The wrought iron plant hangers were found on the street after breakfast one morning. There were about 10!! So exciting.Herbs in the long planter. Comfrey, rosemary, chamomile, mint.

I never know how to spell these. RANNANANANANCUCUCULLSUUSSSS. So pretty, we just bought 6 or 7 and spread them around.

This book is so amazing. I tore through it. This was the life I dreamed of as a kid, visiting NYC with my grandparents and wanting to be Madonna, lofts in Chinatown, etc. One of my best friends uncle’s worked for Roy Lichtenstein, & regaled us with stories of Andy Warhol, Basquiat, the B-52s at downtown parties. Magic. How do we capture that feeling again, being 12 and feeling like anything is possible, complete freedom?

The green notebook is my new wedding notebook! It’s made me feel 100% better to write down names of shops and their hours, lists of each item & all it needs to exist – not just notes but sections for each aspect and what we need to complete it, down to things like string and sealing wax and stamps. Organizing power!

I’m not usually a pink fan, but I couldn’t resist this pink milk glass cake stand at a little vintage shop near my house. & madelines! The chocolate cookie is this CRAZY cookie named something like floradoraarara that has a caramel cream between two oaty cookies, SO AMAZING.

Lemonade made with rose geranium. This is my summer drink, I am so addicted. Jayne Mansfield tea party moment.

Sweet peas. My mama always grew these up a trellis next to the front door, love love love.

Tiny moss worlds on the stoop outside the back door.

Sunny days and puttering in the garden! I could do it forever and ever.

Share/Save]]> http://www.verhext.com/secret-garden/feed 7 http://www.verhext.com/fabric-finds http://www.verhext.com/fabric-finds#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:53:41 +0000 verhext http://www.verhext.com/?p=3225 I worked from home today, and while cleaning up my desk area, noticed a card for the weekly fabric sale at Erica Tanov, which is just down the street. I’d been wanting to go for months and months but am never on home on Thursday. So today at lunch, I ran over!

Eeeek! This is was SO WORTH IT. Fabric was so reasonable, and there’s bolts and bolts of silks, gorgeous cottons, & stunning jersey. I restrained myself and did not buy a teeny anchor print cotton, a black and white seersucker, and a baby baby pink sheer jersey knit. Sigh. I DID buy a pale pink silk that might work for Dori’s wedding dress, a dusty rose shimmering cotton twill, and I freaked the heck out over a caramel silk with gold medicine wheel print they called “Deco Silk.” So tempted to make my wedding dress out of this. & gold sequin trim! & cream silk ruffles, and 2 sacks of scraps.

They also have a free box for scraps, and a random box of inspirational vintage finds – I found a green silk and lace Victorian ribbon (in the 1st photo,) and a photograph album of a girls school in New Hampshire Smith?, with some really amazing photos! I’m not usually one to want a photo album that isn’t of my family, but this one was too cute and too cheap to pass up.

Grumpiest picnickers ever. Click for more detail!

The school apparently had an impressive greenhouse.

I love this sassy crowd.

This striped sweater and tie look is also doing it for me.

Why do I get the feeling she was queen bee?

“Spear” is rocking the long skirt/sweater/belt trend apparently de rigueur among the ladies of the school.

See?

I’m pretty sure these are both girls.

Should I be reading blogs? Should I not? I need a girly girly helper planner to come sit and drink tea and help me pick out fonts and borders and paper and say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ to things. Though mind you, the Professor is brilliant at this, and so far has come up with huge ideas for invites and save-the-dates, which we weren’t going to do but I started to get “when is it, again?” questions.

Part of me wants to take some steroids, pick a theme and go super crazy matchy matchy everything, but the reality is I don’t have the time, energy, or budget. I need to hand write some save the dates, send them out,  put together cute invites and a simple website and call it a day. My wedding site is not going to super match everything else. I don’t have the energy to build out a matching site plus design fancy invites plus make my dress plus finish building the cabin plus build a deck/dancefloor plus yadda yadda. I’m a DIY girl but dang, I do not know where some people get the energy.

