Wednesday Words.

Hello! Sorry for the radio silence earlier this week, things have been busy and I was sick on the couch all weekend. Oh well, on to recovery! Today's Wednesday Words were inspired by (and borrowed from) this post from Jen Hatmaker, then the further I read in her post the more I realized how truly applicable they are to where I'm at in my life right now. Sometimes you just need a reminder to not settle. If there is something out there that's been popping up in the back of your mind for months or years or weeks, then go do it! Or take the steps necessary to make it possible. You owe it to yourself, your loved ones and your community to at least give that nagging idea consideration. For me this is about my career, I know that working mindlessly at a desk job for the rest of my life will NOT make me happy. I know the things that I am passionate about and what I could do with my skills and my passions. Now I just need to keep my fear in check and explore my options and the opportunities around me. 

In her post, Jen says this about how fear can play a factor in our lives:
What are you good at? Not sure? What do people constantly say you are good at? Others can usually identify our gifts long before we are willing to concede. Maybe it is career material. I’ve long said that someone will pay you to do what you love. You might be stuck in a job you hate doing work you don’t care about while your gifts are languishing on the sidelines, awaiting your courage to put them in the game.

Friday Favs!

I have ANOTHER new fun feature on the CHC blog for you guys today! Friday Favorites is a feature that tons of bloggers (including one of my favs, Iowa Girl Eats!) use to share things that they've loved from around the web during the week. So to follow in the trend of those who came more successfully before me, here are my Friday Favs of the week! 

Let's start out with something hilarious and stylish, shall we? HGTV designer Emily Henderson recently designed a space for Snoop Dogg with Airbnb at SXSW and the finishing product is this strange combo of totally outrageous and kind of chic? Check it our for yourself on Emily's blog here!

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For another design related favorite from this week take a look at Karlie Kloss' New York townhome on Vogue.com. I love seeing younger celebrities who are totally down to earth and I think Kloss epitomizes this. And not only was her short hair do' my inspiration for a cut last summer but now her design style is an inspiration as well. Karlie worked with the wonderful Nate Berkus on getting the right look for her first home.

See more of it here!

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Next up is this week's Must Read: "When Women Have It All" an editorial by HuffPost blogger and Girls Globe Communications Director, Emma Saloranta. 

We want a world where women everywhere can, truly, have it all -- a safe, healthy, balanced and fulfilled life, with equal opportunities for everything and anything despite where they are born, where they live, what the color of their skin is, what religion they practice. We need a world where women can finally realize their full potential and become agents of change and progress. In a world where women have it all, it is not only women and girls who benefit, but every single one of us -- because women's and girls' well-being translates into well-being and progress on a much broader level.

Read her whole post here.

Favorite Food I want to try to make is next! I've been wanting to try making Indian food at home now that i think I've got the hand of our new rice cooker/veggie steamer (possibly my favorite wedding gift) but I've been a little intimidated. But Damn Delicious' recipe for a crockpot Indian Butter Chicken seems right up my alley, I think I might have to give this one a whirl. 

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And apparently overalls are having a fashion moment?! Although I have to admit I kind of love Atlantic Pacific's look here, I'm not totally convinced that they will ever override a farmer stereotype look in the great state of Iowa. However if you're totally diggin' this look you can check out Kendi's post or the Glitter Guide's post. 

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And last but not least, and to start off your weekend in the happiest way possible, I give you a puppified version of Pharrell's "Happy."

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Happy almost weekend, and thanks for reading!

Curating Empowerment.

I was recently introduced to She Loves Magazine and this Curating Empowerment project through Sarah Bessey's blog, in her post she talks about how Pinterest can be a wonderful, marvelous place (everybody knows how much I LOVE pinterest), but that she's noticed how many people, women specifically have started to use it in a negative way, masking it as 'inspiration.' I totally agree with her, the line between pinning healthy inspirational, daydreaming photos and photos that reinforce negative body image or serious materialism is very small. In light of this, I really love She Loves idea of using pinterest to curate empowerment for women, instead of using pinterest to merely reinforce all the things that society tells her she cannot do, or should not do or cannot be. 

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Sarah Bessey says it in a fantastic way here:

I am curating a vision of empowerment.

I'm curating images of empowerment to work, to lead, to have courage, 

to be authentic, to be bold, fearless, strong.

I'm curating a holistic view of womanhood to remind me of the truth.

I'm curating a view of womanhood that reinforces personhood, strength, faith, beauty, diversity, growth, change, leadership, and wisdom. 

So I wanted to share some of my images of empowerment with you here on the blog. 

You can also follow along with me in this pinterest journey on my new 

empowerment pinterest board here!

Join in the movement, make your own empowerment board, on Pinterest or in real life!

