Being An Adult

If you can't occasionally buy a horse's head mask for yourself on a whim, then what's even the point of having a job and making decent money?  I've been telling my friends and family that, after emailing them this photo with no explanation.  That, a friend of mine decided, is what being an adult is all about: having the means and the decision-making power to buy yourself a horse mask when necessary.

The dogs love it, although one of them is a little nervous it might bite.

Shoes

I just got myself an excellent new pair of shoes.  They're Steve Madden flats, very comfy.  And although they look like they belong at New Year's Eve parties, I think I can wear them to work with pants and a sweater.

Also, I've already broken my New Year's Resolution, reading comments on articles.  But at least I still haven't read any on Slate. 

Pants Altered

I don't know what's happened, fashion-wise.  I was so convinced for years that flared pants were more flattering than straight-legged.  The flared ankle balanced things out and made one's hips look smaller, the theory went.  But the past couple years, as straight-legs have come back in fashion, it just doesn't seem true anymore.  Or, even if it's true, the advantage of smaller-seeming hips is not as big as the disadvantage of looking not-so-stylish.

I have two pairs of corduroys from Anne Taylor Loft that I love, one in dark brown and one in purpley-maroon (I call that pair my Peter Brady pants).  They fit well, they're in good shape, and most important they're decent non-denim pants I can wear to work.  But they're flared, and they just make me feel like any outfit featuring them isn't really a success.

So, at the advice of my friend Connie, I turned them into straight-leg cords! I laid a pair of straight-leg jeans over them and, using a quilting pencil, traced the sides of the jeans onto the cords.  Then I sewed them!  I think it went pretty well.

Here are the before and after shots.  As a bonus, the "before" photo is an action shot including the aforementioned friend Connie, and the "after" features my trusty sewing machine.

Before:

After:

Socks!

I finished a pair of socks that I'd started knitting in January.  The first of the pair went quickly - I completed the majority of it while on vacation in Atlanta, watching Arrested Development on DVD with a college friend.  The second sock took me much longer.  I got busy and kept putting it down.  But finally, almost a year later, they're done!

They're big, wintery socks to wear around the house on cold Wisconsin nights.  I might also want to try them with colored tights, a short dress, and my blue Converse low-tops.

They're made of self-striping yarn, which I love.  The yarn is dyed to create the pattern - I never had to switch skeins or anything.

Check them out!

Nail Art

I learned a new technique from Bust Magazine's website.  You can get newsprint to show up on your nails!  Here's a pic of how it worked out for me:

Here's the quick version of what to do: paint your nails, let them dry, dip them in alcohol, hold newsprint on them, peel it off slowly, apply a top coat.  It was pretty easy! My friend Connie did graphics as well as words, and those turned out cool, too!

Two More Books

So I bought a ton of books recently, because the local Borders is going out of business (sob!).  I've finished two of them.

I started Real World by Natsuo Kirino first.  It was described as a feminist noir, and was translated from Japanese.  Four teenage girls suspect one of their next door neighbors of murder, and then things get more complicated--or so the back of the book said.  It sounded really exciting and up my alley, but it was not what I'd imagined.

First of all, there's really no question that Worm, the boy who lives next door to Toshi, has murdered his mother.  Beyond that, though, I'd imagined that the girls would be trying to solve the crime.  Instead, they rather randomly, passively support Worm's efforts to get away.  And it's never really explained! I mean, I suppose they sort of justify some of their behavior, but I never, ever felt like Toshi and her friends were in any way like myself or people I've met.  I couldn't understand their motives, and what's more, I didn't care too much about them.  The reader is told differences between the girls (Kirarin is sweet, Terauchi is smart and sarcastic, etc.) but they're never really demonstrated.  It was like "tell, don't show" was the maxim.

The other book I read was An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison.  Dr. Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, and also has bipolar disorder.  An Unquiet Mind is the story of how she learned to deal with the disease, and how it's informed her work as a psychotherapist.  I find well-written books about psychological disorders fascinating, and this one definitely was.  It balances stories of what she did while manic or depressed, how the disorder is treated, and how it changed her life.  I appreciated that it wasn't just "here is messed up stuff about my life." She actually synthesized her experiences and reached important questions.

