Giveaway: Amanda Bee

Miss Amanda Bee and I are hosting a giveaway! I KNOW y'all must be excited for this one!

Amanda has very generously offered a 5x5 portrait that is fully customizable and can be of anything that the winner chooses!!!

Here are a few of my favorite Amanda Bee designs:

(For those of you who aren't as inclined to pink and green as me!)

To enter today's giveaway (mandatory):

1. Like Let's Be Preppy on Facebook

2. Follow Let's Be Preppy on Twitter

3. Like Amanda Bee on Facebook

4. Follow Amanda Bee on Twitter

5. Leave a comment saying that you did all of them and which Amanda Bee design is your favorite! See her facebook page for more!

Optional:

1. Tweet at @letsbepreppy and @AmandaCBee for TWO extra entries!

This giveaway will be live until 11:59 Sunday night! Happy entering y'all!!

xxKatie (and Amanda Bee!)

Designs by Amanda Bee

My VERY talented friend, Amanda Bee, has been painting these designs very recently! If you follow me on Pinterest, I'm sure you've seen a bunch of them since I'm pinning them all too! The one above is my absolute favorite she's done so far, but check out some of my other picks too:

Maryland by Amanda Bee

Loafers by Amanda bee

Crosshatched by Amanda Bee

Knotty in Blue by Amanda Bee

Monkey's Fist by Amanda Bee

Argyle II by Amanda Bee

Colorful by Amanda Bee

Umm how amazing right? You MUST check her out!! See more of her full-size designs on her blog!

xxKatie

DIY: Nautical Flags

I painted this on Sunday and I'm so proud of it!! I was feeling inspired from a pin I saw on Pinterest:

I didn't have any canvases but I did have little square pieces of wood that I used instead. They looked like this before I painted them:

You can see the outlines of the different flags I had in mind.

First I did all the pink sections of the flags. I ordered some Preppy Plates from Rue La La a few weeks ago and they're pink and navy so I figured I'd go with a pink and navy color combo for my bathroom!

Blue was the next step! As y'all can see, the natural wood was light to begin with so it's still peeking out at this point!

Finally I did the white. Getting all those clean lines was SO HARD. I'm not really very artistic. I can paint in lines like nobody's business, but when it comes to real artistic talent (and really patience) I'm a little lacking.

I ended up hot gluing all the panels together to create 1 piece. I figured it would be easier to hang, etc. I glued 2 rods to them for support. (Tip: the "rods" are two shoe stretchers that come in shoes when they come out of the box! I didn't have anything else so I had to get a little creative in finding support!)

I hung it up in my bathroom and was so proud! Then I realized that I hung it upside down...

MUCCCCCH better, now it spells "Katie" instead of "Eitak" upside down!

This craft was SO EASY as long as you have the little wood pieces. I got them at Hobby Lobby for $.90 apiece. I might Modge Podge over the paint so that it lasts longer but that'll be for another day!

Good luck crafting away! I hope I've inspired some of y'all!!

xxKatie 

P.S.: Be sure to enter the Lemon & Line giveaway!!

Year of Birthdays

You're probably asking yourself, "Well, isn't every year the year of the birthdays?" Well yes, but this year I'm a junior which means the birthday that everyone gets the most excited about in college: turning 21! I often get questions about what to get for your friends for their 21st birthdays! Here are some of my suggestions:

Customized shot glasses: I got these for three guy friends last year and they all loved them! They all got 2 glasses: 1 personalized with their monograms and 1 personalized with something funny between us!

A season of their favorite show or a DVD of their favorite movie! This is ALWAYS a crowd pleaser!

Monogrammed Wine Glasses from The Cooler Girl (a fabulous friend of mine!)

Food gift cards! I know gift cards have a bit of an impersonal stigma associated with them, but give them a book of coupons and say you're taking them to the specific place. Need a reason to take this certain someone on a date? ...Sounds like a perfect plan to me!

The Bubbly! This gives you a fun reason to toast (or roast!) your friends at their birthday bash!

Local concert tickets! A bunch of my friends have birthdays the week before THIS GUY comes to town. Too bad I don't give away ANY birthday surprises! I do expect to see y'all all there though!

I saw this concoction on Pinterest a few days ago and it sparked my idea for this post! Too funny! Seems like something a Grandma might do!

What did you give your friends for their 21st birthday? Anything fun? 

xxKatie

So. Close. To. Summer.

Today is my last official study day before summer starts. I have an Art History final tomorrow covering many very famous paintings:

Munch

Monet

Mondrian

We are at the very end of the Western Art spectrum. We finished up our lectures almost 2 weeks ago so I'll be memorizing about 40 paintings and a lot of the necessary info about them. I look forward to finishing up my final final (yay!) and heading home! I'm thinking of everyone else stuck in their exams just like me! We'll be done soon!

xxKatie

Weekly Gratitude

So, LBR (let's be real) I haven't quite gotten the hang of this Weekly Gratitude. Yes, it "happens" to be weekly, but it's never on the same day. I'm really gonna try harder to stay on the ball with this!