Wednesday Words

Today's new blog installment is called Wednesday Words. There are more fun quotations and pictures floating around the internet then I think anyone knows what to do with, but I thought I would share a little weekly motivation with you through them anyways :) Today's  Wednesday Words is particularly relevant to what I've started here this week and even things I've been processing with where I would like my career to go in the future. reminder to self: thinking does not equal doing. 

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Recognizing Our Privilege.

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I recent started reading Sarah Bessey's blog (she's the author of "Jesus Feminist" a book I'm currently in transit with), and in one of her more recent posts she discussed a movement of years past, where many christian women were signing petitions stating that they would not let their children see them working on their computers, because of the apparent negative impact that it would have on their children. Sarah refutes this argument in a variety of forms but I found one thing especially interesting in her post. Sarah said: 

I'll also gently point out right here the privilege inherent in the idea 

that we can choose whether or not our children see us work. 

(see more of her post here)

This concept is so interesting to me because I think it is such a symptom of how many typically white, middle-class, often suburban, women (and all humans really) interact with each other. Now admit that I am generalizing here, but I find it so interesting that said women, can so easily look at those who are clearly different than them, who clearly have needs that are not being met (starving women and children in Africa, to use a common yet very real trope) and empathize with them. We (us suburban, white, possibly Jesus loving women) can see the needs of those who are starkly different than us and we go on mission trips, we donate during lent and we help them start their own businesses because we can see that we have more than they do and we have been culturally trained to act in a colonial helper manner ( I am intentionally using an us/them trope here). Yet when it comes to the working women who may be our neighbors, our classmates, even our friends, our vision of our own privilege is not so clear.  In a society of such stark haves and have nots I think we often forget how easy it is to pretend or to burn our way into debt in order to keep up with appearances. There are so many things about our culture that we need to unpack and take apart in this situation--the standard of appearances for example, or perhaps not even that we cannot see the privilege in never having our children see us work but also perhaps that some women may indeed enjoy their work, do it of their own free will and even want to share that with their children. 

I digress... going back to this idea of privilege that I found so striking in Sarah Bessey's post. I think that those in need in our own communities often go unseen and unnoticed (this can indeed be for the best in many situations), as an eighth grader you may not know that your locker mate is on free or reduced lunch for example, or that their Christmas gifts came from the church's food shelf. What I am trying to pull out of this discussion is an awareness. Poverty and privilege take form in a variety of ways and it seems that we all forget this. As a friend who I had lunch with this week reminded me, I can go back to the campus of my beloved alma mater and feel like I am totally poor, not nearly in the same place financially as my former classmates, then I could drive a few miles northeast to the local middle school and look around--giving me an opportunity to realize how much I truly have. Let me sum up, because I suspect that I've been rambling, where I really wanted to go with this post is to create a functional reminder. A sort of  "check yourself before you wreck yourself" moment of recognizing our own privilege, both in large and small ways, everyday. I'm not nearly perfect at remembering to do this everyday, and I don't pretend to know what it might look like in your life, but I think it is an important task that we each do, everyday--remembering what we have and being thankful for it, while not judging the choices others may make, or crafting some kind of over arching golden rule of how every one or every woman or every parent should act--remembering that we do not know their situation, remembering our own privileges. 

DIY & Home Inspiration: Craft Room.

Another one of my hopes for the new CHC is to refocus from finding happiness in having things, into refinding the joy I get from creating things. Crafting may seem insignificant in the big scheme of the world but I think that the process of creating and then being able to take pride in what you made is something that is not only important but is also indeed significant. Someday (daydreaming here)  I would love to have a space in my home that is entirely dedicated to crafting and creating, a crafty home office of sorts. I love the craft room that Taylor from It's Taylor Made Blog created for herself in her family's home so I thought I would share it with you. And in the meantime, I suppose my rubbermaid drawers in the corner of our spare room will have to do. You can see more of Taylor's Craft Room and her process of making it here.

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I love the overall mix of clean white and color that she has going on in this room. It makes for such a clean yet fun space. And her idea storage shelf and bins in the back? Exactly what every crafter needs to store all their supplies without having to dig through piles of things. Not not mention that dream of a crafting table, front and center. ah le sigh. 

Menu Monday: Crostini Craving.

Menu Monday is one of the new blog features I have planned for the new and improved CHC! 

For this first installment I want to talk all things crostini. In my personal learning-to-cook experience, the success of a crostini is really in the correct amount of oven toasting time. You have to remember that the crostini will need some time to crisp up after you take it out of the oven, if you wait for the crispiness in the oven they will burn! Which is seriously upsetting.  I feel like I've mastered the basic bruschetta, tomato and mozzarella crostini, but here are a few others that I would love to try: asparagus? fruit? Wisconsin cheese? count me in!

