Stitchin' it old school

Stitcher's Delight by Steotch - click me for the original link including a FREE PATTERN

Not quite what I mean, but seriously how amazing is that?
Pardon me while I go download that pattern and follow her Instagram...

So anyway, what I DO mean:

Back in the day when you were a wee bairn learning the home arts you would do a sampler which would teach different stitches and alphabets and often provide a reference for future work (lettering for monogramming personal items, for example).

Sampler stitched by Hanna McGinter at age 11
(1779-1867)

I have kind of a vague half recollection of doing something like that when I was very very young but when it comes down to it my embroidery repertoire has been pretty limited; a bunch of cross stitch, some simple crewel stitches, a hint of goldwork... basically I learn whatever I need to do the project in front of me.

I've been following Badasscrossstitch on Instagram for a while and apparently her recently completed  #YearofStitch project has been worming its way into my brain.

I tried Colonial Knots for the first time yesterday in my Box Of Delights project and realized that COLONIAL KNOTS RULE FRENCH KNOTS DROOL. I had to look at a couple of different tutorials to understand how to do them but once I did I was hooked. They're simple, neat, easy to tension properly, firm, and fairly symmetrical. As opposed to French knots which look like out-and-out mistakes half the time (for me anyway). I love the look of sweet little floral accents on ultra snarky cross stitch pieces a la PlasticLittleCovers but HATE French knots so I never bother.

Seriously, they're actually kind of fun, here's a good tutorial.

Heck, this makes me want to try candlewicking!

My next thought was of course "what other totally awesome and not suck stitches could I have been using all this time OMG WHO WAS RUNNING THAT STITCH A WEEK THING!?!?!?!". I'm a little sad I missed out on the unfolding week by week-ness of the original project but whatever, Imma do it anyway. I really like having these nice discreet pieces to work on in between my magnum opus H.A.E.D. pieces.

Someday I hope to do a similar sort of thing with the tutorials posted on Mary Corbet's Needle and Thread (aka the site that helped me fall in love with embroidery) or Sarah's Hand Embroidery at Rocksea.org (source of the tutorial above) but I think my entirely self imposed embroidery workload is insane enough as it is right now.

What kind of house doesn't have salt?

So, there's this show called Supernatural.

Perhaps you've heard of it?

I uh, have some *feelings* regarding this show and so when I saw that Incidental Twin not only had SPN themed polishes but one PARTICULARLY FREAKING COOL polish I had to have it.

*cough*andabouteightotherpolisheswhichyouwillbeseeingallingoodtime*cough*

Every time I pick up one of the Incidental Twin polishes I'm not sure how it's going to work out. They're somehow just different from other polishes I've ever used... but at this point I've been impressed with the results EVERY time so I just go with it. I actually have a custom order in the works right now!

I hatched a plan to do a particular manicure for the final episode of season 10 using the Incidental Twin polish, a Supernatural themed stamping plate from Apipila, and Snowed In - a white stamping polish from Hit The Bottle which I bought off of Beautometry.

Those tiny black flecks, that's real CHARCOAL.

The hazy cloudy voids in the design, that's not a camera issue, that's SALT.

If there was ever a mani that needed a macro

A deep translucent charcoal jelly sandwich of protective sigils in a suspension of salt, charcoal, hex glitter in two sizes, and micro glitter "embers".

When I started I was REALLY dubious. I was sure that somehow I was going to mess this up. I was convinced that the polish was not going to layer how I envisioned, and that the stamps would be smeared and too busy, but I stuck with it and I think it came out even more amazing than I had hoped.

It's been a bit of time since I did the pics but I believe the base was CnD Stickey base coat, two coats of Salt And Burn, and a coat each of American Classics Gelous and Poshe topcoat to smoothe it out for stamping. 

I stamped each finger, sealed with Poshe again, put a final layer of Salt and Burn over the top to add depth, and finally smoothed and sealed with the same Gelous-Poshe combination.

I found a neat trick to use hairspray to keep the stamp from smudging From Youtube user Denisejohn65 - Nail Ed which seemed to work great! I'm pretty sure if I had to take this off to fix smeary stamping there would be salt from crying in the mix as well.