Whoa, I just saw my purple Donna Morgan dress on a Burlington Coat Factory commercial, on a woman loaded down with shopping bags from their fabulous sale or whatever.  

More Outfits

I thought I'd post some more outfits on here.  Again, they're all from lookbook.  I can officially say I'm spending too much time on there.

Some outfits

I thought I'd post some pictures of outfits I've worn recently, for fun.  I'm still using lookbook, trying not to be distracted by wondering what random strangers think about my clothes, and mostly succeeding.  It is fun to have a place to post outfits, and to look at other people's clothes.

Apparently I really like that black and gray Urban Outfitters belt...

Shopping

The current habit of me and my friends is for them to play New Super Mario Bros Wii while I watch and read Dutch fashion blogs (I'm usually too tired from work to want to play).  Now when I hear the familiar Mario music, I start to think about clothes. 

Probably as a direct result of this habit, I've been buying a lot of clothes.  Over the last week I bought:

1. A maroon vintage late-seventies blouse

2. A pink vintage 1980s dress

3. Blue Converse low-tops

4. A Donna Morgan dress (I'd never heard of her. Got this at TJ Maxx for $40, then read online that it retails for about $180. Yay!)

5. An octopus necklace (This one is en route to me from the Netherlands. I found it for sale on one of the blogs I've been reading. Doesn't the octopus look menacing? Not enough jewelry is menacing.)

6. A pair of silver and maroon fake-cameo earrings.

7. A 1960s red and gold and black velvet dress that makes me look like I should host a variety show.

8. An AWESOME pink Eileen Fisher sweater-jacket. I got it at a sample sale. Apparently it will be manufactured in black, but never in pink. So mine is extra awesome.

Lookbook

Huh. I've been poking around on Lookbook and realized I am older than everyone on there, apparently.  Also, the community in the forums seems a bit intense.  There's a lot of advice on how to get your look "hyped" and get fans.  It seems like perhaps not the best use of my time to worry about what a random fashionable nineteen-year-old in Stockholm thinks of my dress.  I do like it as a place to post photos of what I'm wearing, just for a record for myself, and to show my friends.  But trying to earn approval from strangers is really not something that interests me.

Fashion Website

I joined lookbook.nu, a place to post pictures of your outfits, and look at other people's outfits. I've been thinking about fashion a lot lately. I like to look at fashion magazines like Lucky, but right now I'm more excited by looking at how real people put clothes together than flipping through a magazine, where people are dressed by a designer instead of themselves and advertisers are exerting influence.

New Dress

I just bought a new BCBG dress from Macy's.  It was 60% off, and I am in love with it!  It's perfect to wear to work and feel stylish all day.  It's even cuter on me than it looks on the mannequin. :)

I wore it with black tights, flat black boots, and a little black cardigan.  I also want to try it with something in the opposite style, like big ornate earrings and colorful sandals.

Ottoman!

A friend and I reupholstered my ottoman last night.  It was a sort of test project before we begin on the matching Queen Anne chair.

Here's the before picture.  It was perfectly nice but rather boring.

Here's the after picture.  How stylish!

Here are the intermediate steps.  Hardest parts? Pulling staples out of the original fabric (we eventually gave up and just ripped it out) and sewing the green cording around the legs.

A couple other views of it:

Packing For Mars

I'm reading Packing For Mars by Mary Roach, and it's just fascinating.  She's a great science writer - easy to understand, funny, with a good sense for interesting details and asides.  This is all about the details and minutiae of space travel.  What sort of interpersonal problems occur? How do our organs react to zero gravity?  What happens if you throw up in your space suit? Etc.  It's great.  I'm about halfway through it.

Also, I got an awesome black lace dress for New Year's Eve from Ann Taylor Loft for $30!  It was originally $98.  Good deal.  I can't find a picture online, so I'll post one of me wearing it later.

Boots

I've been looking for a versatile, stylish, COMFORTABLE pair of cold-weather vegan shoes for a couple months now.  I've bought three pairs from endless.com and then returned them because they hurt my feet.