1. My FIRST thank you to the Theta Alpha chapter of Sigma Sigma Sigma at Highpoint University! A good friend of mine tweeted at me saying, "@letsbepreppy a bunch of my sisters read your blog. Today they found out we're friends. Best looks on their faces #winning". It MADE MY DAY! Thanks Sigma ladies!!!

2. Thank you to all the awesome biddies who came out to our shag debut. It was more fun than I could have asked for!

3. On that same note, thank you to the PEDU (physical education code at USC) syllabus for being done after 2 more classes. My written shag final was last night...phew it's over!

4. Thank you to my cooler for getting done. Shoutouts to Sarah C., Aly E. (for keeping me sane), and Colleen R. for all your massive amounts of help, moral support, and endless picture messages that you let me send you when I would mess up right on the line.

5. Thank you to my beach weekend house for liking my cupcakes so much. It's about as close to an ego boost that I can get!

6. Thank you to all the wonderful tour guides that I work with. This is the SINGLE BUSIEST week of being a tour guide at USC. We have 121 tours going out this week (in a typical week, we have 15-19, 3/day of the week plus some weekend tours) which is almost 2900 visitors this week alone plus the hundreds of unscheduled walk-in visitors. #admissionswin 

7. Thank you to hopefully my new community college for me to take classes this summer! Please accept me!!

8. Thank you to our big, huge, end of year banquet tomorrow! I can't wait to go!! Everyone will be dressing up, looking fab, and shedding lots of tears.

9. Thank you to the collapsable boxes in my room. You will now be used to store my paints. I have a lot...

10. Thank you Edith, the sweetest lady in the lunchline, she'll always toss in something free in my lunches and I appreciate that.

xxKatie

Cooler Painting

Back home at last! We returned home from the beach around noon yesterday after a very successful weekend! A big custom with these fraternity weekends is to paint coolers themed around the weekend or event (formals, initiation, for your littles if you're in a sorority) so that you can bring your drinks, snacks and food easily with you! They are EXTREMELY difficult to paint. Whoever made this custom of painting acrylic paint on plastic was insane. Thanks to modern technology and the aid of several girlfriends who have done this in the past, my process was relatively easy. It started out looking like this:

Standard Igloo $18.88 cooler from WalMart

Then progressed:

And again:

And again:

And again: (it's like a butterfly)

This was the finalized top!! I was SO PROUD! Shane and I often call ourselves "Team Maryland" so when I started painting my cooler I knew I was gonna take the Maryland to an extreme! What's more Maryland-y than Old Bay Seasoning??

This was my madras front. I was most proud of this side. I'd never seen anything like this cooler so I was really excited to be very different from the norms!

This was one of my small sides! For this side, paint pens were key!

This was the back, it was a MapQuest inspired map to where we were heading! 

So now that I have one cooler under my belt, I'm tempted to make a list of things I wish I knew. Anyone have any tips to add? What you painted coolers for?

xxKatie

A&C

As I've said in the past, I'm very crafty. I like doing arts and crafts and things like that! Also, I haven't really been able to do many crafts at school since I'm not painting paddles, gifts, etc. AND on top of that, my dorm really doesn't have room where I can sprawl out on the floor the way I like to. I've been painting some letters to hang in my room for about a week so that they can dry. I got 3 big white letters from Michael's in my initials: C, A, and R. When I do things with my initials, I like to use the C since its my real name, despite the fact I sometimes forget people are talking to me if they say Catherine. Getting back to my crafts, check out what I made!!!

Using these colors I made:

(They're drying on the paper plates. My mom's #1 rule was not to get anything on the rug. We had a home-made flubber incident back when I was 13 and decided to re-do my room. As we were shifting the beds, we found some dried "flubber" we made in 5th grade that is primarily made from glue...rock hard on the carpet. It's still there today...)

This one was my favorite. I liked the spacing of all the dots (a little OCD anyone?) and that the backdrop is pink!

Here's the A. A few of the spots are still wet in the photo so some of the colors look uneven. If any dry uneven I'm sure I'll go back over them as needed!

I really like the R also. The green wasn't exactly the green I had imagined from the packaging, but it grew on me.

I'll be sure to post photos of where I put them up in my dorm. I have this white expanse of wall that currently has nothing on it above my bed, so that's where these beauties will go. On 3M wall hooks of course--no nailing in dorm walls anymore!!

I hope you guys enjoyed this preppy (and inexpensive) craft! Which letter is your fave?!

xxKatie