I looked up letterpress pricing for invites, and OMG YOU GUYS FOR REAL. WHO CAN AFFORD $10,000 full invite suites?  WTF. IT IS PAPER. Beautiful paper, but PEOPLE ARE STARVING IN BIAFRA. I’ve seen fancy full suites of custom letterpress on wedding blogs (you know, letterpressed MAPS even) – these weddings must cost more than houses. What. The. Heck. Whoa. I know blog weddings are pretty and all, but I cannot believe the sheer time and expense it would take to do something like this. I’d just never thought about it before.

If anything this wedding planning is another reality check around class strata & the blogosphere. I had NO IDEA how much each piece of a wedding cost, and now looking at “real weddings” is like adding up the items in a shopping cart before you get to checkout. Clearly, I need a better career, or some sort of trust fund, to be able to have a wedding like these. & I find that sites like “broke brides” and “offbeat brides” just don’t have anything that I find pretty, or useful! So, I’m on my own. Which is ok! Momentary lapse of sanity brought on by looking where I knew I shouldn’t look!

My huge huge huge main concern is providing places for people to stay. I know it’s far for people to come and they can’t afford flights & rental cars & hotels, so I’m trying to find a solution that will work, like renting a nearby yurt (they haven’t responded) or a house…nothing is panning out, and I’m panicking! I need some way to chill out, to gain perspective, and some hand holding and tea-sharing, for sure!

So, reality check-list.

___make and send some save the dates

___hie thee to a gym, honeychild.

___start gathering invite makings

___make final invitation list

___finish the cabin & figure out landscaping / ground things, build a pavilion

___where will people stay?

___make a dress.

___find a suit.

___um, rings?

___decide what the ceremony will be like.

___think of it as a big tea party, i’m good at those.

___everything else.

During my vacation (all this expanse to think, and I fixate on my clothes making me feel strange?) I was also thinking about the nature of fashion. The Fashion Week tweets and blog posts were flying thick and fast, so it was in the air. When I read Tricia’s post about Fashion Week, I commented the following:

I’ve been thinking about this all week & have been percolating in order to write about it. & now that I’m about to comment I find I’m still not sure what I want to say! But I too have been burnt out, and I’m not even in the fashion world. There’s something missing – the need for editors to even be at the shows (imagine old-vogue style, where you could phone up and arrange a private viewing!) is irrelevant now — the inspiration seems to be coming more and more from the street and trends are set by the people, not the designers. The internet has changed fashion drastically in just 10 years.

Anyway, babble. Cost vs luxury, DIY, exclusivity, the demise of fashion editor omnipotence… it all POINTS to a more diverse world, but then we still see rows and rows of cookie cutter outfits and poses and trends. THIS is what I don’t get. It’s like no one cares about fashion as a creative outlet, just fitting in.

In my world, clothing is about plumage & creativity. When I look at fashion blogs, it seems that the looks being showcased are very homogeneous. Maybe I just haven’t seen a wide enough range? Lately, I’ve been suffering from information overload and I feel like I’m thinking way too much about what other people wear and do, especially people who’s lives and styles are drastically different from mine. Because I’ve been in such a strange space emotionally, I tend to question my own sense of style. Should I like that? Everyone seems to? But I don’t? There’s something about the constant flow of information, about the concept of fashion that causes me to question what I like. Because I was raised in the woods without television or around a lot of people; I get overwhelmed easily!

It’s interesting that I’m now exposed to people I would never, ever know. The complete range of class and privilege blows my mind, from teenage girls with more money than Midas to stay at home moms creatively managing to make ends meet and still look stylish. Even with that huge huge range of people, I literally cannot tell people apart on street style sites. Tricia posted also this totally amazing site that matches photos of people together, and it took me a moment to realize that IT WASN’T ALL THE SAME PEOPLE. Wild. WILD!

