Last week of November + favourite vlogger list!

 Oh, November is OVER? WHAT. Today I thought a lady at work said "Happy thanksgiving" to me and I was like wat o_O and then I turned around and she was on the phone lol. I'm getting that pre-december present shopping fear at the moment and I just need to chill owt and appreciate November as it's own thing. This week has been busy for me but I've had a lot of fun working on a little (secret) project too! Because I don't have much to say about this week I thought I would do a list of my favourite vloggers on YouTube. The sort of videos I enjoy are thrifting and daily life vlogs and honestly I just like to see what outfits people wear lol. If you also wanted to share your favourite vloggers in the comments please do! I love hearing what other people like :p Here goes...

Liv Harwood

I've been watching Liv's videos for a long time now consistently, she's a jewellery maker from New Zealand  and has the most awesome style ever. Her videos are really well put together and artistic and always have amazing soundtracks. She mainly does vlogs about her week and different places she goes too but she often records her jewellery making process too which is super interesting! She reminds me a lot of one of my closest friends which is nice too hehe.

 Sarah Chio

Sarah's channel has the most authentic 2010s YouTube vibe to me out of everyone I watch. Her videos are super laid back and she mainly just does thrifting videos, makeup tutorials and videos about her y2k collection. I find her videos so relaxing and maybe its her Canadian accent lol but I can watch her foreverr. 

EmDollx

Similar in content to Sarah Chio, the vibe of EmDoll's videos could not be more different lol. Em does mainly thrifting and van life videos, all of which are edited in the most chaotic way possible - try and find a video where she does not use the man filter, you will be disappointed. I really enjoy how she talks about enjoying time alone and how to be more comfortable with yourself as an individual. I am always thirsty for an iced caramel latte with a pump of vanilla now though.

 ymlovely

ymlovely's channel is just the cutest!! Her videos are so creative, it's like watching a tv show. She has a hime-gyaru kinda style and I love watching just to see what kind of clothes she has. I really enjoy channels that put you into the mindset of romanticising your own life like they do in the video.  The editing is absolutely perfect too, it's always nice when someone puts a lot of effort into curating their content. 

 

 
 

 

A cold wind blows...

 This week has been a bit well mental. The temperature has gone crazy low so my winter coat has come out from its hiding place. The boiler at work is broken and so I've spent most of the day rubbing my hands together and trying not to drop things lol. Work has really not been great lately as we are massively short staffed so I spend many of my shifts running around trying to do multiple peoples jobs - not cool. It's funny though that things have gotten worse since I started but as I've been getting better at my job things are getting harder. I do really like and care about the people I work with though too, there's nothing like camaraderie amongst workers haha. 

I have done some fun things this week though! So here's a list...

1. Banner of Heaven. I started the show Banner of Heaven this week which is about a murder case that happened in Salt Lake City in the eighties. The show explores the "dark side of Mormonism" and what it means to follow and be part of a faith community.  It's very very good and even though I usually hate true-crime things it's different than what I expected, I'm also lowkey obsessed with Mormons and SLC so that helps. Recommended for fans of Jacobs's dad in Twilight (Gil Birmingham).

2. Autumnal scents. I'm not really a seasonal person but I do like autumn a-lot and the cinnamony-pumpkiny products it brings. The other day I purchased the Treaclemoon cinnamon bun shower gel and it smells like my autumnal dreams. I really love Treaclemoon's font choices - it's very 2000s blog layout, I do fear that the packaging for this shower gel is ai art though. sob. I'll forgive them <3

 3. Christian indie-rock girl Autumn™.  This week I've been working on two cd mixes because I kept getting carried away with the first once and had to slim it down lol. One of these mixes is very inspired by the band Cool Hands Luke who are one of those bands that I would find the lyrics slightly cringe if I wasn't Christian lol. I mean they aren't like worship music level 100 boss but also Jesus is mentioned by name in every track. I need a non-Christian opinion on this I think.

4. Cocoa butter. no explanation needed. Actually maybe lol. Anyone else's skin dry and crispy? Using a high tech combination of cocoa butter and E45 cream my skin is making it through this cold weather in one piece... it must.. survive. 

