Better Bikinis: give your suits a makeover

I love shopping for bathing suits and summer clothes! I pretty much just love bathing suits and summer style, because it means one thing: summer is here and going strong.

Lately I have overloaded my Pinterest with bikinis and summer dresses, and studded shorts and floral crops, and awesome sandals. I am a summer girl 100%, through and through. But I haven't bought a new bathing suit yet this season, and now I feel like I can hold off on that for a little longer.

As I said earlier, I love shopping for summer, but I do like to be financially savvy and get the best out of what I have bought. I also, like most women, like any advice that will a) make me look better in a bikini or b) make a bikini look better on me.

Ladies, if you have any triangle tops, or even any bikini bottoms, you have potential for a killer new bathing suit style.

I ran across a tip on Pinterest about changing up how you tie your triangle top from a tumblr blog called Goldfish Kiss , I decided to try it out and browse her site, which I fell in love with. And I also found a tip for making those boring bikini bottoms morph into the awesomely flattering scrunch-butt bottoms. I have a few triangle tops and basic bottoms that are the staples in any girls bikini line up, but I was getting kind of tired of them, and I just felt that they were boring. I was actually planning on going through my suits and getting rid of some. Now, I am back in love with all my bathing suits and will not get rid of any of them! (Okay, maybe I'll ditch last year's floral, sequined monokini, which was not my best idea)

Triangle Top= Wrap Top


This tie is great for the ladies who weren't exactly blessed with bounty in the chest area. It creates much more flattering shape than the usual triangle top halter tie and I know it is the same amount of fabric, but it feels like more coverage and better support. I may never wear a regular triangle halter again.

Regular Triangle Tie 

Wrap Top Style 

This gets a little tricky, so here is the you tube video from Goldfish Kiss to make sense of it.

Bikini Butt Scrunch

This basically changed my outlook on how good my butt could look in a bikini. Your basic bikini bottoms are pretty bland and probably aren't as flattering as they could be.But with a little floss (insert butt floss joke now), a needle and about 2 minutes, you can give your boring bottom a makeover! All you do in take some floss, stitch right down the center of your bikini bottoms about 6 inches or so, pull the floss tight to create a scrunched up ruffle and BAM! Your booty now looks fabulous in those formerly saggy bottoms. It also helps stretched out, a-little-too-big bottoms to fit better. No more losing your bottoms in the ocean or down a water slide!

So now you can go and play with your old bathing suits and make them fabulous. One of my old bathing suits (pre-pregnancy, that's how old it is) is now my new favorite of the moment.

Here is another Goldfish Kiss Bikini Facelift I tried :

This tie takes the strings that would go around your neck, and you tie them in the front. I really like this tie  and the way it looks too.



I also branched out a little bit in another way. I have been mixing and matching tops and bottoms lately. I know that is something that most beach babes have been doing since the birth of the bikini, but it is something I have never done before, due to my compulsion to be "matchy-matchy". But now that I have have broken the bonds of matchy-ness, I feel so free. I might go to Target and buy a mismatched bathing suit, or maybe just a pair of cute bottoms, or a sweet top. But I don't know if I could ever go back to matching again.

By tying my tops differently, giving my bottoms a butt scrunch and mixing and matching, I have successfully expanded my bikini closet without buying anything new (D will be so happy!).

But now, if  when I do buy a new suit, it will really be so much more!

happy summer, and you're welcome.

Spring Projects

I have been terribly busy with spring softball (dear husband plays Monday thru Thursday) and bad attempts at potty training.  But I am back, and I have been doing a little bit of crafting and such.

Here are some projects/ideas I have been working on or done since I've been on hiatus.

Hot Dog!

I made Addilyn octopus hot dogs..which turned out to be an epic failure. There must be some trick that I am missing, because the octopi did not have cute little legs that stuck out, they either broke off or stuck straight down. I won't even put a picture of what mine looked like, in order to hide some of my shame at failing at a seemingly simple task.

Glitter Key
I made a sparkle key! Which turned out infinitely better than the octopus challenge, so I will show you a picture of that! It was a key that had  Pepé Le Pew, one of my favorite cartoon characters as a child and he probably sparked my Francophilia, but he was scratched and chipped so I just painted over him with purple nail polish, sprinkled some multi-glitter while the polish was wet and sprayed it with some acrylic sealant I had from another project. I love this key and I am thinking about doing all my keys like this so that my key chain looks like a giant glitter bomb.

 

Glitter Key!

Painting Spring!
I have been inspired by all the adorable spring Lilly prints I see popping up on facebook and pinterest and I decided to pull out paint brush and do some spring canvases just for fun. I did 5 mini canvases inspired by flowers and largely inspired by Lilly and then on a 16 x 20 I did a sweet chevron pattern in colors that match the nautical theme that is my master bedroom. The chevron has a big blank box in the center because I have not decided the best way to add beach sand to the monogram letters that will be painted in the center. I am going to do some test runs on some small canvases before I try and sand texture my chevron print canvas.

It's shiny because the paint is a little wet and the center white box is uneven, but it dried with a nice matte finish and I evened out the center box lines.

Log Side Table!

I have completed the log side table! Dustin wanted to keep it natural so I just softened up some the rough spots and coated it a clear, waterproof protective varnish. It looks awesome, (actually it just looks like a clean, shiny part of a tree trunk) and Dustin loves it, but I think it needs some legs, so I am gonna figure something out, and maybe add some thin, random paint stripes in the style of antler art to make it mesh a little better with our nautically natural room.

Feather Earrings: DIY

I have a pretty rad job at a law firm as a receptionist..that sounds like it would be the opposite of fun. But it is actually more of a dream job. I do something different everyday. Some days I am a travel agent, some days a party planner, or a dog sitter or a personal assistant or a wardrobe consultant and some days we have craft hour.

My boss's wife, J, was having a themed event and the theme was "Quail". We were going to make name tags with feathers and buttons but she couldn't find any buttons she liked. J loves feathers and she had to do something with them so she had the idea to make earrings. She didn't know how we would do it, but her crafty receptionist  played for a few minutes and came up with an awesome and easy way to make the feathers and earring blanks into some pretty ear adornments.

 I am currently in a serious relationship with summery boho fashions so this was right up my alley. I love these earrings and plan to make more.


Supplies:

• Earring Blanks 
• Hot glue/super glue
• Feathers, any will do, just whatever you like
• Tape
• Coordinating thread
• Fishing line

Instructions: 

Put the feathers together how ever you want, what ever you like. 

Cut a 1inch or smaller piece of fishing line. (you use this to attach the earring blank to the feather bundle) 

Loop the fishing line and tape it to your bundle of feathers.

Wrap bundle, over the tape with your thread until it is completely covered. 

Put a dot of glue on the back of the string wrapped section and wrap the string a few more times and snip it. 

Slip the fishing line loop into the earring blank

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Here are some of the earrings I made today: