Scoring Goals.

Well my dears, the summer has officially come to a close. It is the eve of my Junior year of college and I couldn't be more thrilled for it to be here. Much like the end of last summer, I am going to sum up how I did with my Summer Goals List that I made at the very end of April. My oh my how priorities can change in the matter of three and a half months! Clearly I didn't do some of the things, but there was method behind my badness. Here it goes, I hope you enjoy.

1. Attack my "Learn About This" folder.

Yes!! I attacked it in a more efficient way than I could have ever imagined.

Any of my good friends could tell you that I am a die-hard bookmarker on the computer. If my good ole Mac could sit down for an interview and speak its mind, it would say how weighted down it was with websites I have made note of in the past few years. So I discovered Pinterest and now most all of my websites I have relocated somewhere on there.

I did however break down midway, had a fit (because it practically took me all day to go through all of the sites), and just deleted my last page of websites and all of my "learn about this vocab". If I ever run across those words again (knowing most of them came from the mouth of Hamish Bowles, I do say it is rawther unlikely) then I will learn them organically and chronicle them into my everyday vocabulary at a natural pace. Not a major loss.

2. Learn about Graphic Design.

More or less I did learn more about this. I watched the documentary Helvetica whose primary focus was on the art of type design (changes how you look at everything!). I'm sure I subcosciously took in a lot of notes as far as layout design is concerned given my new devotion to the next point...

3. Read more Culture Magazines.

I most certainly did. If you hadn't noticed from my previous posts, I had a bit of a magazine awakening. I had always limited myself unknowingly to the biggies (primarily Vogue, Elle, Dwell, etc.) but I had never really explored past the genre of Women's Interests and Home to see what else was out there! For example, men's magazines are fascinating. I have read many a good article in Port like the one about the Hollywood Machine in the 30s-50s, another about the beauty of staying in rather than going out, great articles abound in International Men's Vogue like the feature on James Franco, and there was an interesting exposé on a certain kind of gun found all over pop culture in another mag that I cannot remember the name of.

You catch my drift. There is a heck of a lot out there and just as it is crazy to limit yourself by only learning about one field and nothing else, it is crazy to limit yourself to one section of the newsstand or bookstore. Think about it.

4. Have my Barista Friend make me a Latte at her New Job.

So sad this didn't happen! I fully intended to journey to the center of the state on a few occasions, but it just never seemed to work out between our schedules. Ala dear: this fall, you, me, coffee, soul-focused talks, movie watching, laughing our heads off. It will happen and I can't focus on it too much now because I will yearn for it much too much.

(Photo credit goes out to Meredith of Delicate + Porcelain)

5. Make Über Flowy, Fun Clothing.

My initial idea was to recreate the French clothing I see time and time again at Worthwhile in Charleston. I put this task off a very long time (I just started making my garment last week!) but I am nearly finished with an interesting looking jacket/vest. The fabric I used was salvadged from an old skirt I had in middle school, which needed a facelift. So now it is in the making of being a modern, beltable piece that is lined with linen, love it!

6. Find an interesting backpack.

I didn't techncically buy any interesting backpacks, but I didn find one my sister got at her internship a few years ago. It does the trick when I want to wear modern clothing; it's black and simple and perfectly Kate. Raspberries.

7. Create and collect a lot of goodies for my new room.

This one exploded in the past month. Every day I would be out and about and see random things like children's toys and hand-made paper and say to myself, I can use that!. I ended up creating four paintings (3 of which are in my vest picture above), collected other art to sprinkle around the room, and my desk is a heck of a lot more beautiful than one would expect for a dorm. Another post with more details soon to come!!

10. Start doing monthly playlists on the blog.

Although they tend to come at the end of the month rather than as inspiration at the beginning, this did start happening. Here are the playlists for May, June, July. (Funny, I made my friends three mixed cds at the beginning of the summer last year, one for each of the months. Here is the picture of them.)

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8. Learn more about England.

9. Make Leather bound notebooks!

11. Finish my new project (it's a surprise!)

It may seem lazy that none of this happened, but I had a major focus change around the end of May.

You see, in my late teens I strategized my plans for learning in my early 20s:

There are two fields of thought people seem to devote their time to: the past and the present. I don't have a lot of time to do independent learning during school and I have a lot of things to cram into my brain before I enter the workforce/adulthood when I don't have nearly as much free time. I should focus on learning about things in the past as much as possible, and then when I am well grounded in all things old (film, literature, pop culture, news, etc.), I will focus on the day-to-day news of this dying world. This transition should occur when I am a grown up.

It's funny because I just thought there were two general fields of thought, but I didn't factor in another important one: the future. There are loads of intelligent people giving a lot of thought to what will be and how to prepare for it. I get really excited for my generation as well as generations to come and I had a major mental explosion when I started learning about innovators of today and what they are conjuring up for tomorrow. I pushed aside my focus on making antiquated notebooks, learning the history of England, and most importantly, I set aside a major project, writing a book, which didn't seem relevant anymore to my aesthetic or for the company my book would have been for.

So, phewww that was a long one, wasn't it? Well thank you for enduring all that hullabaloo and I wish that all of you going back to school have a purely wonderful experience this fall. Here's to the future: may we live it well and be flexible with change as it comes our way. xoxo

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