Bonus item. Today I discovered American doll girl magazines from the eighties and nineties and I am obsessed! As a kid I did not have an American doll girl but I did have the books they wrote about the dolls as real girls. I used to read the books constantly and there was this one I didn't have but used to get out of the library all the time called Samantha's Christmas Story, which I loved. I realise now looking at Samantha that I was probably obsessed because we look similar and also I wanted her outfits - I still do lol. 

this dress...

Trying to make a Blogger layout - a journey of pain

As of late I keep coming up with posts I want to make for my music blog and then realising I made it on neocities and is therefore an absolute pain to get it to work the way I want. Also the layout is a bit weird. So I have decided to make a music blog on Blogger! Compared to this blog which I couldn't be bothered to make a layout for I want to make a cool 2000s style blog layout for my new blog. And so we begin.. the journey of pain.

After considering stealing someone's layout and just adding my own pictures, I just could not get anything to look right at all and did not really understand the code at all. So why not start from nothing... right? As most of my layouts start, this idea also began from a picture. I love this pic of one of my favourite bands Twothirtyeight - just look at those colours! 

Twothirtyeight but make it amish

From here I trawled through createblog trying to work out just how a Blogger layout is constructed. I learnt that there are two types of layout - widget and classic. Widget layouts are the new Blogger layout and what this blog uses. Widget layouts are constructed of these premade widgets that you can change around with the Blogger layout editior. This makes things easier to edit but the HTML itself is such a pain and quite complex on the surface. The classic blogger layout looks like this - most of these have a classic two column layout and the header is not usually "stuck" to the top of the main section, however, on modern browsers many elements like comments and blog archive don't work anymore. This is annoying because widget layouts are more difficult to customise but if you want your blog to work right you have to use them!

Before confusing myself with the widget layout, I first constructed one by adapting a classic layout - this one - with my own design. This wasn't too difficult as the code is familiar to me but if you are completely new to it begin by using the inspect tool on the demo layout and take note of which div tags relate to which section of the layout. 

Stage 1

I then set this layout aside when I was reasonably happy with it and started to look for some basic widget layouts to get me started. Rather that begin with a more overly styled layout I wanted one which would give be a good starting base without confusing me with any crazy styles. I chose this one because of its simpleness and also because it's called pink diva LOL. I then uploaded this template by clicking recover from the customise dropdown menu - this was on widget layout btw. 

For reference I will go through the code of this layout but others could look different. At the start of the  code is a list of variable definitions, this is essentially a colour palette for the layout so that you can change the colours of areas easily without having to go through the whole code. For example: 

<Variable name="bgcolor" description="Page Background Color"

             type="color" default="#fff" value="#FAA2BF"> 

Refers to the short cut  $bgcolor so everytime that appears in the code whatever colour you wrote under value will appear.  I'm sure this is very helpful but I kept forgetting about it and just wrote in the hex codes myself lol.

The first bits of css are quite self explanatory until we reach the wrappers. Each area of the layout is designated a wrapper, for example header-wrapper for the top of the page, sidebar-wrapper for the sidebar and so on. For my layout I wanted to delete the header content so I removed the entire content of the tag: <div id='header-wrapper'> and inserted my header image. I then removed all the header css
tags and replaced it with this:

#header-wrapper img {

  height: auto;

  width: 810px;

  display: block;

  margin: -20px 0px 400px -250px;

}

This code is for a header that fits snuggly in the left corner of the page. I had to the move the main and sidebar wrappers down using margins. I cannot for the life of me work out how to position elements for a blog layout, I also tried using flex to have all the elements fit in a column but kept breaking the code trying to make it work lol. 

All of the wrappers are all in one container called the outer-wrapper, this wrapper establishes the width of the whole blog content. This can have it's own background if you would like to place your sidebar and main content next to each other or it can be transparent. This wrapper can be used to change the closeness of the sidebar and main blog and the position of the blog on the page. As I mentioned the outer-wrapper contains 2 main sections (more if you are looking at a 2+ column layout): main-wrapper and sidebar-wrapper. To create a uneven side-bar, e.g higher than the main content, you just have to change the margin-top to a minus number.

An illustration lol

Past the wrapper section of the css you can find lots of different tags which relate to more specific areas of the layout. These divs have quite self explanatory names but incase you are wondering which thing relates to what you can either search for the id using ctrl+F or inspect. Sidenote, so that the divs wont start moving up the page when you open a comment make sure to position your divs :)

Once you have finished styling the tags with css you can add widgets to the page using the layout section on the Blogger home page. Sidenote, if you have changed the margins of your layout you may not be able to view it on this page, or it may look cut off. In that case, just inspect the page and change the margin of  outer-wrapper so that the add widget button is visible. 

