Fashion Friday

vest: thrifted, dress: made by me!, shoes: Marshalls, bracelet: Bahamas

I bet some of you are just dying for an outfit post, huh? I know, I know, you all are just so obsessed with my life that not knowing what I wear every day is killing you. So sorry (especially if you really do feel this way haha). Well for none all of you wanting outfit posts, I'm gonna try and do them every Friday. It's not that I don't dress cute, I do! (at least I think I do) But I just haven't been taking pictures. And honestly, I really think that's okay. Outfit pictures are fun to take every once in a while though :)

I don't know if I've ever actually featured this dress on my blog before, but it was made by me (back in April)! The top came from a man's shirt and then I made the rest myself. It has a zipper in the back, the pictures just don't show it. You can tell the bottom isn't ironed very well, but I promise I spent forever on those pleats! This is probably one of my favorite dresses. It's a really cute color and I think it can be worn pretty casually or dressy. It also fits me very nicely as well.

At this point in my life, I've decided that what I really want to do "when I grow up" is fashion design, so I'm focusing on that a little more seriously this semester by practicing my illustrating skills. I'm also taking textiles, which means I'll know about every fabric out there, and patternmaking, which means that instead of just freehanding all of my designs and clothes that I make, I can do patterns for them and make them for other people as well! I'm super excited. Someday I would really like to sell my clothes so I'm trying to learn as much as I can about all of this!

But I just want to ask you, would you buy the dress above? And also, what kind of things do you look for in clothes you buy? I would absolutely love your honest opinions!

(linking up at Modern Modest Beauty!)

almost. done.

Blogging every day didn't work out too well...oops! We'll try again soon. Life goes on :)

I just finished reading this post when it really hit me.

I'm starting my last year at my dream college.

And then I'm done.

It's so crazy, because ever since I was like five (maybe not that young, although I wouldn't doubt it) I wanted to go to BYU. I see friends from my old town and they are like, "so are you at BYU?" because everyone knew it was my dream school.

And now, just like that, it's almost all over.

I worked pretty hard to get here, and not gonna lie, but the past three years have been tough and I've learned more than I ever thought I would while just going to school. But they have also been pretty darn amazing.

I took a lot of it for granted. There is no feeling like being at a university. No matter where I go, there will never be a place like this again where so many things are free and where so many people simultaneously spend their lives studying to death, trying to have every ounce of fun they can in the day, and still getting some sleep while doing it all.

This is it. One year left and then I'm gone from the place I've dreamed of for so long.

That really scares me a lot because I'm definitely ready to leave school and homework, but I don't know if I'm ready to move on to a new stage in life.

But there are more dreams that await.

Dreams of a career in fashion design that makes me just giddy thinking about it, dreams of living in new places, and dreams of finding a prince charming and someday having a family.

There will be so much left behind when I leave this awesome school, but there is even more to come. :)

(I will always remember the above photo as "the first photo of college." It was taken at freshman orientation with two of my freshman roommates Brooke (middle) and Hollie (right). For some reason I love this picture. I guess because it signifies the beginning of something very exciting in my life. Crazy, because it literally feels like just last week when this picture was being taken. Wow.)

JUNIEblake Giveaway Winners!

Time to announce the winners for the Junieblake giveaway! Thanks so much to everyone that entered, you guys are great! The winners are...(drum roll please)

Amy and Kelsie Rae!

Congrats girls! Email me at kikicbrownee-at-gmail-dot-com and I'll hook you up with your gift cards.

Thanks again to everyone that entered!!

Quicky

Fail on my goal to post every week!!

My excuse is: this week is education week, I have to wake up super early tomorrow to drive to Provo, I was in Provo all day today, I have to go to bed early tonight, and my sleep matters more to me than a blog. That's definitely good, right?

(I know that people don't really care whether I post every day or not--you don't, do you? This post is just for my own sanity)

Expect a normal post tomorrow most likely!

