I was planning a long post for today but I seem to having issues with tendonitis. A new keyboard is pending and will hopefully help the problem but in the meantime I thought I’d share a couple of things. First, I think I’ve found my summer pedicure color of choice.This bright coral color is called Club Havana and it’s by Wet n Wild. The stuff is cheap and tenacious. I love it!

Also in the post is a Pinterest challenge where you can win some new hair products. Next, people are always sending me infographics to share. Normally I don’t, but this one was really cute.  Have a great weekend everyone!

To celebrate the launch of our new BC Oil Potion Care Line, we invite you to pin to win!

To enter, simply:

1) Follow Schwarzkopf Professional USA on Pinterest (http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpinterest.com%2Fapassionforhair&h=4AQGuCW_s&s=1)

2) Repin ONE of the images from the BC Brides Contest board

3) In the description of the image, write the description of your wedding day hairstyle including the hashtag #BCBrides

4) Encourage your friends to like and repin your images by saying “Please like & repin to help me win” in the description.

5) Whoever has the most combined number of likes and repins on their image will win! Be sure to check the comments on your pin on June 15th, 2013 to see if you won.

Eleven Things You Can Do To Prevent Wrinkles

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Navy Stripes and Denim Blue

Navy blue seems to be the solid dark color of choice this spring. It’s used in both wide and narrow stripes and mixed with color and pattern. Denim and chambray never go out of fashion, but they seem especially appealing this spring as a foil to all the clean bright colors and prints displayed in store windows.

Bright Pink

Pink and navy blue look great together, and the retailers are taking advantage of this crisp, clean color way in window displays all over my local mall. Pink is also being mixed with white and used in pretty floral prints to great effect.

Neon Brights in Yellow and Green

Neon looked like a flash-in-the-pan last year but rather than fading away into just another fad it seems to be really taking hold this year. Brights are hot and pink especially so, but neon green and yellow are everywhere as well.

All these colors look so fresh and fun to me. I’m inspired. Are you?

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This post is sponsored by The Bradford Exchange. 

I would love to have a collection of elaborate diamond women’s rings like these. Some of these designs are actually three separate rings that work together to form one design. The delicate details make them miniature works of art.

Such a sparkly fantasy!

Are diamond and emerald rings your thing?

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I spent years complaining about the 4 foot by 7 foot closet in my 1920′s bungalow, but since we’ve moved to our temporary home my new wardrbe is barely three feet deep and two feet wide. That’s a tiny closet! It makes the previous one seem like ample space for any woman’s collection of clothing. My new situation is really one step up from living out of a suitcase. It should be horrible, but oddly enough it’s actually easier to get dressed in the morning. All I brought to our temporary home are the spring and summer clothes I love the most. I was careful to pack my most versatile items and I also picked a color scheme of blues and greens. The end result is the wardrobe I’ve always wanted: the one where almost everything goes together and getting dressed is a breeze.

Still, I needed help setting up the closet which was just an empty space when we arrived. I needed to arrange purses, shoes, underthings and of course clothes in a way that made sense. I wanted a few tiny closet organization ideas, so I searched Google and my favorite blogs for inspiration and came up with these ten helpful links.

Ten Closet Organization Ideas and Tips

1. She Owns It wants you to break all the organizing rules!
2. These shots of Bittersweet Colors’ closet is inspirational. How I would love all that SPACE!
3. Modern Eve offers up the cutest little spring cleaning infographic I’ve ever had the pleasure to stumble upon.
4. I very much like the Style Files DIY Jewelry Organizing Solution.
5. Inside Out Style shows us how to store accessories in tea cups, mug holders and other unexpected places.
6. Trop Rouge is a complete neat freak…except when it comes to her closet. I love her honesty.
7. Wardrobe Oxygen has experience living with small closets, and her advice in “Honing your Personal Style through closet organization” is excellent.
8. What’s the best way to store your purses? Suite 101 delves into the answers in “Caring for your Designer  Handbag”.
9. I don’t like to hang my handbags because I’m afraid of stretching out the handles, but I can’t help but love this simple DIY purse hanging system.
10. Do you like looking at other women’s wardrobes? Then Closet Visit is for you! The photos are gorgeous too.

How I Organized My Tiny Closet

After reading everything I could find on closet organization I tackled my own tiny space. I didn’t have room to hang my purses so I stuffed them with tissue and placed them in a deep shelf on the top of my wardrobe.

I purchased a hanging shoe organizer from Ikea and filled it with my underthings, t-shirts, and scarves.

My tiny closet might be tiny, but at least it’s deep. I was able to squeeze in two hanger bars, one in the front and one in the back. Here is the back rung. The shoe organizer hangs next to my collection of jackets and coats for the colder days of early spring. Here is the front rung with dresses, jeans and blouses. You’ll notice that most of the clothes are in the blue to green range. I specifically chose clothes that worked well together and of course I brought a lot of basic black too!

I put my favorite spring and summer shoes in boxes and stacked them up on the floor of the closet. It’s not perfect, but at least they’re neat. In the front is a box with my everyday shoes. Casual flats sit on top.

Next to the shoes is a wicker box with my collection of clutch bags. Current wisdom suggests that a small wardrobe can be made more interesting with a nice variety of accessories, and these little bags don’t take up much room.

Behind my small purse collection is my gym bag with all my workout clothes.

Not shown is another shelf in a different closet with my jewelry and a few other things. I also packed two boxes with true summer clothes like my bathing suits. They’ll come out as the weather gets warmer.

What’s your closet situation? Do you have a wonderful, large, walk-in closet or a tiny armoire like mine? Do you have any great organization tips to share?