Here is a guide to different widgets I have used

For the HTML/JS widget you will have to add in all your code through the layout editor and not the HTML editor or it will be deleted, idk why. It is at this point I realised my sidebar was a bit large so I needed to add another sidebar. After looking at a 3 column layout I took this left sidebar code and placed it in my code. 

<div id='sidewrapper-left'>

<b:section class='sidebar' id='sidebar-left' preferred='yes'/>

      </div>

 Because the class is the same as my other sidebar the styling of the links and titles should carry over without me having to write more code. Now because I've added another sidebar this new sidebar will appear in the layout editor allowing me to copy my widgets over! How cool is that?

Finally. We are done. It was not as horrible as I had imagined thanks to my avid use of inspect and moral support (ty finny). This has made me possibly want to make some Blogger layouts for people to use?? Let me know if your interested or if this helped anyone at all lol. Check out the finished blog here and let me know if the whole thing breaks and explodes your computer :)

 

now live! no posts yet though lol

The Grand Finale! {October Challenge 9#}

So this is it. October is over! November is such a meh month actually no wonder Americans care so much about thanksgiving - I mean what else is there? Okay, before I get to into this month I gotta go back in time... to halloween!

I don't even remember what I did last halloween it was so boring, so I knew I had to make this year a better one. My bestie lives in Wales which is about 3 hours away but this year he was hosting a halloween party so i just had to be there. When we lived together we always did couple halloween costumes - in second year we were Dan and Phil and in third year we were Dana Scully and Fox Mulder from x files - so we knew we had to do something great again. So we decided to dress up as Juno and Paulie Bleaker from the film Juno which we both love in a huge way. My costume was relatively easy to put together and I knew I was going to borrow my friends shirt as it was a perfecr match!

On halloween morning I caught a train and when I got to my friends house we rewatched Juno and ate some toast. We wanted to take photos before it got dark so we did that before the party started. We decided a balloon would be the best thing for my fake pregancy belly even though in the pics it looks kind of crazy lol. I think the outfits look pretty good though! Another successful halloween costume i think :)

We tried to recreate the movie poster lol

 

Fake film poster i made lmao

The party was really fun and I got to see a friend I never get to see which was awesome!! Overall, halloween was really great and I hope all my blog readers also had a good time~ I then stayed with my friend all weekend and we hung out and watched loads of buffy! After 3 years or so we have finally finished it lol, for me it was my second time watching it. We also went on some nice walks and ate lots of snacks lol. Today I got the train back and on my journey home my manager called me asking if I could do overtime for tomorrow .sob I said yes for some reason T-T.

So .... the October Challenge is over! And it was loads of fun... now time to check my list of things to do LOL. 

 - Stop using YouTube! (x)

Kinda? I basically didn't watch any but I did watch a IASIP clip in a moment of weakness LOL. Anyway it's really made me consider just how much I time I spent on YouTube before and now in the future I think I'll be less likely to reach for it when I'm bored.

- Make more interesting blog posts 

Okay so. I don't think I did this lol but I did try a little. I think in the future I'll keep trying to make more unique posts!

 
- Reupload all the images from my website that are on imgur 

Okay I think i've done about 70% of this. so something!

 
- Listen to more of my CDs (x)

This I have totally done, I also got some new CDs this month yay. Defo will be continuing listening~

 
- Watch films more often (x)

This month I watched 9 films and I rewatched 3! This is a lot for me and I want to continue watching this many as I really enjoyed it. Here is the list!

 

- Goodbye Lenin!

- Novitiate

- Brides

-Brother Sun, Sister Moon

- Goodbye Lenin! (again)

- Walk the Line

- Priest

- In This House of Brede

- Jesus Camp

- BlacKkKlansman

- Jennifer's Body (rewatch)

- Juno (rewatch) 

- Make some art! (x)

At the start of the month I made a little art but then nothing oops. This past week I have started again and have made some christmas cards and gift tags for a stall on Saturday!!

 

I think the challenge was like basically successful lol I mean I did blog alot. It was really fun and this month I will attempt to blog more too! Thank u for reading and you can see all the blogs from this month under the tag October Challenge ^.^