K goodnight, sorry for like the most pointless post ever. This is barely a post, I'd have to call it more a "flash post."

Okay really though. Night!

:)

*I just realized I put every week instead of every day at the top. Proof that I am very tired.

Ch-ch-Changes

Quick! I need to blog before the day ends.

I've been busy all day with going to the International Summerfest in Bountiful, looking for a bridesmaid's dress to wear at my friend Alyne's wedding, and then going to Alyne's bridal shower tonight.

And now here I am.

I have been loving this blogging every day thing actually. It's a little consistency in my life that makes me very happy.

As I belted my heart out to songs from musicals on the way from Provo tonight, I also got some thinking done in my head...

an hour can feel like such a long drive sometimes.

I say fireworks going off in Pleasant Grove and I was reminded of my friend Amy's post as I thought, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I'm really really happy with my life right now.

I have changed so much in the past few months, past summer, past year. 

But it's a good change. Because I'm just becoming a more enhanced version of myself. A better version.

I find my style evolving from super girly and always trying to look perfect to a more casual, relaxed, and more me look of t-shirts and shorts, my grasshopper shoes worn daily, and everything more simpler.

I sing louder in church and I sing along more in the car--when I'm with people and when I'm alone. I'm trying not to be afraid of my voice.

I'm also trying not to be afraid of what I want to do, which really can be quite scary. More and more I have the words coming out of my mouth telling people I want to design clothes, and instead of the disturbed looks or the "you'll never be able to make it," I expect, I get admiration or a "that's really cool."

It's really amazing when you start to realize that people don't think negatively of you or even think of you as much as you train yourself to imagine.

Oh and of course I've stopped biting my nails, which, in short, means I am not relying on one of my coping mechanisms anymore.

These changes seem so small and minute, but they are steps, and every step up gets me closer to the top, which is where I think we're all trying to reach. And together, they do create big changes. I feel like a more different person every day, although it's really just me becoming more me and accepting myself a little more every day.

Who knows, maybe someday I will make huge changes, like sharing my deepest and darkest secrets here on this blog (I know, I know, you definitely want to read about those, right? Kidding.) because I don't want to care about what people think of me.
We'll see. :)
Either way, I'm content right now. I have an awesome family and amazing friends. There isn't much more a girl can ask for, right?? (Well, maybe a boyfriend....okay okay kidding! Sort of.)
Night :)

nail update

So guess what?! I haven't bitten my nails for TWO WEEKS!

They don't look super long in the picture, but I promise you, they are longer than they have ever been. I had to take off my nail polish because I went to Goshen two days ago and my nails looked beautiful and long. I've only seen my nails when they've had jagged edges and just looked really gross.

This is a habit I've had pretty much since I was born, and to be honest, it was something I never ever in a million years thought I'd overcome. But somehow it's happening and it is wonderful. I realized after I took this picture that it looked like I might be engaged or something, but right now this is an even bigger accomplishment (although with my luck in dating, getting engaged will probably even beat this on the accomplishment scale when [if????] it happens haha).

So basically, habits can be broken! Sometimes you just have to wait for the right time and work at it, and eventually you find the miracle.

{Pssst...don't forget to enter my awesome giveaway! Go here to enter.}

home again, home again, jiggity jig

I've now been home for a week! And man, has it been great. It's weird to be away from Boston and think about all that stuff. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and forget where I am. But I'm so happy I was able to come home and spend most of August with the fam. It's been great. I didn't realize how much I actually missed them! Funny though because it feels like Boston was almost a dream and like I never left Utah. Of course I have plenty of pictures to prove that I did indeed spend my whole summer in Boston. It's insane to think it's over.

Last week I got home Thursday morning. Gracie was soooo happy to see me! She said that now I can't leave for a long time and next time I need to come back earlier. And she keeps thinking I'm going to leave to Boston again. It's so cute. I love how close we are. I went with my mom to take Gracie to swimming lessons that morning.

