tailor & stylist giveaway

Hi guys!  Happy last day of 2012!  I've got one more giveaway for you before the year comes to a close.  Today I'm bringing y'all a giveaway from my sponsor, Tailor & Stylist!  T&S is a great online shop run by, wouldn't ya know, a tailor and a stylist!  They bring a great eye for style and fit, and have a wonderful selection of really cute items, vintage inspired pieces, and classics.  Wouldn't this just be the perfect dress for Valentines?

To enter, just follow the directions below!  The giveaway will be open for entries until 11:59 pm on Saturday, January 5th.  Open to US and Canadian entrants only.

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life lately

Reading...
One Thousand Gifts.  It was a Christmas present from my mom and I'm almost halfway through it already.  I think one of my goals this next year is to be more mindful of all the things I'm grateful for.  It's so easy to focus on the things that suck, or the people who hurt me, or the situations that don't go my way, but when I choose to actively participate in noticing and focusing on those things that are positive, the not-so-awesome parts of life are lessened.

Excited About...
Hanging out with a couple college friends we haven't seen in a while!  It's always wonderful to reconnect with people you care about and find out what they've been up to since you all last hung out.  I don't have many of those type of friends from high school, but quite a few from college.  Thankfully there are quite a few of us still in the PNW, so it's a bit easier to keep in touch.

Watching...
I convinced Dan to start watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with me, from the beginning.  It's on Netflix!  I forgot that it came out in 1987, so the graphics in this first season are hilariously bad!  It's a bit corny, but I'm pretty sure TNG is my favorite Star Trek series.  I've never watched it from the beginning, mostly just watching random episodes here and there, though I'm sure I've seen the majority of the series.

Thinking about...
Giving myself more time.  I think I've always wanted to just go-go-go and get to where I'm going, start my career, start a business, write a book, etc.  But lately I'm realizing that maybe I'm trying to pull the turkey out of the oven before it's fully cooked.  I'm the turkey in this analogy.  I think of all the people who wrote amazing books later in life, or didn't start their major careers until they were middle aged, etc.  Even though life feels like it goes by so quickly, maybe trying to shove everything in as soon as possible isn't the best method for living fully.  Maybe living a full life isn't about living a life that's packed full... if that makes sense.  And sometimes I think that I'm packing life so full that I don't have time to focus on things that are important, or the things that I truly want to accomplish.


holiday party sparkle // wiring our garage // picking up a guitar for the first time in a year stress relief // hooked up my espresso machine to make sure it's still working! our wedding book came! I love it! // loving this necklace from moorea seal painting nails // a sidecar and cookie baking // cute new shoes from le bunny bleu started climbing again! loving being back on the wall.
Some of my recent favorites from around the interwebs!
 Top 15 Autocorrects from 2012.  Some of these are HI-larious  Moments that restored our faith in humanity.  Tear jerker.  An open letter to the woman who wrote "11 qualities of the perfect woman". Boo yah.  As an introvert, pretty much all of these rung true for me (especially the phone thing!)   In love with this couch.  If you haven't seen it yet, hop over and check out my Holiday Cosmo recipe!  I really appreciated this post by James of Bleubird Vintage.    This post by Danielle of Sometimes Sweet also hit a chord with me.  It's almost like she crawled inside my brain and wrote from there!

remix archives // navy skirt

When I posted my last remix archives with the green skirt, I mentioned that I had bought 3 of the same skirt at the thrift store in three different colors.  I hemmed that green one to be a bit shorter, and this one shorter still.  It's a bit *too* short, so it doesn't get worn as much, unfortunately, and as you can tell from these photos, I haven't worn it in a couple years.  I still have it, however, as I do love it and can't bear to part with it.  As I age (I know, I'm only 26, but still), I've found that I don't feel as comfortable wearing shorter skirts.  I don't know why this is, but I have found that a few of the items in my closet that I love quite a bit don't get worn very much simply because they're a bit shorter.  I am certainly not getting taller!  Maybe I just don't want to be paying attention to not flashing people all day.  Shorter skirts are definitely higher maintenance in that regard.  Perhaps I flail about/bend down more these days (I definitely bike more)?  Haha, who knows.  But either way, I keep this skirt in my closet as I still do want to wear it, so maybe I'll pull it out and pair it with some tights again.

my curl routine

I've done posts on my curly hair routine before, but I'm still experimenting and learning (and probably will be my whole life), so I thought I'd do an update.  I get asked all the time how I do my hair, or how I get it to "do that," and unfortunately mostly the answer is just that it grows out of my head like that.  Any product I use (which is minimal) is really just there to get the curls to behave in a way that isn't crazy, or at least in a pretty-crazy way.