I was worried the polish layers wouldn't stick on top of the hairspray but there were no issues with the technique as far as I could tell. I will absolutely be doing this every time I stamp.

A very Supernatural season ender manicure special

I've been sitting on this post for no reason for months but I figured the new season was as good a reason as any to get back on the horse!

Spindle and Rod and Tablet and Thread

I've figured out the central theme in the clothing I've been drawn to lately.

I follow a designer on Facebook called David's Road and I found I was VERY drawn to a dress they recently posted on their Facebook so I clicked through to their page to look at their s/s 2015 women's collection.

Screenshot from davidsroad.com

When I started looking through the collection it hit me:
I want to look like a figure from Greek or Roman mythology living in the modern world.

Most specifically, I want to look like one of the Fates (aka the Moirai, Parcae, Sudice or Norns, depending on where you're asking): the figures standing outside of the world who controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal from birth to death.

There's an aloofness and an understanding that these are creatures of dreadful power wielded to great purpose. I dig it. I think it'd be pretty boring if everyone had the same flavor of inner goddess.

Listen Fates, who sit nearest of gods to the throne of Zeus, and weave with shuttles of adamant, inescapable devices for councels of every kind beyond counting,  

Aisa, Clotho and Lachesis, fine-armed daughters of Night, hearken to our prayers, all-terrible goddesses, of sky and earth. 

[from Pindar's Hymn to the Fates]

I have no idea why it took so long to work out because it's something I've been talking about a lot for the last few years, but I guess much like magic eye puzzles: you see it when you see it.

I made an Arachne costume for a Gods and Goddesses party a few years ago and fell in love with the simple drape of the chiton. That costume was made of flat sheets of 45" wide raw silk that draped from my shoulders to my feet and from elbow to elbow. The design is *basically* a giant tube with a few tweaks at each hem for fit, and yet it captured every curve of my body.

Simple, regal, incredibly sexy.

My husband saw this shot over my shoulder and without any knowledge of the post context he said he remembered thinking that the costume was exceedingly hot, even though the only part of me you saw was my shoulders, and added that it'd be cool if I wore stuff like this more often.

I have noticed a lot of elongated draped clothing around and about in the fashion world lately but something always seemed to be missing for me and I couldn't put my finger on what. This David's Road collection provided the missing key. It hits the silhouettes I seek perfectly and I would buy their stuff in a second if it were available in the US or (presumably) anything in a price range I could even hope to afford.

Last summer was fairly cool and I wore jeans a lot and generally felt like a schlump. I'm hoping this summer will be hot enough to switch back to dresses. Due to my height I typically look for knee length empire style dresses but I always feel they look very cutesey.

Perhaps it's time to get the sewing machine out to play-test a few long columnar draped pieces and let out my inner incarnation of destiny and life.

[post title from "The Fates" by Jane Yolen]

The Rick Owens F/W 2015 Paris Menswear Penis kerfuffle (yes, you read that right)

So, Rick Owens Fall-Winter 2015 show "Sphinx" featured (and I do mean featured) exposed male genitalia.

I guess Owens is a bit more of a classicist, as the OG answer is, of course, Man.

And boy howdy does this show celebrate manhood. I know this is going to be a polarizing show, but personally this makes me want to jump up and down and cheer a little bit!

The Man Himself (he is wearing pants in this shot I assure you)

Photo: Yannis Vlamos -Indigitalimages.com

I have no issue with the exposure of bodies in high fashion as clothing is MEANT to accentuate the human body and high fashion is MEANT to push boundaries, EXCEPT in that there is a clear double standard when it comes to exposing men's and women's bodies in fashion.

I'm all for celebrating the female form through fashion and art, so it only stands that the male form should be celebrated too! This sort of show levels the playing field without feeling exploitative.

Note: I consider body image and exploitation questions separately from those of pure nudity but I think that deserves its own post so I'm not going to even try to address it here.