We had Sunday dinner with our extended family on Sunday to celebrate my dad's birthday. It was fun to see my aunt and uncle, cousins, and grandparents again, who I haven't seen all summer!

Monday night for family home evening, we celebrated my dad's birthday, which happened on Saturday, by going to see the local city play, Hello Dolly. I'd never seen the musical but it was actually very good! It was outside so we just brought blankets to sit down on and watch.

All the girls in my family!

After the play Cee Ryle had a gift card to Orange Leaf, a frozen yogurt place, so we all went and had frozen yogurt. It was a great sight, all seven of us surrounding a little table. We're used to it by now, and we were mostly just happy to all be together.

I can't post pictures from it, but yesterday I had the awesome opportunity to go to Goshen and be an extra in one of the New Testament videos that the church has been putting out! We filmed the "Feeding the 5,000" story. It was a long, hot day, and we wore clothing like they would have worn back then, so obviously that only made us hotter. It was such a great experience though and as soon as the video is posted, I'll share it! I think you'll probably be able to see me, my mom and sisters (Carina and Sidney) in it. :) This is one of the videos that came out a while ago. My mom's in this one because she did a lot of filming last summer. Check at 0:32 seconds to see her.


Tonight I went with my Cee Ryle, Sidney, and our cousin Shayden to Get Air!, a place in Kaysville  filled with trampolines and foam pits and stuff. Cee Ryle had passes there so we used those to get in (in case you're wondering, Cee Ryle got second place in the regional spelling bee, the one right before the DC bee, so he won a ton of stuff, including the Get Air passes and the Orange Leaf gift card...just to clarify that my brother isn't this wealthy thirteen year old haha). It's very similar to Jump On It, if you've heard of that. It was super fun! I'm definitely not an athletic, flexible, or acrobatic person, but I still came out sweaty and happy when our hour was up.

my sweaty, but still cute lil' bro ;)

It's been a fun week home! My aunt and uncle, Zildy and Jonas, are in Costa Rica for the week so we're watching their kids, Shayden, Jasmine, and Tayevion. Gracie and Cee Ryle have been having the time of their lives, and we always love having more people around! I've also been making some extra money this week subbing at the day care that I worked at two years ago. It makes me miss it all over again. Next week is Education Week so I'll be heading back to Provo to work in the bookstore. My fourth and last year at BYU and the bookstore is just about to begin :)

Oh and P.S. I have a great giveaway going on right now! Go here to enter!

a braided headband

While I'm waiting for the new Pretty Little Liars episode to buffer (links on sidereel if you wanna watch shows the night of their release date) I'm doing a blog post to try and keep up with my one post a day goal :)

So I love headbands. I think they are super cute and can dress up hair no matter what. Sometimes they become problematic though because they hurt your head after like 2 hours of wear time or if they go all around your head, sometimes they lift up the hair under and it shows through looking kinda funny.

But...

I tried a french braid headband and it worked great! I've wanted to do one of these forever and I'm always french braiding my hair, but I guess I wasn't sure I could do. This hairstyle will probably become a regular occurence, considering it's made of out of my own hair so all the complications don't exist anymore.

These pictures are like the worst, but from what you can see, how do you think it looks?

For some strange reason, I really like the below picture. Maybe because it's how I look on an every day basis. I have an awful mole on one of my eyebrows and whenever I smile, one of my eyes is a little smaller than the other one (which bugs me so much sometimes!), and my nose is big. All are kind of non-desirable qualities when I look in the mirror, but in this picture they don't seem as bad. (Well, at least I don't think so. And since I'm on a happy basis with my eyes, mole, and nose right now, please don't correct me if I'm wrong ;))