Top Right: cherry tomato crostini
Bottom Right: asparagus and ricotta
Top Left: honeycrisp and gorgonzola
Bottom Left: nectarine and wisconsin

What about you guys? Are there any Pinterest worthy recipes out there that make you want to expand your cooking skills?

thoughts and a new journey.

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Hello Everyone! 

You may have noticed that I have been on a bit of a blogging hiatus, and before my hiatus that I had been posting rather inconsistently. The reason? you may ask. Well the reason is this post. This post is something I have been thinking about for a while, and it may seem inconsequential as a majority of my blog followers are my friends (love you!) but as this blog originally started as a creative outlet for myself, I think I owe it to myself (and any of you readers) that I explain. In the past few months I came to a slow realization that something about this blog and the blogging community I came to love and read every day was just off. Around the same time I came to a realization in myself that I was focusing on the wrong things here, and even more so that my focus in this blog-o-sphere was leading me to make unhealthy decisions in my life. Not unhealthy in a literal-bodily way (not referring to drugs, food or alcohol) but still unhealthy. Don't get me wrong, I still believe that style blogs can be an excellent creative outlet and source of inspiration. But for me I found that it was leading me down this overly material path, where I was spending more than I wanted to on things I neither needed or wanted. I found that reading certain blogs everyday just made me wish and want more--this can be seen in every style bloggers frequent "wish list" and "gift guide" posts--something that has become and unfortunate trope in the style blog world, in my opinion. 

In the process of this self realization, I decided to purge. Purge my closet of all of the things I did not wear, need or even truly want; realizing that even after this I still have much more than I truly need and certainly much more than most 22-year-olds around the world. I then decided to seriously reform my spending habits, this has not been an easy task and will certainly be a difficult journey as I (like many others, I suspect) now see that I was using shopping as an emotional outlet. I want to only be buying things when they are needed, with the rare shopping for fun trip with friends. I've started using mint.com to help me track me spending and my debts, and seeing now that amount of money I used on just shopping...it's ridiculous. I've always thought of myself as someone who is globally minded, with a heart for those in need or who are less privileged than myself--and now truly seeing the amount of privilege I have, I can literally see by looking at my spending habits just how many hungry people I could have fed had I not gone to Target that one time, or how many mothers I could have provided safe birthing kits to if I had not gone to the Gap that other time, or how I could have contributed to building a school where there was no access to education--I am truly dumb-struck by it. 

Because of this I felt the need to bring this slow self-realization back to this blog and also to the blogs that I follow. I am not necessarily advocating that everyone out there with a designer handbag or and excellent shoe collection get rid of all of their things and never buy anything nice again. But I did want to share with you how seeing others everyday with these things has led me to lose focus of what I actually care about and what my true passions are. Being almost a year out of school now I can see what really made me happy in school was being able to read, write and have in depth discussions about what was going on in the world around me. I still love beautiful things, and I do believe that dressing up for a day at work can make you feel better about yourself--and with today's media I think this is extremely important. But I have learned the need to but this love for beauty in perspective, and perhaps to even redefine beauty for myself. Considering my needs, and what I most value in my life--my friends, family, my education, the gift of choice and liberation as a woman--I want to give those things to others (in the most non-colonial white privilege way possible, promise).

With all of this now off my chest, I want to share some changes that are going to be happening around here. I still plan on sharing my DIY projects with you all, and hopefully more of them! Crafting and making things your own is something that I truly enjoy, and often can be very affordable. I am also hoping to share some of my food adventures with you all, this is something that could be very entertaining, if you know me you know my cooking skills are questionable at best, but I want to learn and hopefully get away from boxed dinners. I also still plan on sharing inspiration with you, especially related to homes and lifestyles. As a young 20-something I am trying my best to make my living space a reflection of me, even with an almost exclusive collection of hand-me-downs, in this realm I think a little daydreaming can be healthy motivation. Where the big change will come however, is in the main posts. I don't plan on doing nearly as many outfit inspiration posts (though there may be some here and there), rather I plan on sharing my thoughts and frustrations with you. Things I love and find hopeful like the recent "Ban Bossy" campaign for young women and girls, things I find interesting like rebuttals to Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" or Barbies recent "Unapologetic" campaign. And things I find upsetting or believe need to be discussed which could include comments from your friendly GOP congressman or resurfacing gender stereotypes. 

These are the things that I am truly passionate about, and I don't want to lose site of them again or find them lost behind a blogger's Celine handbag. I won't be offended if you chose to un-follow or no longer read, but if this is a journey you think you might be interested in too, then please stick around. 

Heather 

ps: I promise to continue to instagram pictures of my dog 

and my extensive collection of Target shoes.