There are things I love that it’s not as fun to wear anymore. Like giant fur hats and kiltie boots and belted blazers and turbans. Can they be un-stylish so I can go back to wearing them? Is that insane? There is something truly magical and freeing in wearing things other people deem outlandish or backwoods, something great in the freedom and creativity that came from being in my own little bubble and dressing to express my own personality. I think of my office job is also a huge factor in the loss of that creativity. How can I stay myself and still look professional, and still be able to safely bike to work? That’s a tall order!

I saw this quote from an Isaac Mizrahi interview: And who, in plainer terms, is this showgirl-meets-woodland-fairy Mizrahi sees wearing his collection? “I think it’s about a person who’s somewhat smart and somewhat urbane, yes, and also kind of this perfect age: 35. Whether she’s 65 or 25, I think it’s smart to look kind of like prime, as opposed to too girlish. I try to stay away from girlish things, I really do. I don’t mean girly things. I mean, I don’t like girls to look tweenish. I don’t like a tween. Even though, of course, I love a tween, I have the soul of a Japanese tween, I do. Um, what? ARE YOU SPYING ON ME, ISAAC? Showgirl meets woodland fairy? 35?  Staying away from girlish things? What what!? Sounds good to me!

But the quote itself also brings up the incredible disconnect I see in images where 14 year old girls are wearing clothing designed for 30 year old women. It doesn’t look good, it looks jarring, like a little girl playing dress up. The thinness is also getting so so so extreme to the point where I honestly think we’re at the skinniest fashion ideal of all time. Girls on the internets look like the very very poor girls who didn’t have enough to eat when I was growing up, and I was a skinny teen, around 100 lbs! It makes me sad, and worried. It’s just insane.

At lunch yesterday I sat in a bookshop and read feminist books that made me angry for an hour, which is a good way to get perspective when I worry about shit like “I hate all my clothes.” or “Why do all these young girls want to dress like frumpy 90’s kindergarten teachers?” Why do I, as a woman, get so caught up in something so seemingly trivial? Because clothing helps me feel comfortable in my skin, in a world I don’t entirely understand. It is armor and protection, it is a way to create a space for myself, it is something I can control and express in my own world microcosm. And that is why the idea of Fashion with a capital F is something I don’t want to be a part of – a cultural and capitalist entity that feeds off the identities of it’s followers in the name of style.

What I love about clothing is creating places, characters, ideas. Time travel, the past and the future! I love the idea that fashion can be feminist, that we don’t have to wear what’s created for us if we don’t want to! We can take it back, refuse to fit into ideals, use clothing as a tool to break glass ceilings in the workplace. We can get married in black, wear metal spikes on our shoes, vote with our dollars by shopping only vintage! I like the fact that I can be a different person every day if I want to.

When I have these wee fashion crises I always gravitate back to beatnik witches, preferably Italian. What? Why do I bother gravitating away, when I’ve been liking the same things since I was 10? What is it in the inherent power of these women that so enamors me? Genetic memory! It’s like a recharging spot that I come back to over and over, a grounding point. Today I’m wearing a giant black cashmere sweater, black tights, and boots. I’m working from home. There’s a storm brewing. I feel grounded and good.

Mod eye makeup! I’d watch her put on makeup when I was little, the pot of eyeliner was always the most fascinating to me.That’s fat babycheeked me! I wear that big garnet cocktail ring now.With my cousin, she’s probably 24 here. Tiny! I wish I’d gotten her hair and not these curls. Pretty witchy mama! She’s always taught me to trust my instinct and inner guiding spirit, to wander into the woods, to be myself & to do anything I want to.

What else has been inspiring me? Inspiration days, being madly in love with someone who is super accepting and wonderful and supportive and amazing & gets me on track when I’m off, planning the wedding, cherry trees, family, the future, house dreaming, 1920s, my grandmother’s spirit, tumblr, embracing the witchiness, sewing projects, the promise of summer.

Make sure to check out the rest of the blog it forward blogs!! I haven’t had time to even think (even getting this wee post up was a pain) but I really want to spend some time browsing the whole list. I need a better way to organize the things I do read and sort it out to focus on inspiring things.

• Two Brunettes 2/23
• victoria klein 2/25