My Best Friend's Wedding

(l to r) Lauren, Alyne, Jessica, Sarah, Me

In about the past one and a half to two years I've become really close with four other girls--Sarah, Alyne, Lauren, and Jessica--who I would definitely have to call my best friends. They literally know pretty much everything about me, I can talk to them about anything, and we have so much fun together! Our friendship has been filled with many nights of making granola bars and falafel, late nights just talking and laughing so hard in the "no shhh zone" in the library, at the Coffee Pod, or in Alyne's basement, drooling over the gorgeous Ryan Gosling, and dozens of other hangouts doing the most fun things. Sometimes that stuff is probably only fun too because it's been with fun people. Anyways, I love these girls to death and though life is always changing and is always crazy, we try to make time for each other and support each other no matter what. Right now Jessica is on a mission :( but just this past Saturday, Sarah got married to Devin, the love of her life! Unfortunately, due to unforseen circumstances, Lauren and Alyne couldn't come, but I got to go and be a bridesmaid and have so much fun.

I didn't get a ton of pictures, just because I wanted to just have fun and there was already a photographer there taking all pictures needed, but here are a few from Sarah's special day.

It was so beautiful! They got married in the Draper temple (sorry, didn't get any photos of that, though I should have!) and then had their reception in downtown Provo on the rooftop. It's the top of a parking garage where they hold the rooftop concert series in the summer. It was such a beautiful place to have a reception, even though earlier in the day it was kind of hot. They had lights strung around as well as picture frames of the cute couple on all of the pillars.

Dinner was catered, yummy tex-mex style, and had some speeches from parents and siblings. Sarah and Devin sang this song to everyone (but mostly each other) which was really cute and beautiful since they both have amazing singing voices.

Sarah is crazy, but awesome, because she made her own cake for her wedding! She is an amazing cook and makes really gorgeous cakes. She started a blog for her cakes and if you ever want her to make your wedding cake, go there and contact her. Seeing the pictures above--and if you had tasted the cake!--you won't be disappointed. They cut the cake and totally shoved it at each other. I always love when couples do that because it's really fun and it shows they can be totally silly around each other and be fine with it.

Dinner was followed by dancing and then we all lit sparklers as they ran down to their car and off on their honeymoon!

It was a wonderful day. I had a lot of fun with the other bridesmaids and because I love weddings in general. I'm soooo happy for Sarah to have found such a wonderful husband and I wish them the absolute best together. I'm so happy that she gave me a chance to be a part of her special day :)

Goal Crazy

So I've made it a new personal goal of mine to blog every single day, even if it's something small, because I think it's really important for me to write down my daily thoughts and share them with others. So if you read this thing at all...then expect some more posting!

I feel like I have been going crazy making goals for the past few days, and it actually feels great, because they are doable goals and things that I think I can really do.

Like....I haven't bitten my nails for a whole ten days now. If you know me, that's a ton! I'm the girl who's sitting in class or church or anywhere and she's biting her nails to the core. And it just looks so gross. At least, I'm pretty sure it does, as I've never actually watched myself do it. It's funny how this whole thing started out, because I wanted to paint my toenails this cute mint green color, but I couldn't find it! So I settled for my usual purple and then was so annoyed when I was done and I found the green one. I go through quite an ordeal painting my nails sometimes because I mess up a lot and there is a lot of nail polish remover involved, so when I'm done, I'm just that...DONE. But I wanted to wear the mint green polish so bad, so I decided, what the heck, I'll paint my fingernails, even though they have maybe been painted once or twice before in my life. So I painted them, and they looked soooo cute! I tell you that it was one of the most special days of my life and I had such a happy feeling. I kept looking in the mirror, holding up my hand with my nails showing and just having a big smile on my face because I loved my painted nails so much. Right then and there I decided I would never go without painted nails again. Which meant I could never go with bitten nails again if I actually wanted them to look super cute. And that was that. No nail biting for ten days and I'm going to keep going! I have a system worked where I give myself a reward on a weekly and monthly basis and so far it's going well. This is honestly such an exciting thing, because I have bitten my nails hard core my whole life and just never planned on quitting because I didn't think it was possible, but I guess it just might be. :)