After I cut my hair short, I really wanted to start caring for it, since I'd been treating it a bit more harshly than usual during the prior two years, lightening it to red and then having it pink & teal for a few months.  I wanted to nourish it and give it a break from the processing, especially because someday I think I would like to go back to being a redhead, and I'd like to have healthy hair to begin with when I do.

I've completely stopped using shampoo with sulfates in it, as sulfates are absolutely terrible for curly hair.  Of course, most of the hair information out there is not geared toward those of us with curls, so growing up I just used any shampoo out there.  No wonder I had such a hard time wrangling my hair as a kid/teen.  I have just a bit of some Tresemme shampoo left that I use very sparingly, only on days where I can tell my hair is really gross, because the sulfates really strip the hair of moisture.  I recently got Beautiful Curls Shea Butter Curl Activating Shampoo, which has no sulfates, and before that I used Dr. Bronners soap as a shampoo and it worked fine too, and has no sulfates.  Really all I need when it comes to shampoo is something to get the sweat/grime/product out that has built up, so something basic like Dr. Bronners works totally fine.  If I feel like my hair doesn't need shampoo, I'll just skip it and go straight to conditioner.  I'm washing my hair more frequently now that I'm working out regularly, so I need to wash the sweaty grossness out.  Since I don't want to dry out my hair excessively, skipping the shampoo is a good way to get clean, healthy hair without making it dry.


I currently use Beautiful Curls' Conditioner for curly to kinky hair.  It's a bit heavy for my hair, so once I finish it off, I'll use their Conditioner for wavy to curly hair and see if that's lighter.  I like to put my conditioner on before I shave and stuff, so I let it soak in for those minutes where I'm doing other showering duties.  Then I use a brush or wide tooth comb to get the tangles out of my hair with the conditioner in it.  This is literally the only time a brush EVER touches my hair.  Once the tangles are gone, I rinse out the conditioner and shower time is done.

I'd like to get a towel better suited to curly hair (such as a super absorbant microfiber towel), since terry cloth is known to be not so great for drying curly hair, but I usually just throw my hair into a towel-turban and let the towel try to absorb some moisture while I put on body oil/moisturizer.  I try to keep styling product minimal, so my hair doesn't get weighed down with junk.  I don't like to wash my hair more than a couple times a week, so having less product in it makes this much easier.  I sometimes put Argan Oil in my hair.  I have quite a few different random products I've acquired over the years that I occasionally use (curl defining sprays, frizz reducing spritzs, curl creams, hairspray), but lately I've been liking going really minimal and almost never put any sort of product in it.  I've learned that in order to make my hair bigger, keeping the product down is key.  If my hair is dry, it'll try to seek out moisture in the air, which means it gets bigger.  For some curly girls, I know that this can result in lots of unwanted frizz, so it's definitely something that might not work for you.  I like my hair to be pretty big (in high school once, a kid said that I was 90% hair, 10% body, haha).  If I want it to be a bit bigger for a party or something, I'll throw my hair upside down, spray some hairspray in it and give it a bit of a backcomb at the roots.

I always blow dry, mostly because air drying takes forever, but also because I feel like I have more control over what my hair does when I blow dry it.  But really, having a wet head for hours is lame.  I blow dry with my hair flipped upside down over my head using my hand as a sort of scrunch/diffuser.  I don't like to get too crazy moving the blowdryer around a bunch either, since less friction=less frizz, which means better curl definition.  I blow dry until my hair is completely dry, and sometimes until it is mostly dry and then clip it up into two sort of "balls of curls" on each side of my head with those claw clip things.  I do this so that the hair can try to air-dry without the weight of the water stretching out the curls, making them more limp.