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Last week I ran a give away where ten of my readers could enter to be randomy chosen to win a bar of soap. The contest is over and the winners have been drawn. They are:

Entry #16 Sylvia V.
Entry #19 Elaine
Entry #9 Manda O.
Entry #7 Greetje K.
Entry #24 Kandy R.
Entry #12 Sharon H.
Entry #17 Cynthia N.
Entry #11 Alicia S.
Entry #1 Heather B.
Entry #22 Lisa S.

I’ve sent e-mails to everyone and most of the winners have responded, however, I’m missing an e-mail from one of you and another wouldn’t send, so if your name is on that list and you HAVEN’T gotten an e-mail from me please contact me on Facebook, Twitter or via my Contact Page here on the blog!

A big THANK YOU to everyone who took part in the contest.

Heather

The post The Great Zote Soap Give Away – The Winners! appeared first on The Style Confessions™.

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Disclosure: I purchased all of these products with my own money. I was not compensated for the post by the brands I recommend, however there is an affiliate link embedded in the link below. If you click on it I will receive a small commission. Thank you for your support!

Wearing:

• Dress by American Living (Check out the dress online by clicking here.)
• Shoes by Roberto de Carlo

Will you be wearing a white dress this summer?

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Bar soap can be sent overseas, so this give away is open to international readers!

It’s easy to sign up. Use the rafflecopter widget below to follow me on Twitter, “like” my Facebook page or leave a comment in this post.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The give away is open today until monday May 7th. I will pick ten random winners from Rafflecopter on May 8th and will contact you via e-mail.

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White is one of the biggest fashion trends of the season. All-white outfits are popping up like mad on my Pinterest feed while everyone from Garance Dore to Bittersweet Colors are posting articles on how to wear the trend. Recently I’ve gushed about white dresses on Twitter but from the responses I’ve received I can see that not everyone is with me on this one. It’s not that white isn’t pretty, it’s that it stains too easily and is too much work to keep really, really white. Well, you can embrace the white clothing trend this season because I’ve discovered how to get whites white again.

The Stained Shirt

Here in Los Angeles I’ve already pulled out all my white blouses, skirts and jeans from their winter storage. I came across my first white clothing problem quickly. My not-very-old white cotton Gap t-shirts had some strange phantom stains on the front. These weren’t brown or even yellow, they were pale blue-grey, and they drove me nuts.

Anyone who owns anything white knows how difficult it is to get stains out. Bleach often turns the stain yellow, and although the oxy miracle stuff is useful in keeping white, well, white, it doesn’t help much once pasta sauce splatters on the item of clothing, and don’t we ALL get a little splatter once in a while? All my stain-fighting sprays are useless once a smudge has set. I’ve even tried my mother’s technique of squeezing lemon on a spot and leaving it in sunlight for hours. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

I was pondering turning the t-shirt with the blue-grey phantom shadows into rags like I usually do with stained garments when my mother-in-law stopped me.

“Why don’t you try THE SOAP?”

The soap?

The Soap

I had never heard of this stain-fighting technique but I trust my mother-in-law implicitly. If she says the soap works, then the soap must work. So I handed all my stained white blouses and t-shirts to her. She proceeded to show me how to wash them by hand with a big bar of  soap. The t-shirts had the worst stains. We boiled them with thin shavings of soap and then let them soak overnight.

The result? White! White! White! The stains have disappeared.  In addition to washing my blouses my mother-in-law also attacked my daughter’s white sneakers, which had turned a rather unappealing shade of pale brown. Those are white again too. Here they are.

White Sneakers are White Again

So what’ in this soap? It contains Sodium Tallowate, Sodium Cocoate, fragrance, an optical brightener and violet dye. According to the Zote Website the soap is made with natural ingredients and is good for hand-washing delicate fabrics. Zote comes in both pink and white versions.

What can I say. It works.This is the best way I’ve ever found to get whites white again.

Disclosure: No, I was not paid for this! I just think it’s a great product and I wanted to share. 

In Los Angeles Zote soap can be found at the 99 Cent store. Yep. It’s cheap too.

Do you have any great stain-fighting techniques to share with me? Have you ever tried this soap?

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We went to the beach every day during our stay in Carpenteria. Every morning I wore a bikini under my clothes in the hopes that it would be warm enough to swim. On the day we took these shots I wore pale blue printed jeans, a chambray top and sandals to match. The sun warmed up the beach for a few hours that afternoon but not enough to remove the layers. By the time we took these photos the fog had rolled in and it was quite chilly. We loaded sandy kids and beach gear into the car with my parents, then my husband and I headed back to the hotel on foot. I was glad for the shirt, but wished I’d brought a sweater too. To make walking easy I changed my convertible canvas bag from a cross body to a backpack, but I couldn’t do much about the shoes. They’re comfortable but not especially practical for walking on dirt paths.

Train tracks run right near the beach Carpenteria. The sound of the train lends this already beautiful stretch of coast an old fashioned charm but it also makes getting from the beach to the town a bit more complicated than it would be otherwise. As my husband and I strolled along trying to find a way over the tracks we stumbled on this tunnel and, thinking it was quite scenic, we stopped for some shots before heading into town.

Disclosure: Except for the backpack, which was a gift from Skinny Vinny, I purchased all of these clothes with my own money and was not compensated for the post by the brands I recommend, however there are affiliate links embedded in some of the links below. If you click on them I will receive a small commission. Thank you for your support!

Wearing:

• Zara chambray shirt: This one is similar (Affiliate link)
• Skinny Vinny Convertible Sal bag (A gift from the company)
• NYDJ printed jeans: These are similar (Affiliate link)
• Kork-Ease “Felicia” sandals: They’re on sale here (Affiliate link)

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