Owens has shown a trend of bucking runway expectations with notable moves such as using a lineup of forty step dancers from Washington, D.C., and New York City-based crews (Momentum, Soul Steps, Zetas, Washington Divas) in place of the usual models in his Spring 2014 show and it's nice to see that he's keeping it going.

It is however a bit sad that either move is even remotely notable in the first place. Celebration of the variability and beauty of the human form and how it looks in a designer's clothing should be the norm in fashion. The focus on a small range of looks and approaches limits creativity and is frankly pretty lazy.

Rick Owens Paris Spring 2014 - "Viscious" Full Show

As for the clothes...

Well there I'm pretty mixed. I like a lot of the coats (mmm double breasted structure in leather and tweed) and I DO appreciate how hard it is to showcase the male form without dipping into the International Male/Romance novel cover side of things, but in general he runs far too oversized/asymmetrical/slouchy for my taste and there's a distinct flavor of slightly rumpled Shaolin Monk (both in the drapey and the lighter structural pieces) and/or "naked guy who had to jump out of bed to answer the door".

image from NewNowNext - original source unknown

I'm still working on finding a video but for now here's a link to the full Style.com slideshow.
They have managed to source their pictures from comparatively modest angles so there's nothing other than chest and legs showing there.

Make no mistake however, this show was CLEARLY not supposed to be "suggestive" of nudity as this NewNowNext article more clearly... ahem... demonstrates. (link is exactly as worksafe as one could expect out of any WOMEN's fashion show, which is to say not even a little bit).

This was not a question of wardrobe malfunction, penis showing portholes are carefully placed, drapes are carefully arranged and on a whole the effect seems fairly playful.

Yikes! Stripes!

I'll give you my horizontal stripes when you pry them out of my cold dead hands.

I may be "too petite" or "too curvy" for horizontal stripes by some measures, but I also have a pixie cut and elfin features, which I feel gets me a firm buy on a couple of the rules on account of my rather Gamine appearance.

From Wikipedia: The word gamine is a French word, the feminine form of gamin, originally meaning urchin, waif or playful, naughty child.

From me: in the 20th century it took on the implication of a small, slim, doe eyed, impish woman with a noticeably French (sometimes boyish) flare.  

Two of the most well known gamines are of course the Audreys.

Hepburn and Tautou, that is.

Their style is iconic, but just a tad too sweet for me, and anyway I'm talking about stripes here. When you're talking about gamine and stripes, you're talking about 50s/60s actress and tragic figure, Jean Seberg.

Jean Seberg in stripes (<-- that is a Google image search, go bask in the stripey goodness for a minute, check out all those homages, Madonna, Winona, Emma... I'll wait) is probably the single most definitive style influence of my last decade.

If I were limited to a single outfit for the rest of my life - a striped boatneck with slim but relaxed jeans would be pretty high up in the contenders.

March 2010 - I miss platinum hair just about every day, no joke

I've always had a soft spot for 60s style and cutting my hair off threw that into overdrive, so when I'm feeling like exploring the somewhat harder edges of Gamine I look to late 60s actress, Warhol muse, and also tragic figure - Edie Sedgwick.

Don't get me wrong, I dearly love me some Twiggy too, but for the goth girl in me - it'll always be Edie.

I've never gotten the hang of big earrings (I prefer bracelets), but a lifetime of cropped hair (contrasting roots and all), kohl, black leggings, and sack dresses would suit me just fine too.

On a related note: I've been going through old pics of myself this week and have noticed a distinct change in my eye makeup styling from the go-to look of my teens and twenties to now.

March 2003 - all hail the crappy webcam selfie!

I used to have a pretty adept hand at extremely heavy kohl and strong cut crease styles using little more than black liner and shadow (applied while commuting to college on a train every day, no less). When I started using the internet to research makeup I realised I had independently discovered many tricks commonly used to make small eyes look as large as humanly possible, yet I pulled it off with full, heavy black lining, which is usually said to shrink eyes.

Looking at the way I do makeup now I feel that I may have actually lost a few tricks along the way!

