Lizzie Bennet Diaries is killing me.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if you aren't watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, you're a damn fool. (And you might want to stop reading this, for spoilers sake.)

Look at that gazing. Oh the power of that male gaze! (Lit major, you know. I can't help it.)

I discovered LBD sometime towards the end of last year. I clicked on a Pinterest link, and boom, there it was. At first I thought it was kind of silly, and really with as much makeup as she is wearing in that first episode, it does come off as waaay cheesy. However, I have watched every other version of Pride and Prejudice ever made, so I thought I would stick with it for a while. And then something magic happened. I fell so deep deep deep in love. Like how much Darcy loves Lizzie in love. Really, it's kind of gross how much I love this show.

Yes please.

I love Pride and Prejudice in all forms. There is something so compelling about loving someone in spite of yourself, loving them even after they've rejected you, and using that love to transform yourself into a better person. I love me a piner. All it really takes for me to love any book or show or whatever is for there to be a guy who is secretly (or not so secretly) pining over a girl he can't have. And Darcy is the ULTIMATE PINER! He loves her secretly, loves her despite it all, pines for her for the entire story. Plus, it doesn't hurt that he is always hot, rich, and hunky. Daniel Vincent Gordh is definitely no exception. Even if his shirt is sadly always dry.

When I first saw Daniel as Darcy, I was less than enthused. He was awkward and stunted and all flaring nostrils and grimaces. Bleh. Of course, that was the point. We're to see him the way Lizzie sees him; at first, he is rather abhorrent, but as time passes he softens and starts gazing at her and joking around and becoming all cute and squidgely. Therein lies the beauty of this adaptation: the better-than-you Darcy from the book is now just a really awkward Darcy who can't manage to attract Lizzie even with his piercing blue eyes and chiseled jaw because he is just too uncomfortable all the time. Awwww. So many of the social foibles that drive the story aren't issues today, and the writers have done a truly impressive feat in modernizing it in ways that are plausible, inventive and fun.

Well, this is the last week of Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and you know what that means. They finally got together and fangirls across the world squealed and died. Including yours truly. I am, in fact, writing posthumously. And not only did they get together and kiss and yes!, but we also got two videos of them being all happy and coupley and so so cute. 

I think I may have peed a little when I saw this moment from Saturday's Q&A video. It's so stinking cute that it caused my body to stop functioning briefly. Playful Darcy! Who smiles! And she would have said yes! Plus, it sent me into a flurry of "they've totally done it!" thoughts, since he totally wouldn't be picking her up if he wasn't comfortable touching her bod, if you know what I mean. Wink Wink. I'm not the only one who thought this either, if the large amount of smutty fanfiction out there is any indicator. 

Nerd Alert.

Today was the last video with Darcy, which is unsurprising though still sad. Only one more video left. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself once it is over. Wait, that's not true. I decided to re-read all fourteen of the Robert Jordan books, so I will be doing that for basically the next 6 months. Hopefully it will go faster once I am not so obsessed with LBD that I'm reading fanfiction every day instead of actual books. But that is neither here nor there. Today's video was thankfully nice and long and we got lots of Lizzie and Darcy cuteness, which all the people in the comments were griping about, but I could pretty much watch forever. I wish it never had to end. Darcy was very generous with the smiling today, too, which was nice. I went on a long rant to my husband over the weekend about how talented Daniel Vincent Gordh is to convey so much emotion with so little movement of his mouth. My husband did not care. But I still talked about it for a good fifteen minutes, then forced him to watch the video again for posterity's sake.

This post seems to have gotten away from me a bit. I had originally intended to share my Lizzie Bennet Diaries smashbook page and tell a little bit about why I love the show, but apparently I love it too much to bot gush for an hour. Meh. Here is the page I made about it.

I was pretty pleased to find that DCWV had a Dear Jane paper stack with tons of lovely Austen inspired images, and quotes from Pride and Prejudice. Way to make something for a very specific type of nerd, DCVW! I had to have it. Even the hubby couldn't protest when it was so clearly made for me. 

I sure will miss LBD, but I am looking forward to seeing what obsessions April has in store. Any suggestions?

Fill That Sucker Up!

Hi Y'all. I've had some pictures of my Smashbook up on Pinterest for a while now, and I finally have a blog to link them to. So, if you clicked here from Pinterest, you are in the right place! I'm Erin and I loves me some Smashbooking.

This is by far my most repinned page. Probably because people want to see what all that chicken scratch on there actually says. I know I click on pins all the time hoping for a closer look at what is there, so here you go, satisfy your curiosity pinterest viewers!

This was one of the first Smashbook pages I ever made. The third one, to be exact. What I like about this page is that there isn't much on it but my scribbles and ideas. And, of course, pictures of my kids.
You'd be hard pressed to find a page in my Smashbook that doesn't have them on it somewhere.

