Avoiding the side-eye from my blog shortcut on my toolbar has been a priority lately. Even now I'm thinking "I could tackle that pile of receipts on my desk" or "I really should go through that pile of recipes." Weeks ago G was watching something on my computer and asked "What's Swimming Chickens?" I omitted some truth and just said "a blog." I was mildly ashamed of how little I'd done on it in ages that I didn't want him to read it just yet. Despite that, the enthusiasm continues to wane.
What has been poking me a bit into doing something, and why I fall into youtube holes at 2am, has been following a buttload of bloggers and vloggers. I've been known to binge on their previous content at times, ruining my sleep schedule for days because YOLO. After some hunting, I did find the other post I had done about other bloggers I follow, way back in
2011 (a banner year of 40 posts), and discovered that I do still follow some of them. One's disappeared while 2 others have lessened their postings (still better than me, so can't complain), but many, many more have been added to the list since then. The following is a super short list of the regulars.
The Youtubes...
Ignoring the current pastel thing they've got going on (don't hate, I just have a natural aversion to pastels), HGTV Handmade is super fun and inspiring. These ladies are constantly doing random challenges, themed weeks and aren't afraid to show their craft fails. They each have different styles between them which makes the videos all the more enjoyable since it's something different every week. I still follow Meg's channel,
Meg Allan Cole Crafts (psst, look for a Meg-inspired home decor post soon), and I've also been recently following
Karen Kavett's channel, some evidence of which you can see here.
I love Annika and I'm annoyed I didn't find her earlier. This science-loving maker does AMAZING sewing and making tutorials that are not of the "you already need several projects worth of knowledge to make this thing" variety. Her instructions are super clear and answer, she's not afraid to show off the screw ups and has a wonderful instagram that makes me want to actually sign up for instagram. Thanks to her, I finally made my own circle skirt, with a
ZIPPER AND
HIDDEN POCKETS. Yep. I had seen circle skirt tutorials around for ages, but there was something about how she explained it that just made it so much clearer. My hem looks awful, but I can blame me for that one. I still made a skirt with POCKETS that I wore for 6+ hours on Christmas that didn't fall apart. I have made clothing. I am eternally grateful Annika, you've fueled some realistic clothing-making confidence in me :)
If you're interested in more of Annika's stuff or don't know where to start, I would recommend her
Make/Thrift/Buy series for laughs and inspiration, or her
Get Thready With Me series for many more of her tutorials. She also has a new series called the
Style Pyle, which is a totally
stealable borrowable idea to tackle the box of randoms next to my desk. Either that or it will force me to realize I should get rid of a fair bunch of the things in that box. Finally.
Ze Blogs....
I've been following Aunt Peaches for a while now, and she's my kinda gal... *just enough snark to make things interesting. I love her writing style too, which can be exemplified in this little bit of her about blurb; "this site was founded in 2010 as a sandbox for practicing my html skills and as an excuse to make unhealthy quantities of paper flowers. So many paper flowers."
She's a fantastically and unapologetically creative woman, painting anything that isn't (or is as the case may be) nailed down. She organizes a worldwide the Valentine's handmade card swap every year, puts flamingos on everything and is currently working on a book! I love wandering through her blog and
instagram, which are explosions of colour, flowers and a cat. It's great.
One can safely assume that I'm slightly biased towards redheads anyway, but the vintage aspects and gorgeous photos were the clinchers that caused me to binge her entire backlog in one night several years ago. The blog is filled with several covet-worthy outfit posts and Janey's love of the vintage inspired kitsch travelling. It's been worth a look for the past wee while, and I hope it will be yet.
Jessica is just fun. She has a great rotation of outfit posts, vintage ads, vintage life and resource posts that never fail to catch my attention. Even
today she posted about 10 online resources for petticoats (super handy)! I had been following her blog for ages before I realized she was actually based in Canada, which just made my little patriotic heart burst with pride.
A Bit of Both? More?
Thanks to my love of Mythbusters, I discovered Tested on youtube about 3 ish years ago. I had never really listened to podcasts (or really understood the point since I'm a troglodyte) at that point, but I got hooked on the
Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project pretty quickly. The topics range from movie, props, making, philosophy, mythbusting (or not now as the case may be) and a little bit of everything else. Even the horror movie podcast was fascinating, and gave me a list of movies I should avoid! I don't really follow the
website that much, since at the time it was mostly techey stuff that I'm not too keen one, but the youtube channel is a lot of fun. Every now and again the podcast can inspire me enough to actually leave youtube alone for a few hours and make something. It's powerful stuff.
I am actually working on a project or two at the moment, and cooking more. In theory there will be posts in the near future here. I'm hoping that I can get some more oomph from the guys above this sentence and actually post them. The new family motto is "we can but try," so we'll see how things go.