It's something I've been playing with lately and I've got a new concealer on the way so hopefully I'll have more to say on that (and maybe the gumption to take some closeups) later.

My clothes really are quite cool

In order to set up my last post I spent several days looking intently at pics of what I actually wear, and I thought it would be neat to figure out if there was a unifying pattern behind my preferred colours.

This is a small swatch of nearly every non black/white/grey piece of clothing I've shown in pics here so far.

My "favorite" changes every once in a while but I've always been drawn to extremely vivid cool colours. Peacock, turquoise, and aqua have been in regular rotation near the top my whole life, but violet was undisputed Queen of my Tweens. I had a brief peridot green phase in college and a bluish-crimson phase in my late twenties. Purchases in the shades between fuchsia and violet have been very common for me lately - I have three separate shirts, a dress, and a pashmina featuring that orchid on the left and don't get me started on my growing collection of fuchsia shoes. I am noticing that I am *especially* drawn to the combo of a slatey navy + either kelly or orchid right now.

Yes, Pantone Color of the Year for 2014 Radiant Orchid as a matter of fact, but I called it first!

I had been trying to find a colour wheel with a breakdown of how colours are normally paired to see if there were patterns in what I was doing, but there was just something lacking.

RYB color chart from George Field's 1841 Chromatography; or, A treatise on colours and pigments: and of their powers in painting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I found myself looking at how the colours I wear relate to the primary colours we all learn sometime around preschool (red, yellow, blue) and the rainbow of secondary colours we get from them but I just couldn't work out the pattern. Everything I found looked like the Crayola 8 box to me while my wardrobe looks more like an Easter egg hunt at a saltwater aquarium.

Never understood why it wasn't ROY-G-BIV +1

I started yet another Google search of colour theory images and this time something caught my eye. Here was an image featuring MY colours. Intense scintillating shades of grass green, cobalt, vibrant magenta, lemon, and aqua.

Oh, and red. Red is pretty enough, but I just haven't been into it at all lately.

What's the difference? This more vibrant wheel is is the primary (red blue green) and secondary (cyan, yellow, magenta) set of colours used for colour theory as it pertains to LIGHT. Unlike the strangely blah ROY-G-BIV pigment colours, which are what we typically learn as kids, I am ALL OVER this palette.

Break the blue/green side of this down into tertiaries and you get almost exactly the same palette as the one derived from my clothing above.

What does this mean for how I use colour? I don't know yet, though it is pretty neat!

I feel as a first step I may benefit from having a closer look into my heavy use of analogous colours, which are those next to each other on the colour wheel. I normally think of my jeans as neutral but in given my heavy use of cool tones they are clearly adding to this overall cool feel to my wardrobe.

Due to some revelations I have recently had about my skin tone I have been experimenting with slightly warmer colours in makeup. It may be fun to take this a bit further and seek out other small ways to add some warm pops in, such as with accessories and jewelry. I love stark contrast and this may be a great way to play that up.

It feels very simple in concept, and yet I feel like I've been given a whole new way to look at my wardrobe!

The wedding dress I'm NOT wearing

It's getting on crunch time to buy my wedding dress.

Oh yeah, by the way I'm getting married in the fall! I don't think I've mentioned that yet, have I?

I'd say it's the majority of the reason I've even gotten into this whole style thing. I spent months researching the most flattering options for me and looking at thousands of images of pretty clothes and makeup for inspiration. Eventually I remembered that people see me other days too.

Anyway, I'm posting because I have spent the last several days stressing my gown.

I had some very clear ideas about what I was looking for, especially in terms of silhouette. My love of dancing, small frame, and size of the venue all pointed me toward a lighter, more fitted, non "bridal cake meringue" dress with a high drama factor, and I've stuck pretty firmly to that. I have a gown picked out, but there was an aspect of the fabric that didn't quite click so I'm special ordering it in a custom fabric.

I love it, it's gorgeous, because of the fabric changes it will be 100% unique to me, I can't find one picture of someone using it as a wedding dress, and it's designer silk with custom changes at a retail chain polyester price-point. Presumably that is because it's not generally sold in a "wedding dress" colour. No, I'm not telling you what designer or style, not yet anyway (EDIT: I will say however that there were apparently five different people wearing their designs at The Golden Globes and associated galas).

