Delaney Paige

My Easy Instagram Hashtag Trick

I love Instagram. It's probably my favourite social media channel. I love posting photos. I love looking at photos. I love the community aspect. I love it all!

Hashtags are great for a few reasons.

• If you want to embrace the community aspect, you can link to other users with a common hashtag (the #getmessyartjournal is a perfect example). I have found some of my favourite accounts by browsing through the photos for a specific hashtag.
• If you are interested in building a following (which is not one of my top priorities), it's a good way to increase the chances of your photo reaching  a wider audience
• Using your "own" hashtag is also a good way to link all of your photos of a certain thing. However, this isn't a perfect art... all it takes is another pet owner to get a Gracie, and your #adventuresofgracie hashtag gets diluted with someone else's pet! 

My hashtag trick works because most of my photos can be lumped into one the following categories:

Books
    

Gracie
    

Creative Projects
    

Selfies
    Nature
    

From Where I Stand
    

And now, the trick...

Because I tend to use same hashtags, I have created a document in my "Notes" where I have copied all of my frequent hashtags by photo genre - this list is constantly evolving as I add and remove hashtags.

 

When I want to post a photo, I open up the note, copy the relevant hashtags onto my clipboard, open up Instagram, write my caption and then paste the pre-prepared hashtags.  

#easyaspie

What about you? Do you add hashtags on a whim? Or not at all? Is there an easier trick? I'd love to hear your secrets!

My First Attempt at Quilting: An Easy Triangle Quilt

I've been itching to make a quilt for years, but I was really nervous to tackle quilt making as a project. It always seemed to require so much accuracy and disciple, two skills that my creative hobbies don't usually involve.

However, after several years of pinning quilts regularly, I decided 2015 would be the year I'd give it a go. I figured worst case, I'd get one terrible quilt out of the deal and best case, I'd kick off a meaningful and productive hobby. Win / win, right?

Between Christmas and New Years, my local craft shop had their semi-regular "40% off quilting fabrics" sale. It seemed like a no-brainer. I could buy the fabrics for cheap so that I would have the motivation to actually make the quilt at some stage during the year ahead.

As it turns out, I loved my fabric choices so much that I couldn't wait to get started, and got through the first few steps (pre-wash, ironing, cutting) in a matter of days.

I used Elise's tutorial (here) as a rough guide and this is the finished project:

I completed the rest of the quilt over about a month and a half, working in shifts. One day was triangle-into-sqare day. Then an ironing day. Then sqares-into-rows day. Then another ironing day. Then rows-into-quilt-top-day.

Elise's advice about getting the corners to line up was a complete sanity saver: Decide how much you want this to bother you and move on. I decided early that I would do everything possible in the cutting and early sewing stages to sew with accuracy so that they points would line up, and then I wouldn't let it bother me if things didn't work out perfectly.  I was fully prepared for hideously un-matching points, but I was very pleasantly surprised at how well things lined up at the end. I'd say at least half of my points line up (some line up perfectly!) so that's pretty awesome for a first try in my books.

I made one real mistake in the process, which I have certainly learned from and won't make again. When I did my original fabric shopping, I didn't worry about purchasing the batting or the back and binding fabrics. The end of the project felt so far away that I decided not to worry about it. However, when I finished my quilt top quicker than expected and  started looking for those products, I couldn't find the backing fabric I had my heart set on. It took a couple of weeks to track down a backing fabric I liked (although I love it now), and was really discouraging to have an imposed break in an otherwise really quick process.

Anyway, once I purchased the last of the supplies, I flew through the rest. The piecing, quilting, and binding were done over the course of a weekend.

I used this tutorial for binding the quilt. I intended to hand sew the binding, but after wrestling with a needle and thread for over half an hour to get just two inches of really messy binding attached, I ripped out the stitches and ended up machine binding the whole thing in less than an hour. Best choice ever.

I absolutely LOVE the finished project. Hands down, this is my favourite thing I've ever made. It's already a staple on the back of the couch, and I often have to fight Gracie for it, because it's already her favourite, too.

Everday Professionals | WorkWhere 001

I've been so excited to share this post with you. I am teaming up with my internet soulmate Naomi Liddell, who happens to also be one of my real life besties to present a regular fashion post. Naomi is an amazingly talented design and branding expert. She skilfully balances a variety of roles, including business owner, blogger, mother, and wife. 

Naomi works from home, while my office is pretty conservative,  so we have radically different work wear. Hopefully, if you work in a traditional job, my outfits throughout this series might provide some ideas for you. If you work from home (or just hope to look super stylish on the weekends), head over to Naomi's blog to be hugely inspired.

One of the hardest parts of moving to a new country is trying to find new favourite clothing stores, particularly when you hate shopping. After a lot of pain exploring the Perth shops, I found my dream (work clothes) store: Portmans (not affiliate, just a favourite). Now, 90% of my work clothes are from Portmans. I can pretty much pick anything from the work section and feel confident that it'll be totally appropriate. Almost everything I own is black and / or white. It's like my own version of a capsule wardrobe - everything goes with everything!

 

 

 

This is a pretty standard work outfit for me: plain top, pencil skirt, black heels. It's simple, professional, un-wrinkled-able, and doesn't show too much skin. In other words, it ticks all of the boxes for work-appropriateness.

I definitely need to give the world's biggest thank you to the lovely Rachel Chapman for taking the photos (and for her patience with my exceptional awkwardness in front of the camera - we had to take probably hundreds of photos to pull this off).

