep my mind tidy so I'm not worrying about unnecessary things.

I'm just sticking to two goals this week but I think that will be challenging enough!

Now head on over to The Nectar Collective and join the Weekly Wish link up.

What do you wish for this week? What are you grateful for?

Easy peasy ways to make your blog prettier in 5 minutes

I may not be an expert on blogging, but I do know a thing or two about what makes a blog pretty. It annoys me so much to see a blog with fantastic content, but an awful design--most people won't give your words a chance if your layout isn't aesthetically pleasing! It's sad, but true. Here's how you can easily make your blog prettier without buying a whole new design.

1. Make all your photos the width of your text column. This isn't hard. Use high-quality pictures when possible and resize them in Photoshop or at Picmonkey (free/no registration). This goes miles to make your blog look more professional, and it's super easy! This also applies to your widget. You can alternate sizes but make sure your edges aren't jarring.

2. Please clean up your sidebar. You don't need to have a widget for everything, you just don't. A bio, categories and ads (if applicable) should be your basics and you probably don't need much more.

3. A note about backgrounds and fonts. Please make your background, or at least the part behind the words white. Make your words black or very dark. Please don't use cursive. That's so not okay. Also, don't make big blobby chunks of words; no one wants to read that. Tough love, you don't want your blog to read like a textbook. As a rule of thumb, keep paragraphs to six lines or under.

4. Make your social media buttons match your color scheme. Well first off, have a color scheme. If you don't know how to make social media buttons, have any designer make them, I guarantee they'll be under ten dollars. I'll make them for a buck each. (design) The ones with the brand colors are just not pretty and aren't doing you any good at making your blog look put together. It's the honest truth.

What do you think keeps a blog looking clean and pretty?

Weekly Wishes #11: cacti + baby steps + design

Hey all. It's Monday, you know what that means! Today, I'm linking up with The Nectar Collective for Weekly Wishes. The Weekly Wishes is where we all can share our posts about goals, challenges, and wishes for the week! Is this the prettiest picture ever or what? I love bright things.

Last week, I wished for a few things and was pretty successful! I worked pretty hard to get my body on a good sleep schedule. My lights weren't always out by 10:30 but I slowly but surely moved from falling asleep at 3 am to 11:30 pm. Baby steps. I also did lots of cleaning and unpacked everything from the summer! Yayz! I also sort of randomly got a futon from my sister so I cleaned a lot to make room for that. I scheduled out this whole week to help me get through the craziness but still have time for this little lovely munchkin of a blog. I've got some exciting posts coming up--especially a guest post from Stacey over at Grace Believer.

This week, I did a lot of design work which was really exciting for me! Most recently, I did a big design for Caitlyn at ChemGradBoom. It was really fun for me to make a really cute, but chemistry-themed design--check it out! I'm really loving that I can do something that satisfies me while making a little money! If you're in the market for some new digs for your blog, noodle on over to my design page.

But despite all that fun, school starts tomorrow. Cue the conflicting emotions. I'm excited to see friends and learn stuff and all but I'm not excited to get up early and die slowly under the mountain of work.

But anyways, here are my wishes:

• Not die. This should be easy, but I'm seriously skeptical. 


• Exercise! Now that I'm home and settled in, it's time to start working out again. Anyone have any great home workouts they like to do?


• Contact teachers about recommending me as a tutor. Simple enough. I'm a tutor who needs a job, they need tutors.

Now head on over to The Nectar Collective and join the Weekly Wish link up.

What are you wishing for this week? Any recommended workouts for me this week? I'm thinking Blogilates maybe...

Weekly Wishes #9

Hey all. Today, I'm linking up with The Nectar Collective for Weekly Wishes. The Weekly Wishes is where we all can share our posts about goals, challenges, and wishes for the week! Last week, I had quite a few goals! Here's how I did.

• Get through my Bloglovin' feed? Ah no. But I did make significant progress! I'm just barely under two hundred!


• Get a new sponsor?? Nope, not this week. I do have a super awesome guest post coming up from Crystal at The Happy Type and I'm so excited to share! If you ever want to guest post/sponsor CMS, check out the sponsor page.


• Brainstorm topics for the first week of school posts? Yessirree sure did! Get excited!


• Make progress on school reading and college apps? Yep! I started my apps and am just waiting to hear back from my counselor before I finish!

I'm finding that my goals are just too vague so it's hard to really make progress. So I'm making a goal to make my goals more concrete (yes, my goals involve goal-making).

Now, for this week's wishes:

• Keep on truckin' through my Bloglovin' feed! I'd like in <100 ideally. Work on it a little bit everyday!


• Try to comment more on blogs! Make at least one thoughtful comment everyday--more is great!


• Plan two posts and write out one for the first week of school.


• Go home!! By this time next week, I'll be home in Charlotte! I get to see the boy eeeeeeeeee.

Now head on over to The Nectar Collective and join the Weekly Wish link up.

What were your wishes this week? If you have a blog, tweet me, or comment to motivate me and help me reach my wishes!

July in Favorites

Things I love about me + why that's not arrogant
5 more things I'm not ashamed of (but probably should be)
Three Must-Read Memoirs
Where'd You Go, Bernadette [book review]
Marie Curie, karate chopping stereotypes.
Funky Mood? Not for Long.
The Good and Bad of Living in Alaska [guest post]



Beautiful Boy by David Sheff.
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye. Not done with this one, so that might be cheating but it's great so far!



Amanda makes super cute geometric jean shorts with a bleach pen and raspberry-rosemary sorbet. FancyHands shows a really doable way to live richly and avoid regret. Melyssa shares the experience of getting and dealing with her first negative commenter. Sarah introduces me to Jes the Militant Baker. I found Emily's pretty and natural blog, Growing Wild Ginger. Mary shares her thoughts on the Trayvon Martin case. Kelsey shares some super duper cute patterned things! Crystal works out at home.





I Want You to Want Me / Cheap Trick
Somartider / Gyllentider
Thrift Shop [electro-swing cover] / Postmodern Jukebox/Macklemore
I Would Walk 500 Miles / The Proclaimers
Jackie Wilson Said / Van Morrison
Hey Willy / Shannon and the Clams
Guaranteed / Eddie Vedder



[8tracks width="400" height="400" playops="" url="http://8tracks.com/mixes/1912963"]

What were your favorite things this month?