I'm totally buying it, but I think I needed another good day of running around in circles with my hands flailing over my head and an intense internet shopping comparison session before I could commit.

So now that that's out of the way, this post is about The Dress I'm NOT getting.

More after the jump:

Curvespiration and shorthusiasm

There's a great deal to be said for deriving pleasure from your own unique beauty, but that is often an understanding that comes with maturity. When you're young and impressionable and the women society tells you are beautiful are NOTHING like you, or like Rita Hayworth are so far removed from their original look that you would never know, it can be hard to feel like you have a place at the table.

I'm not a fan of the music of Jennifer Lopez, but just about every time I see a picture of her I am massively grateful for the amount of image PR she has provided for petite, shapely, athletic, Latina ladies. When I was young it seemed like NO ONE in the media or in my neighborhood looked like the woman I expected to become, but Boricua (the native word for the people of Puerto Rico and the most dominant element of my genetics) is now SO much more broadly recognized as beautiful, thanks to the wider media exposure to women like J-Lo. 

I feel that in no small way her popularity gave me the ability to quiet at least a couple of the self conscious worries of my youth. But even now it's hard to feel connected to fashion when I'm looking for items to suit a small curvy tanned frame and the world is showing me everything on tall willowy alabaster women.

Internet fashion world to the rescue!

I have begun digging through the internet in earnest and have found some great petite bloggers. This listing of 7 Phenomenal Petite Fashion Bloggers from allwomenstalk has been so beyond helpful - even to the point of confirming that Wendy of Wendy'sLookbook, (which I already followed) is also petite! I feel like she proportions her clothing so well it's actually hard to tell.

At 5'5" even J-Lo is somewhat "tall" as an aspirational figure for me and was certainly not the first Latina women on the scene, but I really feel like she broke things open for the wider appreciation of a certain sassy, hippy, golden hued, button nosed, brown eyed look; and I can sort of relax a bit about whether I could possibly pull off a style when I see her rocking it.

image of J-Lo at the AMAs via http://gofugyourself.com*

Look at those hips! Seriously, I just can't hate on my curves when I see a picture like that.

I may not have a veritable army of personal trainers, makeup artists, and stylists at my beck and call to keep me looking my best, but I DO have approachable sources of inspiration. Very VERY thankfully I also have a brain, a tiny frame, a yoga mat, and a good pair of running shoes, so I think I have a fair shot when I actually put in the effort.

It's easy to get caught up in the differences between ourselves and the darlings of media but it's important to look at similarities too. I personally happen to be five foot two inches tall - so I thought it would be cool to give props also to some other gorgeous fellow five foot two Latina celebs who utterly rock their looks like:

Shakira
Eva Longoria
Christina Aguilara
Salma Hayak
and Gloria Estefan.

These ladies have helped to wake up the world to a wider definition of beauty!


*If you've got a bit of time to spare, the recurring parody depiction of Jennifer Lopez on the Go Fug Yourself celebrity fashion blog is seriously one of my favorite things on the entire internet.

Behold the power of embarrassment!

When the format of this blog began to crystallize (sometime last Tuesday-ish) I immediately thought of the TLC show What Not To Wear.

If you've never seen the show: they pick a person to makeover and follow them around for a few days getting pics of their day-to-day wear. Stylist/hosts Stacey and Clinton surprise them by showing (and picking apart) this footage in front of a giant group of friends, and then through the magic of television we all accompany the makeover-ee on a shopping spree with tips tailored to their frame, tastes, and lifestyle. This culminates in a big reveal in front of the same crowd who got to see the embarrassing secret footage.

(Results not typical)

I've gotten a lot of solid info from the show over the years, so I figured if I was looking to overhaul my wardrobe I could do a lot worse than to follow that same formula. Over the course of the week I started taking daily shots of my outfits and learned some pretty important things.

Continued after the cut.