This photo pretty much sums up today’s post, both in what it’s kind of about and how hard it was to write, HA! I’m sharing blog life as I know it, which is something I’ve chickened out over many times because I didn’t want to risk coming off as whiney or like I’m complaining. The opposite of that though would feel like I’m giving off the false image that I’m getting by without struggle. So as I begin by admitting to you that I failed over the weekend at coming up with this week’s scheduled DIY, my hope is that there’s something here you guys can relate to and that we can be encouraged to talk openly and honestly about the things we struggle with, whatever they are.
I think you guys know I work a full time job, so I reserve nights and weekends for working on my blog. My entire struggle lies in how that same time needs to be shared with everything else that’s important in my life, but with the pressure of trying to “keep up” with the blogosphere and dedicating precious weekend daylight hours to photographing content for the blog, I often reject plans with friends and family and sacrifice taking care of my basic needs (I know that wouldn’t fly for a second when I have kids… blogging mamas, HOW do you stay alive??) So far I’d try to wear this sacrifice as a badge, like it was assurance that I’m following in the footsteps of every success story, but the reality was that it kept me from living a vibrant life offline, which makes it very, very difficult to stay inspired.
Lately it’s been rough for me in that sense, to consistently come up with ideas that are relevant to me rather than something I forced in order to create a pretty picture people would want to pin. It’s teaching me that while this blog takes an immense amount of time and work to grow, I cannot effectively churn out creativity in a way that’s genuine and true to myself if all I do is live for the blog. It’s a little counter-intuitive, to spend time away from something you love that requires a lot of your time to do, but I think a huge part of success in blog life is knowing when to remove yourself from it for a minute, like when the inspiration just doesn’t come, when creativity starts to feel like a competition, or when it feels like a bombed Instagram post is ruining your day (hate how petty that is, but I’m guilty of it!)
I’m making it sound all bad, but it’s definitely not. The tricky thing is just that blog culture encourages carefully curating the better parts of our lives, which is fine, we want to be inspired by beautiful and happy things, but it can be exhausting trying to keep up with that all the time, or if everything you do offline starts to feel contrived because it needs to be something you can blog about.
So my point… I’m making an effort to spend more time enjoying things outside of blog life with the intention that what I do share on this blog comes from a real place. Even if it doesn’t work out that smoothly, I recognize that there’s a limit to how much time should be spent cooped up at home trying to force ideas to formulate out of thin air. It’s what happened this past weekend, and I went outside and enjoyed my city instead, something I’ve been loving doing a lot lately, and is a little bit of how I’m navigating through this funk that has been hanging around for what seems like since the start of this year.
I know a lot of us were feeling that funk too, and I don’t know if any of you still feel it lingering around, but I’d love to hear any insight on how you deal with similar issues, or if you have been feeling any of the same frustrations!
I cut the square dowel into three pieces with the measurements noted above. I picked a square dowel because I figured it would best keep the wire (showing that soon) in place and prevent it from slipping around like it most likely would on a round dowel.
I tied and double knotted each end of suede lace to each end of the wood dowel, then cut off the excess lace. I roughly eyeballed the length of the lace so that it was somewhere near twice the length of the dowel, maybe a bit less.
And then it looks like a little trapeze!
My air plants came with wire already wrapped around the base, but it would be fairly easy to add it yourself. Note, this means the air plants will not be easily removable, but I plan on only water misting the plants and not removing them for soaking. I have another air plant that has faired well for a while with just water misting 2-3 times a week, which is a relief because it’s possible I’m too lazy to regularly remove plants for hours of soaking.
I didn’t anticipate that each hanger would need to be hung off-center in order for the dowel to hang straight since I attached the plants on the ends, but I find it surprisingly beautiful that way and how it creates scalene triangles (woah, just realizing I still remember that term from geometry class once upon a time, didn’t know that was still in my head).
These turned out way better than the original sketch I had in mind (ain’t that the best?) and they’re the perfect accessory for letting the sculptural lines of the air plants take the main stage. Very happy with these, AND with how well my plant babies have been doing in general. You see that little baby leaf sprouting out from the plant at the bottom right? Makes my heart sooooaaar.
Guys. This is a momentous occasion. Last I talked about 
So these glass votive holders, right. They come in a 16 pack at Michaels and I take at least one glance at them every time I’m there. Sometimes I just have a feeling about things and keep them fresh in my brain catalogue, ready to be dispensed at any possible DIY or project idea that pops into my head. I always thought about how I should do something with these votive holders, and somehow that manifested into a vision for floating flowers.
Am I the only person who still uses accordion file folders? Not that I have more than one, or four, but I like this “old-fashioned” way of keeping my receipts organized, which I was thinking about after filing my taxes this year, which is very boring and no one wants to talk about that, but what’s not boring is putting gold on everything. This one only takes 10 minutes, too, which is so worth spending to make receipt-keeping a lot prettier.
First, this 12 pocket file folder, which was only a dollar at the Target dollar spot (they get me). I was completely happy with it being all white like this, but it also felt like the perfect opportunity to test out a new craft find.
There’s not much to show, especially because I did this at night and took zero photos of the process, but it’s very straight forward. The foil tape has a paper backing that needs to be peeled off, and I used a small piece of the backing to measure out the spacing in between each gold stripe as I stuck them on. This tape smooths over really nicely, so it was easy to get rid of any small air bubbles by rubbing them out with a finger, but if reapplication is necessary, the tape doesn’t crinkle or crease much when peeled off- nice! Once satisfied with the placement, I used scissors to cut off the excess tape around the edges of the flap.
I could very easily go down the rabbit hole of gold foil taping all the things. This could work on so much stuff, like most other office supplies, DIY art, vases, planters, all my favorite things apparently. You might probably definitely see more of this stuff in the future.