{"id":56420,"date":"2016-07-01T11:42:19","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T15:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oliverands.com\/community\/?p=56420"},"modified":"2016-07-01T13:45:17","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T17:45:17","slug":"weekend-links-31","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oliverands.com\/community\/blog\/2016\/07\/weekend-links-31.html","title":{"rendered":"weekend links"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello friends!<\/p>\n

What do you think of the new look around here? We hope you like the design changes we rolled out yesterday. Our intent was to make the site easier to browse, to increase the size of photos, to have it be more responsive to the screen size of your mobile devices, and to give easy access to all our past tutorials and sew alongs. And we figured that we might as well throw in all the most recent photos from the Oliver + S Flickr and Instagram feeds. That way you can see everything that’s new all in one place. If you receive our blog posts by email, come over to the website<\/a> to see what we’ve done. (And if you’re reading this on the web, you can sign up to have new blog posts emailed to you on this page<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I’ve missed you over the past couple of weeks, and I hope your summer (or winter if you are Down Under) is going well. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet, but we are going to slow down posting here during July and August. Rachel is going to be spending more time with her kids during their summer break, and they are all going to take a well-deserved family vacation. And I have some things lined up that I’ll tell you more about next week. We’ll have something new and inspirational here for you a couple of times a week for the next two months. But don’t worry; we’ll be back with daily posts again in September.<\/p>\n

I’ve been missing S since she went off the States with her grandparents last week, but she’s having such a good time with my parents and her cousin that she’s been too busy to be homesick. Which is good, because I’ve been keeping busy too!<\/p>\n

My sister and I just returned from our trip to Morocco. As Todd mentioned in his post last week, it’s been a long-time dream of mine to visit. The trip was everything I hoped it would be! More actually. I really enjoyed exploring the city of Marrakech, but it was a bit of a surprise to me how much I enjoyed meeting the people as well. Despite cultural differences (this was my first trip to the African continent and my first visit to an Islamic country, which happened to coincide with Ramadan), we shared jokes and had a lot of fun getting to know the people we met. We had a few real adventures (a couple of would-be tour guides we had to fend off vigorously, which apparently is a common occurrence; a crazy-fun tuk-tuk ride directly through the souks; and an introduction to the man who feeds the fires for the local public hammam 24 hours a day, for about three weeks at a time, living and sleeping in a pit in the ground), and in general just really enjoyed the trip as well as spending time together. I’m so eager to go back, especially now that I understand the culture and feel a bit more comfortable with it.<\/p>\n

So instead of Pinterest picks this week, I thought I’d share some photos from our trip. I found it to be incredibly inspirational, and the colors and patterns everywhere were simply astounding.<\/p>\n

\"Marrakech<\/a>
\n\"Marrakech<\/a>
\n\"Marrakech<\/a><\/p>\n

Weekend Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n