Today, I bought a pair at Aldo.  They're short boots ("booties" sounds like something for a baby, and I will not use it), they'll go with brown or black, they have a small heel but don't hurt to walk in - exactly what I want.  They looked great with the jeans I was wearing when I tried them on (dark blue straight leg Levi's), and I can't wait to wear them with a skirt, maybe with an odd-colored pair of tights.

Here's a pic:

Photos!

I found my camera cord! It was in a box full of other black cords - who would've guessed?  Here are some things I've wanted to post:

This is the 1930s blouse I made!

This is a shirt I embellished as a gift for a friend.  It was originally just a plain green tank (on clearance at Target) and I added the lace.  

Finally, this is another photo of the tank top I made:

Shirt

Here's a pic of one of my new creations.  I made this shirt without a pattern.  For the shiny bit at the top, I took a dressy blouse and cut off the bottom of it.  For the rest of it, I used black stretchy material leftover from a skirt I made, and white material from some hacked-up t-shirts to construct the rest of the shirt.  The slightly sticky-out bit on the left of the photo is from an awkward joining of strips of material right there, and is usually not very noticeable. 

The gorgeous bracelet and earrings were made by my mom, as is the painting in the background.  (Her website is marytelfer.com)

(Still no camera cord, but my mother kindly took a picture of me with her camera and emailed it to me.)

When I Won Third Place

Since I still can't find my camera cord, I thought I'd show a picture of a previous accomplishment of mine.  In 2005 I won third place for scariest knitwear on the now-defunct You Knit What? blog.  Behold, my terrible dinosaur tank top, and the description of it that I sent them:

These are pictures of a sweater (?) I knit two years ago. I thought it would be different to have a dinosaur on a shirt instead of boring stripes or something. I also thought "I don't need a pattern!". Which is why it's wayyy too big on me. On the sleeveless side, you can see a lot of my bra, showing just how great the fit is. So it's pretty warm, like a sweater, but sleeveless, meaning that even if I threw a shirt on under it, there was never proper weather to wear it (too warm in summer, too cold in winter). Because of this, last year I decided to add sleeves. I wanted to make them pink, but because my local yarn shop was out of it, I bought blue instead - and not the same blue as the dinosaur. A much uglier, non-matching blue. I made one sleeve, and realized how ugly it was. I tried tying a piece of yarn around the sleeve, like a ribbon, and tying it in a bow. That's the weird string hanging from the shoulder. And the other sleeve? I decided it was pointless, and called it finished

New Shoes

I bought these shoes off a friend who ordered them and found them a little too small on her - what luck! I'm in love with them.  I wore them to work just once so far and got lots of compliments.  They're made out of plastic-coated recycled newspaper, and are made by All Black Footwear.  Mine actually have gray straps, rather than the teal in this photo.

Shoe places need to come up with more unique names.  Do you know how hard it is to find that company online? I got lots of photos of black basketball shoes and such...

Joseph Kanon

I've read three books by Joseph Kanon now (just finished Los Alamos) and I definitely have a grip on the template.  Tough sort of guy, maybe a journalist, gets involved in both a murder investigation and some romantic entanglements - usually with a woman who seems like trouble but is ultimately worth it.  World War II and communism are involved.  The murder is solved, and along the way deeper themes are explored (the responsibility of the scientists in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, for example). 

I like them.  Is it bad when books are formulaic? Maybe it's not the sign of the most daring, original, wonderful books (Los Alamos is no Cloud Atlas, which I still can't get out of my head) but that doesn't mean they can't be fun.  Fun isn't even the right word, since reading about the destruction of Berlin in Kanon's The Good German is certainly not fun.  Maybe the word I want is worthwhile.  Plus, after a chapter or two to gain momentum, they're nicely un-put-down-able.

As soon as I find my stupid camera cord I'll post pictures of the blouse I finished.  It's the pink, floral 1930s one, and I adore it.  It's lovely.  I also created a tank top out of a shiny, dressy blouse that a friend gave me, an undershirt of my boyfriend's, and some black scrap fabric.  It has a few more flaws than the pink blouse, but I'm proud of it since I built it myself, without a pattern.