Hello folks!  My week off was wonderful and refreshing, and I feel like I’ve got a lot of great new ideas for Smiles Go With Everything.  As you may have noticed, I spent part of my time last week re-vamping the look of the blog, and I am so incredibly happy with it!  It feels great to actually be able to apply what I learned in my web design class last year, and I have to say that I felt quite pleasantly nerdy spending two hours last week playing with CSS, HTML and Photoshop.

You may have also noticed that my blog’s tagline has changed to read “style and sustainability for the optimistic soul”.  As I mentioned last week, I want to shift my focus slightly.  Sustainability is an issue that is near and dear to my heart, and I am fascinated by the way that it intersects with personal style.  I want to spend more time digging into that issue, and in particular I want to talk even more than before about shopping second-hand, hand-made and local.  As always, I will be talking about these issues with an optimistic perspective.  It can be easy to get depressed when talking about how much humans have screwed up the environment, but I would rather focus on the positive side of what we can do to make things better, as opposed to dwelling on the negative side.

This is still a style blog, and I will continue to post Daily Outfits, Etsy Love posts and tell you about how I shop in my weekly Shopping Plan posts.  I’ll still talk about how I alter clothes to work for my figure.

For now though, there probably will be fewer outfit posts than before.  With my current schedule at my job (which I love!), it’s hard to get four outfit photos every week.  It was getting to the point where it was becoming a chore for me, as opposed to something I enjoyed doing.  For right now, I’m only going to post outfits twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays.  If I can get to a point where I can take more outfit photos every week without it feeling like an obligation, then I may increase the number of outfit posts.  At this time, it’s just about figuring out what kind of a schedule works best for me.

Outfit posts will definitely always be around, though.  I think that they are a vital part of this blog, and they fit in perfectly with my new focus on sustainability.  I put a great emphasis of shopping second-hand and hand-made in my personal life, and outfit posts are a a great way to demonstrate that it is completely possible to be stylish in a way that is not detrimental to the environment.

I’m very excited about all the great new things to come, and I hope that you are too!

Cardigan: J Crew (via eBay)
Blouse: Ann Taylor LOFT (thrifted)
Skirt: Semantiks
Shoes: Clarks Apple Sky
Necklace: Coryell Design
Earrings: Wear-thou
Watch: Target

Quote: It’s Hard to Be Five: Learning How to Work My Control Panel, Jamie Lee Curtis & Laura Cornell