Then I usually will get ready with the clips in and when I'm done, take the clips out, blow dry it for a few more minutes and then I'm done.  It should be noted that I have almost never washed and dried my hair in the morning.  I always wash my hair either at night or in the afternoon because the time it takes to wash/condition/detangle and then dry (especially when it was long) is too long to do before starting the day.  Also, I'm NOT a morning person and I'd much rather sleep in than have pretty/clean hair that day.  I'd much rather do it at night when I have the time and energy.  I also usually keep my bangs curly, though sometimes they are being jerks and I take the straightening iron to them to get them to behave.  Though sometimes I've found that if I part my hair on the other side and flip my bangs to go the other way, they'll look right.

So there ya go!  I tried to be pretty thorough in describing my routine, but if you have any questions, or need any clarifications, just leave a comment and I'll see if I've got an answer.  I've been using this routine for the past few months.  I should probably also mention that I cut my own hair and the last time I cut it was just doing a fringe trim, so it's mostly just my short cut growing out at this point.  I like to layer my hair with shorter layers on top and longer layers underneath to keep my hair from being too triangle-y in shape (I'm sure you curly girls out there know what I'm talking about).  If you want to check out my previous hair routine posts, click here!

candid thoughts on being brave

I spent a few hours in the car last week, which is always a time when I reconnect with myself and actually can focus my mind without all the distractions of the internet, texting, etc.  One of my thought tangents ended up thinking about bravery.  The word alone, Brave, is something that enters my life and conversation quite a bit simply because of my Winnebago Brave, but I know there's been discussion about being brave here on the blog, either in posts that I've written, or as a discussion in the comments section.  Most recently I had a commenter share that she thought I was brave for choosing blogging as my main income source, as she felt that it would take a lot of courage to leave the security of a more standard job for the insecurity of a job like blogging full time.  Another commenter replied to her, saying that maybe it would be brave if I was 200 lbs, instead of being cute and average and just interesting enough.  I long time ago I recall another commenter responding to something (I can't remember if it was something I wrote in a post, or something another commenter wrote), saying that it was ridiculous to think I was brave for anything I did, because true bravery was found in her husband, who was serving in the military.

But here's what I'm thinking about bravery.  Who is to say who is brave, or what actions are to be called brave?  Something that takes an enormous amount of courage for one person, could be simple and easy for another.  How can we go around telling people they aren't brave, when we have no idea what kind of courage their actions require of them.  Is the word "brave" or "courage" only limited to people who are outside of the social norms, the accepted standard, or for people who do things that are widely considered "brave" (such as military service, firemen/police officers, etc)?  Certainly performing some actions will likely require more bravery than others, especially for those people, but I believe that bravery, like many things, is on a continuum.  Small amounts of courage are required for some things, very large amounts of courage are required for other things.  And most importantly, those amounts widely differ from person to person.  A lot of things that I do that don't require any bravery on my part, could require quite a bit of bravery from a different person.


Is a student who is terrified of public speaking and gives a speech in front of his school braver than a soldier in Iraq?  I've known a few people who would probably much rather do the latter than the former.  So is one braver than the other?  Is a kid who faces their bully at school brave? If you've always wanted to wear something specific, but never felt like you could pull it off, and you decide to go for it and wear it... is that brave?  Is it our place to tell any one of those people that their bravery is illegitimate because we believe that they aren't really being brave, considering all the other things that "clearly" require more courage?

Two summers ago I worked at a summer camp which had a high ropes challenge course.  We would take groups of kids through the course, and told them to focus on giving their 100% while respecting others' 100%.  For some of the kids, just climbing to the top of the ladder, not even getting to the start of the course, was their 100%, for others it meant going through the entire course with a blindfold.  It was important to us that each individual respected every one else's 100%, not making fun of them for only being able to make it to the top of the ladder or not being able to get through the whole course and needing to be rescued midway through.  It could take just as much courage for one kid to make it to the top of the ladder, as it took for the other one to do the entire course with a blindfold.  Each one was out of their comfort zone and each one needed courage to complete the task, even though to some of us it appears that the second kid was way more brave than the first one.  I know that for myself I have pretty much no fear of heights, so when I went through the ropes course I thought it was a blast!  But I had a friend that was pretty scared, and I know that when she went through the course, she was way more brave than I, even though we technically performed the same task.

Bravery is one of those things that we can't see.  It's internal.  It's individual.  There are acts of small bravery.  There are acts of indescribable bravery.  It is more important to show grace to those around us, than trying to determine how brave someone is or is not.  I will leave you with this quote by Ian MacLaren...
(image source)