My 2017 Favorites

I love favorites posts because a. I love to shop and b. I love buying things that are tried and true for other people! I follow a lot of lifestyle bloggers and get so many beauty and fashion ideas from their favorite posts – they’re some of my favorite posts. I wanted to put together a list of my favorite sewing notions, beauty and lifestyle items, and books from 2017 before we get too far into 2018!

Sewing Notions

I love gadgets – you can always find me buying tech gadgets (looking at you Apple Airpods and iPhone X…) and sewing notions to me are a bit like gadgets. They’re designed to make you life easier or solve a problem you either know you had or didn’t know you had. My sewing room is full of them! Here are a few of my favorite from the year.

Dritz EZY Hem Guide

I love this hemmer – I use it for hemming 100% of the time. It does get really hot when you put the iron on it, but you just have to be careful. I love how it makes a really crisp hem. By far my favorite hemming tool!

Wonder Clips

When it comes to knits, I don’t like to use pins. I fear serging through a pin for a variety of reasons. Clips are my favorite thing to use with knits and also for wovens when I’m feeling lazy. There are a variety of different brands of “wonder clips” – I’ve used the Clover brand ones, but there are less expensive options like these and these.

Zirkle

I cannot sew without my Zirkle. I had a serious debate with myself if it was worth packing it for Camp Workroom Social or not [I decided not because I didn’t want everything in my suitcase to stick to it with magnetic force!]. I have one on my cutting table and on my sewing machine table and they fit a lot of pins, really really magnetic and a great addition to a sewing room!

Beauty and Lifestyle

Drybar Everything!

At the end of 2016, my hair was damaged and I was getting far too comfortable not doing anything with it – just going out with wet hair and it just looked awful. I told myself I should really start curling my hair every day and I basically did that! Apart from a few work from home days where I didn’t curl it, I dried and curled my hair every day. The straighting process on my hair was really frying my hair and curling it has made it so much better. I credit Drybar for my hair styling abilities! I linked all my favorite products below. The ones I can’t live without? The 1.25″ curling iron, the Double Pint Round Brush, and the Prep Rally Detangler/Prep Spray! I am planning on doing a how I curl my hair post in the near future, so if that interests you, stay tuned!

Lipsense and Senegence Makeup

I discovered Lipsense and Senegence Products in 2017 and absolutely love them too. They’ve really helped me step up my makeup game. I use the Color Correcting Tinted Moisturizer, Shadowsense, and Blushsense everyday and use Lipsense Color on the weekend. You do have to buy from a distributor, which I am not, but here are two of my favorite distributors – Emily and Caroline!

Erin Condren Life Planner

Gosh, I would be so disorganized without my planner this year. I use the Erin Condren Planner and love it. If you’re looking for a planner I’d encourage you to check her planners out. You can even get $10 off your first order if you use this link! She has tons of different options – I use a neutral vertical planner (and have been using the vertical since I was in college!)

Books

This year was the year of books for me. I really haven’t read a lot of books the past few years, but this year I really got into Audible this year and “read” a lot of books that way. I also read some books in hard copy too while traveling a lot this summer and fall. I rounded up my four favorite books from the year.

Small Great Things

This book was hands down my favorite book of the year. Jodi Picoult has been my favorite author since I was in high school and she has an incredible knack for having incredibly well written and researched books. Small Great Things is a book about race privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion and is an amazing read. I would highly recommend it.

Crazy Rich Asians

I loved this whole series. It tells the tale of Rachel Chu who agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend and she has no idea what she’s walking into when she arrives. Nick’s family lives in a house that looks like a palace, extremely wealthy and is the country’s most eligible bachelor. All three books inside the series follow the crazy lives of Nick and his extended family. They’re super fast reads (or listens), but I would definitely recommend reading the first book – there’s a family tree at the beginning that is super helpful to keep track of who’s who!

Pretty Girls

Pretty Girls was really intense but amazing! It’s in a similar genre to Gone Girl and other books of that type and is a psychological thriller. It begins 20 years ago when Claire and Lydia’s teenage sister disappeared. The two surviving have not spoken since and live extremely different lives. This was all until Claire’s husband is killed – the book follows the journey of Claire and Lydia as they find out how the disappearance of their sister and the murder of Claire’s husband could be intertwined. It is such a good book and keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time!

Inside the O’Briens

Inside the O’Briens was one of my favorite books of the year because it was so compelling, so gripping and so heart wrenching. I can’t accurately describe the plot (and couldn’t when I had it in my monthly favorites earlier in 2017), so I’ll include the Amazon summary again.

“Joe O’Brien is a forty-three-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s disease.”

“Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure, and each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.”

I could not put it down. I read it at home and listened to it in the car (a book + audible combo) and when I would get to work, I could barely convince myself to get out of the car to stop listening!  I’ve heard really good things about her book Left Neglected, so I think I’m going to read that soon!

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So now I think I can close the chapter on 2017! Did you have any favorites from 2017 that you’d like to share? Leave a comment below!

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