Don't forget to head over to Naomi's blog to check out her #workwhere post as well - I promise you won't be disappointed!

5 Beautiful Moments

 

I was struck by a post a friend shared on Facebook the other day showing five photos of herself that made her feel beautiful. It got me thinking about which five photos I would choose of myself. 

I haven't been feeling very pretty lately. I mean this in a "I'm trying to be honest", not "fishing for complements" kind of way. You know how some days, you feel prettier than others? It's just that those days seem to happen a lot less frequently than they used to. This isn't something that plays heavily on my mind or keeps me up at night - it's more of a casual, passing observation.

I started trolling through my old photos, trying to decide which five photos I felt captured my beauty. As it turns out, I couldn't narrow it beyond 6 photos, and this is why:

 1. This photo was taken in October 2013 on Gracie's first trip to the beach. Even though half my face is outside of the frame, the happiness is so apparent. 

 2. This photo was taken in June 2011 at my university graduation ceremony. As I'm currently outlining in my career story, the path through university was not an easy one for me, and the pride and joy I felt this day was immense. 

 3. This photo was taken in a regional town in Mexico - possibly Oaxaca - in May 2010. I was on the (school) trip of a lifetime, travelling with some of my best friends throughout regional Mexico. Shane and I were in the beginning stages of dating, and our bond truly formed through emails and Skype trips while I was away. Being with someone who gave me the space to live my dreams was a new and surprising gift. I have this big dopey smile plastered on my face in practically every photo from this trip.

 4. When Shane and I moved to London, I found it really hard to make friends. I wasn't used to starting in a country without knowing anyone, and I found the isolation exceptionally tough. I eventually made some amazing, life-long friends, but it wasn't easy. This photo was taking during a rare night out (somewhere in 2011 or 2012), and the joy I felt at having a solid group of girlfriends was huge.

5. This was the first wedding Shane and I attended together. One of his cousins was getting married in Ireland, and we made the trip from London to attend. It would have been around October 2011, and it was the first proper introduction I had to a lot of Shane's extended family. This picture summarises Shane and I perfectly - he makes me laugh every single day.  

6. I have included this bonus picture from a few weeks ago, because it is one of the few pictures taken in the past year in which I truly feel beautiful. There's no wonder why - I'm surrounded by some of my best friends, my sister and her boyfriend, and Shane. I'm in a city that I love, and I'm truly happy.

I felt a bit silly when I started this - what good would looking at old photos be? How very self-indulgent! However, I hoped that in picking these five photos, I could try to draw out a common thread - to pinpoint how to feel more beautiful. In purely physical terms, I think the moral of the story is I should make a greater effort to wear my hair down and put in my contact lenses - clearly I feel prettier when I've done this. 

However, more than anything, this exercise demonstrated that for me, my beauty is most apparent in the moments of true joy. None of these photos are overly staged - the are moments of joy and confidence and laugher. 

Beauty isn't just about how you look on the outside. When I told Shane "I just don't feel that pretty these days", his response was "You look the same as you always did". This just reinforces the fact that beauty is more about how you feel than how you look.

If I haven't been feeling pretty lately, maybe it's because I haven't been feeling as many of these blissful moments. It's so easy to get stuck in the rut of work / eat / errands / sleep to lose sight of the importance of the pursuit of truly blissful moments. 

I would encourage you to try the same exercise - find five photos of yourself that you think are truly beautiful, and explain why.  Where do you find your beauty? This may be something you do privately, although if you are willing to share, please share your post in the comments below and link up on Instagram using the #5beautifulmoments hashtag.

We should all take the time to celebrate the beauty in life, even the beauty that shines from within ourselves.

Long Summer Days

I love daylight. The longer the day, the happier I am. In fact, 21 June has always been my favorite day of the year specifically because it is the longest day of the year.

In the summer of 2009, I had an internship in Nairobi, Kenya. Because Kenya sits right on the border, there is almost no variation in the length of the days between summer and winter. Essentially, the sun rises at 6 am and it sets at 6 pm. Every. Single. Day.  I found it very hard to adjust to - growing up in Canada, I was used to long summer nights, with the daylight lasting as late as 10 pm on the longest days in June.

While I was in Nairobi, I made friends with a Kenyan student who worked in my office. Halfway through the summer, he was offered an internship of his own in Switzerland. He was wildly excited - it was his first trip out of Kenya. Speaking to him a few weeks after he left, he told me he was settling in well, but he just couldn't wrap his head around the long evenings. He'd never realized that the further you get from the equator, the longer the summer nights (and the shorter the winter nights!) would be. It really got me thinking about how incredibly disconcerting it would be to have the sun rising and setting at times you weren't expecting.

Now fast forward 4 or 5 years to the present. 

We're living in Perth and can't speak highly enough about how amazing the lifestyle is. Quite honestly, my only real complaint is that the days just aren't long enough in the summer time. Even on the longest day of the year, the sun is down before 7.30 pm. We've been living in Perth for over a year and a half, and I still didn't feel like I had adjusted to the short days... until we arrived in Ireland last week.

It's amazing how quickly you can adjust to a new environment, because I, lover of the sun and long days, still find myself checking the clock in incredulation throughout the evening as the sun continues to shine. We're getting daylight until nearly 10 pm and it's August. Bliss! This is what holidays are made of!

(The photo above was taken by my beautiful bestie, Rachel Chapman)