My Favorite Blogs and Websites

Recently, I read a post from Gina Alyse (two posts actually, Part One and Part Two) about her favorite people, blogs, websites and youtube channels around the internet. You may have noticed that I have a page on my blog with all the blogs I read on a regular basis...but that list hasn't been updated in months. 

So I'm in the process of updating this list + I thought I'd share it with y'all in a little more public way as I do! But this is also a reminder that I always have the blogroll up at the top + I'll try my best to keep it updated! Most of these blogs are related to design, productivity, blogging or positive living but a couple of them are a little random.

And please--I love finding new blogs. Share your favorites with me or if you're a silent reader, leave a comment so I can visit yours!

A Cup of Jo

A Fine Line

A Little Opulent

Alexandra Franzen

Allyssa Barnes

Betty Red Design

Breanna Rose

Breathe and Nourish

by Regina

DesignLoveFest

Earl Grey Blog

Elle & Company

Ember & March

Gina Alyse

Hello Brio Studio

Holly Marie Designs

Humans of New York

Jennypurr

Jessica Says

Kory Woodard

Lifehack Productivity

Love Grows Design Blog

Lucky Number Seven

MindBodyGreen

Pen and Peplum

Positively Present

Poverty Luxe

Pugly Pixel

Sea, Field and Tribe

Smart, Pretty and Awkward

Tanea

The Alisha Nicole

The Blog Market

The Clueless Girl's Guide

The Dainty Squid

The Life of Bon

The Lolly Project

The Pineneedle Collective 

The Private Life of A Girl

Whitney Blake

XO Misse

XO Pixel

XOSarah

Yes and Yes

What are your favorite blogs?! Share em!

Weekly Goals #37

Helloooo! How was your weekend? Mine was pretty fun, between the craft fair and shopping with friends, except for this crazy weather! It's been insanely windy + cool (think low 60s!) + we haven't had a good beach day in a week! Oh well. This week is pretty routine. Other than working, my only real plans are hanging out with the gal pals tonight, potentially dying my hair turquoise/purple (whaaaa?! just the tips!). 

What are your plans for the week? 

Last Week's Goals:

+ Exercise 120 minutes. Rocked this. As of Friday, I had only put in 40 minutes and got discouraged. But then I remembered that I still had three days to go! In the end, I finished the week with 135 minutes, mostly of walk/runs and conditioning. Yay!

+ Read for 30 minutes a day. I came fairly close to this one. It would have been a lot easier to get the reading in if I had had good beach days, but I just had to read inside most days. I finished Ender's Game and surprisingly, hated it. It was awful. Speaking of awful, I'm reading a Jon Sharpe western book (I think called Desert Death or something like that) and I just can't take it seriously. Also: too many sex scenes. 

This Week's Goals:

I want to do something a little different this week, maybe for the future as well. I'm going to separate my goals into categories (body, mind and blog) so that I make sure I'm working on different areas of myself. Hopefully this means my goals will be more interesting and varied!

+ Body Love: exercise 120 minutes and run the 5k race. My town hosts a Summerfest every year and I'm pretty sure I saw a sign somewhere that there's a 5k race? I probably won't be able to run it all, but that's okay. But, I'm giving myself permission to wuss out if it's expensive/conflicts with my schedule, since I'm not sure when it is.

+ Mind Love: find a new podcast to keep my mind going during the summer. My favorite podcast to listen to during walks is True Murder because it's like watching SVU while exercising, but it's not exactly the most mentally stimulating. Anyone know of a good science/easy French language podcast? 

+ Blog Love: comment on three blog posts every day. It's really low, I know. But I am so guilty of being that silent lurking blog reader. If you comment on my blog regularly, I probably read your blog. I am just awful about commenting. But, I will say. If you don't have disqus, I don't bother. Get that installed, yo.

What are your goals this week?

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. (:

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 #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?

Catching My Eye 09.

Would you make me very very happy and take my survey? I promise, it's super short, 9 questions. And most of the questions are multiple choice, a few you have to fill in a word. I will love you forever! 

The best of the interwebs:

(This is probs NSFW...but it's effin hilarious.)



♥I'm working on the 30 Day Arm Challenge with Claire from DaisyBisley. I love feeling stronger!

♥This slightly depressing article shows that I'm about as smart as an eighth grader in 1912.

♥I love this cool Kickstarter campaign for laboratory glasses made into tableware.




♥Think your life is tough? Here are 23 easy fixes to first world problems.

♥If anyone wants to give me $60, I'd love this studded Stella & Dot bracelet.

♥Michelle reviews a subscription box of gourmet food!

♥This is so freaky cool! A photographer spliced pictures of family members together and shows how cool genetics are.



♥Make graffiti with moss!

♥You might have missed: Funky Mood? Not for Long ♥ Weekly Wishes #8 ♥ Choices + free iPhone backgrounds ♥ Sponsor CMS in July/August.

What have you been loving this week? Which of these links did you think was the coolest?