I wrote everything on here with the pen that comes with the Smashbook. It is one of the best pens I've ever had and I use it for everything. It is especially great for doodles and little line drawings. I'm not much of an artist, but I do think it's fun to sketch little pictures and visual aids. I also have the SmashStick in pink and blue, but the black one is the one I use the most. If you're wondering if you should buy the other colors, I'd say skip them. The pink and blue are very light and do not stand out well against most of the pages in the Smashbooks unless they are white like this one.



 I am a huge fan of the Smashbook polka dot washi tape. (yes, technically I am a fan of all washi tape, but still!) I use it for everything all the time. These pictures were glued down, but I thought they looked better with a little bit of tape holding them down. Nowadays, I cut my tape thinner a lot of the time, but I almost always leave the ends ripped instead of cut. A Smashbook is supposed to be messy, after all.

When I made this page, I had just moved into a new house that was twice the size of our old place, and I discovered that we had a lot of empty walls. So I spent a lot of time scouring the internet for cute and inexpensive things I could make to brighten up our home. As you can see here, this was the first time I discovered Pinterest! Oh boy, was it a revelation! I've never been one to dilly dally on the internet much, but Pinterest sure changed that. It's such a wonderful time sucking, soul stealing creativity inspiring site, and I've wasted many an hour endlessly scrolling like some kind of craft zombie. Me need ideas for gifting! Me hungry for recipes for laundry detergent! Me must click more more more. Oh pinterest, I love you.

Anyways, I think at this point I didn't actually have an account, so I had to scribble down all my ideas in my Smashbook. And add visual aids. And instructions. In the end, though, I did end up making a bunch of the things I jotted down here. The ruler growth chart is one of my favorites, because it is so cool and such a great conversation starter, and it was SUPER simple to make. Here is a link to my pinboard featuring a few of these things: http://pinterest.com/eyessocruel/we-made-these/. 

Super close up, in case you actually want to read all the little notes I wrote.

I want to make the rest of these!

I tried to make the kitchen sunburst mirror thing too, but it was a complete bust! My own personal craft fail. I bought all this plastic silverware and tried to spray paint it blue. But I didn't realize that spray paint wont stick to plastic unless you prime it first, so basically I just covered my garage in globs of old spray paint. Then I tried to paint a platter silver instead of using a mirror... oh boy, that was a mess. And ugly. But I had bought all the stuff, so I kept going. Perseverance! I then tried to hot glue the plastic silverware to the platter and ended up melting half of it and having the other half pop off ten minutes later. So many lessons learned in a single project, the best way they can be learned: through tons of mess and frustration. Ugh.

Well, I derailed a bit from the topic of this Smashbook page, but I hope it was mildly entertaining. I'd love to talk to you about Smashbooking or failing at your projects or how to make  things or about my grammatical errors. Please feel free to comment or send me a message. I will continue to add posts about the other Smashbook pages that are up on Pinterest in the days to come. Thanks for reading!

Smash it!

Hello again.

Just wanted to share with you a couple pages from my Smashbook, and some of my usual go-to products and techniques. 

March Starts.

When I Smash, I tend to do it in loosely chronological order. I start each month with a tab and a calendar pocket that I fill with odds and ends from the month that are too big to just glue down: cards, notes from my hubby, big pictures the kids have drawn, shopping lists, the worship folder from church, even just extra pictures with little notes on them. I think these pockets are really awesome, and I've gone through several packages of them by now. They are where I store all that stuff that I want to remember but never have a place for. Before I started Smashbooking, I had tons of boxes filled with all kinds of little things that I never looked at but couldn't bear to get rid of. But now I know exactly where that stuff should go, and where I can find whatever I'm looking for later.

I like to fill my calendar in with all kinds of things that are going on for us. Sometimes if things are busy, it is just events: birthdays, parties, date nights, etc. But when I am regularly adding to my Smashbook, I like to leave little notes about the boring stuff that makes up our life, like what days it rained, or what my son said one afternoon, or something that made me happy. You can see that this one is only half full- I'll keep adding to it as the month goes on.

As you can see on this page, and pretty much all my others, I am obsessed with washi tape, which is just patterned tape. I had a friend ask me once why I loved it so much, and I had a hard time explaining exactly why it was so wonderful. I use it to tape stuff down in my book, but I also use it just to decorate anything and everything. My sewing machine is covered in little strips of washi tape. There are three different ones on here, but I've got at least twenty five now.

This page shows a couple of other things that I habitually use in my Smashbook. I am constantly using paint chips for journaling blocks and photo mats and anchoring all the junk that a Smashbook is meant to keep. Any time I go to Walmart or Lowes, I stick a new handful of paint chips in my purse all guiltily. I don't know why I always feel bad about this since they are FREE, but I do. I'm always sneaking around in the paint section, peeking around corners and blushing. I'm pretty sure the Walmart paint guy is on to me. No one paints that frequently. These are solid color ones, but I like the strips of several colors too.

