2010 August | Making it Lovely

Archive - August, 2010

Another Baby

We’re going to have another baby!

Also, I think our matching mother/daughter dresses are funny. ;)

This pregnancy has been less worrisome than the first, but I have been exhausted (and nauseous). I’m looking forward to getting a little energy back and feeling better as I head into the second trimester.

I’m due February 12 and Eleanor won’t turn two until April 29, so we’ll have two under two for a while. Sounds… challenging! But it also sounds fun.

My Life, Parenting, Pregnancy • 413 Comments • August 9, 2010

Honor Roll

August
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Sometimes I come across something so cute/sweet/charming/funny/pretty/inspiring/lovely that I just want to share it with you. These are the things that have made my honor roll.

Do you remember Catherine’s nursery? Well now the nursery for her baby brother James is finished. I wonder if baby James is here yet…
Here’s how granny sandals became chic (and yes, I want a pair).
Penelope’s bedroom is so sweet. I love all of the happy yellow!
If you liked Eleanor’s pillowcase dress, you’re going to like all of Fable’s handmade dresses too.
I’ve never rocked false eyelashes, but I think maybe I’d like to give it a try. (Have you?)
Jo’s house is looking good thanks to a little help from Little Green Notebook.
And speaking of Little Green Notebook, Jenny wants to know if you can have children and still have nice things. (I say yes.)
Everyone has seen Mila’s daydreams by now, yes? (Go look if you haven’t yet — I’ll wait.) Well here’s an interview with Mila’s mom, Adele.

Honor Roll • 21 Comments • August 6, 2010

New Old-Fashioned Technology

August
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I love the look of vintage technology. The ability to fix up old electronics however is not among the skills that I possess. Luckily there are plenty of new items that have the same styling as the classic old pieces. Here are four of my current favorites.

Do you have any similar new/old tech pieces in your home? I have three vintage-style phones: a red one in the bedroom (from Pottery Barn), a white one in my office (by Crosley), and a wall-mounted white one in the kitchen (also by Crosley). It’s sort of surprising that I don’t have that pink one though, eh?

Covetable • 44 Comments • August 5, 2010

Eleanor’s Pillowcase Dress

August
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I checked another item off my 30 Before Thirty list last night! ~~#8: Sew a dress for Eleanor.~~ I made a pillowcase dress, following Jaime’s tutorial on Prudent Baby.

I was going to make my own bias tape because Jacinda’s was so cute, but then I hesitated after realizing that it’s probably a huge pain to do without the proper doodad. Twitter confirmed my suspicions.

So I went with the brown bias tape that I already had on hand, and some Amy Butler fabric that I bought for curtains but never used. The dress took me three hours from start to finish, but that is because I am most definitely a novice when it comes to sewing. It would probably only take an hour and a half, maybe two hours, for someone with more experience.

The dress turned out nicely though. It’s so sweet! I’ll probably swap out the long satin ribbon for something a little more practical, but it was pretty for these photos.

If you’d like to make a dress for a little girl but aren’t sure of your sewing abilities, I recommend making a pillowcase dress. The trickiest part was attaching the bias tape to the arm holes, but if you can handle that the rest is easy. And it’s so cute. I want to make a million more.

Crafty (& Handy), Parenting • 99 Comments • August 4, 2010

Adding Related Posts

August
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I’ve noticed a lot of people using LinkWithin to display related posts at the end of each entry. It looks great, but I had a few concerns about using it on Making it Lovely. The stats would get thrown off a bit when using the widget because all of the referring links are shown as coming from LinkWithin. I also wanted something self-hosted for more control (*ahem*), and something that could be cached to avoid slowing down the site.

I decided to go with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Hooray, it’s self-hosted! And it doesn’t throw off my referring stats! And it caches and works well in conjunction with WP Super Cache! And it’s totally customizable! It even adds related posts to your RSS feed if you so choose. Nice.

The default display is simply an ordered list. That’s fine for the RSS feed, but I wanted a layout with thumbnail images similar to the standard LinkWithin widget. So then I started playing around with it to make it look nice…

I quickly realized that I’d have to enable the thumbnail feature that was introduced in WordPress 2.9x. And then go through each of my posts and set the thumbnail, which I had been doing manually. OK. It’s a lot of work, but I can do that. I’m thorough (and compulsive) enough.

Then I began working on a custom template, delving into the PHP.

I got the thumbnails to show up! Hmm, but they were lined up vertically. So then I had to create a table-style layout, using CSS.

The automatic placement stuck the related posts right at the end of each single post’s content, but I wanted to move it down a little. Fortunately, this was fairly easy. I just turned off the automatic placement and inserted a line of PHP into my single.php template of my theme.

OK, pretty good. But now let’s cut to approximately three months later when it is still bothering me that the text underneath each thumbnail does not play nicely with the layout when it’s too lengthy. #$@&!. Of course it’s been so long that I don’t remember all of the work I had already done up until this point, so I have to refamiliarize myself with the CSS syntax that I set up.

But I finally finished!

And you know what? Maybe you would have noticed or maybe not. Maybe I spent hours upon hours, spread out over months working on something that would only make me happy, but I’m fine with that. I’m glad that I was able to really tweak the whole thing to get it exactly to my liking, even if it did take forever. I love a good coding challenge.

The Blog • 29 Comments • August 2, 2010