Sep 28, 2012

Fashion Friday : October Wish List

Madeline Beard Fashion cats, floral booties, October, spiked headband, trends, wax jeans 5 Comments

Here are a few things on my wish list for October!

I feel like the cat sweatshirt goes without saying — cool weather and an infatuation with everything feline makes this sweatshirt the coolest thing since sliced bread. Paired with a spiked headband inspired by a Fashion Week look from one of my very favorite bloggers, Peony Lim, I am determined to push the envelope between what’s crazy good and just plain crazy. Blurring that line is half the fun of putting an outfit together. If I’m feeling ambitious, I may attempt to DIY the headband with instructions I found here.

On the more conventional side of my sartorial desires of the month, I am definitely searching for a pair of black wax jeans — I feel like they offer the edge of leather pants while remaining a bit more practical for every day wear. I am also on the hunt for some floral booties and a bright orange satchel. Normally towards the middle of October my wardrobe starts to drift towards the monochrome color scheme in shades of white, grey, and of course, black. I want to keep color in my wardrobe through the fall and winter months, and what better way to do this than an orange satchel? Orange is a great color for summer to fall seasonal transitions because it is everywhere right now — the leaves on the trees, the pumpkin in my Pumpkin Spice Latte and the stripes in my candy corn. I love finding inspiration in unexpected places.

Tomorrow I am headed to my first ever CapFABB meet up and I couldn’t be more excited! I will have my camera on me for the whole day, cannot wait to share the event with you guys. Hope everyone has a fantastic Friday!

♥

Sep 27, 2012

Homemade Pop Tarts

Madeline Beard Fashion, Food baking, college fashion, fashion, homemade, pop tarts 2 Comments

I want to start this post off with a quote I just found on The Man Repeller‘s Instagram:

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

I really like the idea of this — happiness should be a duty, a priority, in our lives. I feel too often I spend my time micro-managing that I only have a few fleeting “wow, I’m doing this for myself and no other reason” moments every week. Which brings me to the main topic of tonight’s post: homemade pop tarts!

I pinned these over the summer and have been wanting to test drive the recipe for months. Wandering around the aisles of my neighborhood grocery store last night I thought to myself, “What the heck, I’m going to make pop tarts tonight because I need a break from everything else.”

So I gathered up the ingredients…

… mixed up the dough…

… flattened the dough out with my trusty rolling pin + cut out 14 rectangles for 7 pop tarts…

… added strawberry preserves + closed up each tart with a fork…

… let ’em bake, then let ’em cool…

… annnd adding the icing/sprinkles in the morning!

And let me tell you, they turned out great. Like taking a bite from my childhood, without all of the extra preservatives and red dye #12. Yum! My tips for future pop tart endeavors: less is more with this crust, and the more strawberry preserves the better. I was pretty light handed with the preserves this time around and I really didn’t need to be — ~~live~~ bake and learn 🙂 If you end up baking your own homemade pop tarts, you’ll have to let me know how they turn out through a tweet or Instagram photo.

These pop tarts turned out looking pretty celebratory, what with the colorful sprinkles… who knew today I would have something to celebrate!? Last week my dear friend Tania asked if I wanted to be featured in her “Looks on Campus” column on College Fashion. I jumped at the opportunity to connect with a wider audience of fashionistas, you can read Tania’s article here.

After the article was posted, I reached a record 500 page views in one day! Opening my Google Analytics account this morning was such a big surprise and I want to say how thankful I am for everyone and anyone who has read SLB — every day is an adventure, and I’m so glad I get to share it with you guys. On that note, I’ve gotta get to bed, the last 24 hours have been both exhilarating and exhausting. Sweet dreams readers, much more to come.

♥

Sep 25, 2012

Odds + Ends

Madeline Beard Fashion, Other Adventures design, j. crew, leopard, stripes, website 2 Comments

I woke up this morning in the mood for some color and a little pattern matching. I love mixing and matching subtle details with bolder pieces — my checked grey and white oxford, hot pink and orange sweater and thin leopard belt felt like the perfect marriage of color and pattern. Paired with faux suede shorts and perforated leather flats, the outfit falls somewhere between quirky and classic. Here is the resulting look:

I don’t know what it is with my tendency to pick photos of myself where I’m not looking directly at the camera — I think in the case of these shots, my eyes were a bit sleepy. You guys can just start calling me “Maddie: the Eyeless Wonder”, maybe I can make it my trademark?

I also wanted to post the revised version of the website I wrote about a couple weeks ago. Long story short, my Experience Design professor decided that we needed to spend more time on our sites to refine the designs and work on the coding end. Here is the new site I created, I would love to get some feedback on it. I will probably try to revisit the site in a couple of weeks to fine tune some elements/improve readability, but for now I am pretty sick of looking at it, which usually happens with most projects I really delve into. Tonight I hope to bake something new, a beloved past time which has fallen by the wayside since school started. Looking forward to sharing this adventure with you guys tomorrow, so stay tuned!

♥