watch this space

yall know how much i love halloween.

i'm hoping, fingers-crossed hoping, that i'll be able to pull off a pretty major halloween project this month. 

i'll be blogging it right here.

i'm currently working full time and studying for the GREs, mired in grad school applications and working a counseling job besides. so if this project gets out of my hands, it's out of my hands. but i'm hopeful.

essentially i plan to pull off a "closet costume" every day in october. meaning, while spending as little as possible and getting as much from my own collection of clothes as possible, i hope to put together a fictional character- or historical figure-inspired outfit and photograph it each day. these outfits, for the most part, will be things that i can wear to work or in my daily life but will still, hopefully, be clearly inspired by these characters.

i'm really excited and hopeful. i have a big list of characters i plan to be inspired by but if any of my followers have suggestions i'd love to hear them!!

i'll also be posting to my instagram which you can find here.

xoxo

halloween boots!!!

i have a doc martens problem

at one point i had seven pairs i think. i've since consigned some but i have at least four now. i basically hadn't worn these white ones since my freshman year of college so i decided to give them a makeover using angelus leather paint, inspired by a picture i found on tumblr. 

starting to paint. i took this picture in a panic after realizing i hadn't done a 'before' shot.

after one coat of paint. 

 i think i did about five coats of the orange plus some touchups where it was needed. i freehanded the pumpkin faces. honestly the shoes turned out a bit more vividly orange than i would have really liked but there wasn't much to be done about that. the colour might fade a bit with wear, but i'm happy with them anyway. 

all laced up!

tired diy: hair twist... thing

i'm exhausted this week because i've been working a ton thanks to a new hire at the shop who decided one day to just stop coming in but i wanted to make something so i decided i'd throw this together after a morning shift. 

one of my most-used hair accessories is this black velvet... thing. it's a piece of black velvet with a wire in it that can be twisted. i got it from the american apparel outlet a few years back along with a burgundy one, and while i use the black one a ton--twisting my hair around it for an updo, tangling it into a bun, or just using it as a wrapped headband--the burgundy one clashed badly with my hair. so i dissected it!

you can, of course, use any wire for this, although i suggest something relatively thick that can hold its shape but still bends easily. i just used the wire that was in my burgundy headband and some fabric i bought at joann's ages ago.

this was really simple. i just cut a rectangle from my fabric a little longer than the wire i was using and a little wider than double the width i wanted the finished piece to be.

i sewed a little sheath for the wire so it wouldn't just be loose inside the fabric tube.

with the wire inside its sheath i flipped the whole thing inside out and sewed around the edges, leaving one end open so i could flip it back right-side-out. then i tucked in the ends of the fabric and sewed that end shut, too.

 

done!