Baby's First DIY Crop Top: A Five Minute DIY Tutorial for Summertime

You've caught me, this is not my first crop top. But it could be yours! And it is crop top season. Just kidding, it's always crop top season. Personally, I hope this trend lasts a long time. Like skinny jeans. Anyways, this is mostly a teaser tutorial before I do more DIYs--I ruined a favorite dress of mine and now I'm a bit wary of doing more intense alterations. Let's get started!

First, start with the CLASSIEST t-shirt you can find.

The little fella behind me is my dog's toy. He says hey.

I recommend marking where you'd like the shirt to fall when it's cropped while you have it on, and then laying the shirt out flat on a table.

Like so.

Cut along the line you marked! You could stop here. You could continue. You could do something totally different than what I did next. 

It looks crooked, I swear it's not!

What I did next is cut the neckline to create an elegant scoop neck, so that I could show off my collarbones and be rid of the small stain on this shirt's collar ;)

So elegant.

If you'd like to make your top EVEN FANCIER, you can cut the hems of the sleeves off and roll them:

Et fini.

This tutorial may have been totally useless. That's okay though! Do you have a preferred way to make your DIY crops more interesting?

Monster of the Week: Collaging

Hey there! Apologies for going dark for a while-- I was completing my first year of college and moving back home to Maryland. It feels great to be back.
I've decided this will be the first post of a weekly installment called Monster of the Week. Monster of the Week is one of my favorite terms to reference a TV trope in which the protagonists deal with a "whatever" monster & is eradicated by the end of the episode. I first heard it in relation to the X-Files (one of my favorite shows!) and originally wanted to name this blog Monster of the Week! Anyways, since I love the Monster of the Week episodes best in most of the TV shows I watch, I decided that this category of postings wouldn't have a negative connotation. MOTW will just be an update on something I'm obsessing over for the week.

Onto collaging!

Collaging is one of my favorite stress relievers, and once I discovered what could be accomplished with Mod Podge, my collaging life got so much better. A few brush strokes and your masterpiece is sealed forever! Like a blood pact, but with $8 glue and some paper. I also use the bottles to prop my window open in the summertime.

I'm one of those people who's really into artsy clutter, and can't have bare walls ever. The space above my desk always turns into a collage of sorts. Here's my closet door, currently missing a few pieces I took to college:

The thing I find most relaxing and satisfying about collaging is that it's hard, consuming work, but can be done while watching Netflix (the X-Files maybe?). Better yet, you get a piece of art or an updated item afterwards!
Here are some of my high school notebooks, pre-Mod Podge, inspired by a friend at a summer writing program.

Here's one of my craft/knitting boxes made with comic book panels from a few different books taken out of context, and a jar I use to hold some makeup brushes, done with passages from a French workbook on Le Petit Prince.

A lot of these were made using really cheap items-- used book stores will have comics, magazines and maps for about 75 cents each. I got my hands on some Holiday magazines from the 60s and 70s while at that writing program, and I'll probably keep using them until they're nothing but sad little spines. I'll use those too, come to think of it.

Collaging is great because it can last as long as you want it to, and be as easy or hard as you want it to as well, and each one can have a mood. A friend and I did these in about three hours one night, and the next one took about half an hour, sitting on my bed in front of Netflix.

I hope this was inspirational, fun to read, or just some nice eye candy. 
Do your thing, and treat yourself to some papery goodness!

xx,