I also like to make my pictures into two inch squares in photoshop before printing them. I think this started with wanting to keep instagram pictures, but I've since abandoned instagram and just kept making the tiny pictures. I like them this way because they are small enough to get a bunch on there (I always have waaay to many pictures to scrap them all), but still big enough to be bright and dynamic. Plus it is cheaper than printing a thousand full size pictures.

Okay, here's the page that is really cute (if I do say so myself).

Look at my hubby all scowling while I kissed him in that second pic in the photo strip. He is lame.

I'm super pleased with how this page turned out, because I think it is a nice mix of just getting your stuff down and more traditional fancy scrapbooking. I mean, it's still pretty random, but look at how much pretty stuff is on here! I love the gorgeous pages that you see in magazines, but I get anxiety over making them myself. I get all stressed about perfect layouts and never being caught up, and I can't make myself put anything down on the page. Hence, my love of Smashbook. No stress, just glue your junk in there! But I do still like to make pages scrapbooky sometimes. 

I recently discovered a bunch of products by Basic Grey 70% off at my local JoAnns, and I bought that shit up! The striped background paper on the left, the star pin, the banner, and the noteworthy tag on the bottom right are all from this collection. The pages in the Smashbook are always cute, but for some reason I always end up completely covering them with other paper. I have been accused of having a paper fetish though, so that might explain it. In any case, I love the six by six inch paper pads for my Smashing because they are the perfect size for photo mats and journaling squares and covering up the frequent pictures of horses that seem to appear in all the Smashbooks.

Here you can also see one of my very favorite Smashbook products ever, the label maker. I love this and use it all the time. I like to add a title to my pages and labels are such a cool way to do that. Plus, I am a nerd and like to organize shit. Don't judge. I dug out a bunch of things from my kids my stash for this page. Bits of ribbon and flowers and buttons and a metal tag. The journaling spot on the left is actually just the packaging from some chipboard tags. Because I am also a bit of a hoarder (at least I'm an organized one). And of course all the washi tape. I can't seem to help myself.

I don't know why I had like six paragraphs of stuff to say about that first page, which I don't even like that much and I can't come up with much to say about this one that I really like a lot. But there it is. Are you sold on Smashing yet?

Yep. It Happened.

Momma's got a brand new blog.

Hello there friend. My name is Erin and this is my first ever blog. Which basically means that I have no idea what I'm doing or exactly what to say, but that is okay, since this is mostly an exercise in getting back into the habit of writing. And since probably no one will read this.

Me: Molly's Momma, Tickler Extraordinare, Wearer of Weird Homemade Jewelry

Okay, so a little about me. I am a 28 year old stay-at-home Mom with two gorgeous children who drive me absolutely crazy. I have a completely useless degree in English literature, so I have a lot of nerdy tendencies, and a spectacular proclivity to get something stuck in my head and obsess over it for ages. I love books of all varieties and would rather spend my time at Pemberley or Hogwarts or Bon Temps than in my house. I like sparkly indie rock and will unabashedly play a single (usually sappy) song on repeat forty times until I can unravel the feelings or story that it inspires. I'm essentially a family oriented person, and I spend a lot of my time just hanging out with my parents and sisters. I like to take lots of pictures of my kids (surprise surprise, right?), and look at my kids, and brag about my kids, and read books to my kids, and tell funny stories about my kids, and complain about my kids. 

It gets bigger and bigger. Kind of like my butt.

I'm an avid and enthusiastic *Smashbook-er. My main reason for creating a blog is to share my Smashbook pages, and for my pinterest pins to link to something. I am a huge advocate of Smashbooking, and I have tried to force mostly everyone I know to Smash too. I have kind of a terrible memory, and I mostly blame that on Mom brain, but because of my inability to retain information for more than 48 hours at a time, keeping a record of what goes on in my life and the lives of my family is something I take very seriously. I'm a little tempted to insert some cheesy cliche here about how life is lived in the mundane details, but I'll refrain. Suffice it to say, I really love the low-key, no pressure, messy recording of mundanity that is my Smashbook. If you aren't Smashing, you should be. Because it is awesome.

Currently, my obsessions are Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Lizzie Bennet Diaries and oh yeah, Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I cannot get enough. Can. Not. As a general life rule, I try to avoid fanfiction. Not because I dislike it, but because I love it so so much. Fanfiction is the literature equivalent of Thin Mints. It's rather unhealthy for you, you're not going to stop until you've consumed waaaay more than you should, and it is just sooooo satisfying. So, just in case you aren't clued in yet, let me make it clear: I have read nearly every Lizzie Bennet Diaries fanfiction anyone has ever written. And that is a lot. Could I have found a better use of my time? Certainly. Could I have found one more emotionally satisfying than reading all the fanfiction? Eh. Debatable. It is awfully nice to live in Pride and Prejudice land as much as possible.

Lizzie Bennet Diaries

So, for now that is probubaly what this blog will be about. Smashbook, my kids, and Lizzie Bennet Diaries. At least until that is over at the end of the month and I have to find something new to nerd out about. Like Beauty and the Beast? Squaresville? We'll see. 

Thanks for reading imaginary internet person!