I was out of town this week and totally forgot that I had pre-scheduled this mad libs video, so this has been up a few days already! But – if you missed it, Joe and I did mad libs when we were stuck in our hotel in Montana. I still have the mad libs book, so if you liked this video, I would love to make more like it!

This is the final installment in this week’s video series exploring my recent trip to Montana. Joe and I are definitely home safe and sound now, but I wanted to share the whole gnarly experience with you guys. Please let me know if you enjoyed this style of video and maybe I’ll make an effort to make it more of a norm on my channel!

In totally unrelated news, HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! Regardless of your views on the holiday, I hope you manage to spend it with people you love.

This the second video in my Montana series this week, in which Joe and I experience some extreme highs (discovering an actual IRL Harry Potter neighborhood) and even more extreme lows (crashing our car and getting stranded on the drive home).

Get up close and personal with us as we take you along on our adventure, for better or worse!

I am trying something new this week! I am posting THREE videos instead of one, and they’re very much more in the style of video I used to make, which was the “take your camera around with you and film life” instead of just vlogging on a topic in my bedroom.

If people seem to like this (or seem glad I have returned to my roots a bit) maybe I’ll keep doing it!

Either way, you should definitely watch the whole series as I post it this week (the others are going up Wednesday and Friday) to get a first hand account of what went down while Joe and I were in Montana. It was not the trip we thought we were setting out on.

Here is this month’s favorites video, full of everything I’ve been obsessed with lately! Please leave me comments on this blog post with recommendations for things I might be totally into for next month’s video!

For quick reference, here a couple of links to things I talk about in the video. Tara’s “Geeky Sprinkles” kickstarter, Firmoo’s First Pair of Glasses Free program, and how to order Esther Earl’s book, This Star Won’t Go Out.

Also, check out this month’s Subblime List! You could win 50 Free Printics, which are printouts of your instagram photos that look like polaroids!

2014 has been a great year so far not only for starting new projects, but also for picking up old projects and dusting them off. OneUpMakeup was of course one of these such projects – but the other is Answerly!

Answerly was and has been an advice channel I made weekly videos for, discussing the ins and outs of being a nerd. My co-hosts were Joseph Birdsong and Hayley Hoover, discussing love and college life, respectively. We made two straight years of videos before we decided it was time to give the channel a face lift.

As we rounded the corner to the new year, we relaunched the channel with all new branding as the Answerly Book Club, a place to read books together and talk about them and interact much more than you ever could before with Answerly. Joe’s reading comedy books, Hayley’s tackling books by women, and I will be finding out what’s new and hot in the Young Adult genre.

My first book is Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell and I’m immensely enjoying it. I hope you’ll join us with these first books of the year, and stick around to see what we’ll be reading next!

I am so glad we found a way to take our tired old channel and really breathe some life into it… as well as encouraging ourselves and others to make more time for reading! God knows we all could probably use a bit more reading time.

When OneUpMakeup first started, I took on more of a producer/technical/model role in the project. Really all the jobs except doing the actual makeup, because I knew very little about applying makeup to my own face (let alone someone else’s!). But over time I’ve picked up a good number of tips, I’ve grown my own makeup collection and I’ve done a heck of a lot of practicing. Before this I’d made a video showing you my personal daily makeup routine and I did a sort of simple 1920’s look, but today I give you the first look I am really actually kind of proud of… Anna from Frozen!

This look was the follow-up to the Elsa look Mallory demonstrated on me in the previous week, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun with a OneUpMakeup collaboration. Mallory is adorable and fun and probably my biggest makeup influence (I’ve spent hours in the chair while she made me look fabulous for Job Hunters). I hope you enjoy this video and I also hope my makeup skillz are improving!

I’m very happy OneUpMakeup is back. Being part of this all-female run production is incredibly empowering and I’m glad the people who watch our videos seem to be having as much fun as we are.

For those of you not in the know, my girlfriends and I have a fun little makeup channel we created together called OneUpMakeup that we used to post weekly videos on. It was part excuse for the six of us to get together for girl’s nights, part a method of learning a bit more of the technical side of running a channel (directing videos, setting up lights and multiple camera angles, etc.) and part a chance for ALL of us to grow and develop and learn from each other as makeup artists.

The channel did surprisingly well, except for the fact that filming Job Hunters last summer (a project five out of the six of us are heavily involved in) caused us to take a much needed six month hiatus from uploading anything.

But! Now that we’re totally wrapped on principle photography, we’re gettin’ the gang back together! OneUpMakeup is one of my favorite little side projects, and I think it’s pretty readily apparent how much fun we’re having in every single video we post on the channel. Each video is a different combination of girls – we’re constantly switching up and doing makeup on each other. No one is just a model, or just an artist, or just a camera person. This is a project where everyone does everything, and that’s what I love so much about it.

Our very first comeback look is probably one of my personal favorites in the history of OneUpMakeup, and I’m not just saying that because it’s on my face. Mallory recreated a stunning Elsa look, inspired by Frozen, and I am quite proud to show it to you:

Keep an eye on the channel and be sure to subscribe to see what we create in the future… especially next week, when I make the companion Anna look to this one on Mallory!

Hey everyone! I have really been meaning to write up my second bucket list post (which highlights my recent trip to the Winchester Mystery House)… but I’ve been both sick and distracted with the Project 4 Awesome, so it hasn’t happened yet. I have posted a lot of videos recently, however, so I thought I would tide us all over with a round-up post of all of those in the meantime.

First up is my Farewell video to my Fiesta, Rainbow Dash. I had a good run with the Fiesta Movement, but it’s back to reality now. This video was my way of saying goodbye:

We also started playing Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know (the new Adventure Time game) over on Team Hypercube. We’re only three episodes in, so it’s a good time to jump in on this new series. Not only will we be bringing on special guests to play with us, but it’s the first game we’ve started using picture-in-picture for… meaning you can see a video of us in the corner while we play! It’s a lot of fun so far and I guarantee it’s only going to get better:

We’re also getting dangerously close to WEEK 100 on Dokapon Kingdom, so you might want to catch up so you don’t miss it! Check out Team Hypercube and subscribe, because more things are going to be happening there in the new year. You’ll want to keep an eye on it.

Coming soon on this blog will be my bucket list post, reviews of the two most recent ipsy bags, and a lot of fun outfit of the day posts for the holiday plans I have on the horizon. Thanks for sticking with me and I’ll be back again soon. In the mean time, let me know in the comments who your favorite Adventure Time character is and which one you’d want to play in the new WiiU game!

It’s that time of year again, folks… the PROJECT 4 AWESOME! As a dedicated nerdfighter, this is one of my favorite projects of the year and I am so stoked for everyone to see the video I made for it. I feature a different charity each year and this year I chose to finally talk about a personal favorite… National Novel Writing Month.

I’m gonna be hanging out in the live stream for most of the next 48 hours, and I should also be hosting it later on tonight or tomorrow when John and Hank need a break (or to like, sleep/eat). If you’ve never heard of P4A or never participated yourself, please go check out the Project 4 Awesome website, donate at the indiegogo page (there are so AWESOME perks, including a handful of UNCUT SHEETS of Jetpack Unicorn that will be going up soon!) and watch/like/comment on as many videos with this year’s thumbnail as you can.

We can get so caught up in the holidays and shopping and gifts that it’s nice to have this annual reminder that we can use YouTube as a force for good, bringing real humans together to donate money to things that really matter to us as a group. I am so proud to have been doing this for seven years and I can just tell this will be a P4A to remember.

Did you make a P4A video this year? What charity did you choose and which are you voting for on the site?