I've also just been making goals with the blogging every day and really trying hard to read a chapter of my scriptures every night. Many times I'm tired and I'll just get away with a verse or something, but it really hit me when I heard someone talking in church about how if we don't make the time to actually study our scriptures, we won't get much out of them. I can't open them up and expect to always read the exact verse I needed to read and that's all. I have to go through the whole chapter and then I will find that verse plus more. This is what I think about whenever my eyes start to droop and I'm tempted to just read a verse and go to bed.

And then in church today, I was really hit hard by what a girl commented in Relief Society (which is an hour set aside in our meeting where women 18 and older go to have a lesson and learn about stuff to help us in the gospel. The lessons are usually more geared to women, obviously) about weaknesses becoming strong. I've heard that so many times but I guess the way she worded it really stuck out to me. I mean as humans, we have a lot of weaknesses, man do I have a ton! I bite my nails, I struggle opening up to people and really sharing or speaking in large groups, my room gets messy way too easily, I procrastinate, etc. The list goes on and on, seriously! A lot of times, we think that these weaknesses will always be weaknesses. And yeah, they might improve a little, but we're always going to struggle with them no matter what. But not so! Every single one of those things I struggle with, can become strengths if we really work hard and believe that they can become so. My nails can become really beautiful one day, and people might not even ever know how ugly and deformed they used to be. Or I could become the person who is early and on-time with assignments and tasks, rather than the procrastinator. It was just really cool to realize that if I work at this stuff, it doesn't always have to be a weak thing in my life, it can be a total strength.

Basically, I know that habit breaking is so incredibly hard. I've struggled and overcome some really difficult things in my life that I never really thought I could do. I hope I keep this happy attitude of goal-making while I'm doing all this stuff, because I do want to improve on these things so much. The happiness when you truly hurdle a challenge is indescribable. You feel strong and you feel like you can do anything and you do feel so happy.

And that's my post and thoughts for the day. It feels good to get it out. And if you managed to get through this whole post...thanks for reading. :)

To Boston

I guess right now I could be catching up on posts from July because I am stuck in an airport bored out of my mind, waiting for a bus to take me home (long story). But I don't really feel like posting any of that stuff because I think it might make me cry, and I'm already pretty close to tears.

This morning I was in Massachusetts driving down the Mass Pike for the last time, admiring all the trees and all the old buildings one last time. This morning I was in Massachusetts and now I'm not. I'm just gone.

Don't get me wrong, I am so excited to see my family and friends again and just be home in Utah. But I'm so devastated to leave Boston. I had one of the best summers ever, going to beaches, Red Sox games, traveling all over the east coast, and of course interning at Anthropologie. I feel like it really became my home for the past three months...I got to know the area and the people. I lived and loved there.

I don't even know what I'm trying to say here, just that I'm going to miss it so much. I'll miss going to Anthropologie on Mondays and Tuesdays, working on projects with the other employees and interns and learning so much while doing it all. I will miss all the trees everywhere and I'll miss all the random lakes and ponds and beaches and coasts all over the place. I'll miss the singles ward and the family ward that I went to that were both so welcoming and immediately friendly. I'll miss the patriotism and the history. I'll really miss my "summer family"--Derick, Cat, Bri, and Elle. I loved having late night talks and laughs with Brianna and giggling about all our crazy inside jokes and every weird thing that happened to us. I loved Ellie's spunky personality and always being able to have fun with her. I loved late night movies and random tourist trips to show me around the area. I loved it all sooooo much. And that is why I will miss it. Sooooo much.

So to Boston and all the people I met there, I love you. Thanks for an amazing summer and a really happy summer. I learned and experienced so much and I will never forget it all. Hopefully I will be back soon (very soon!) and be able to experience it all over again. So for now....goodbye. I will miss you :)