There’s a fashion/lifestyle magazine called Lucky which peddles $300 bluejeans and $900 spangled high-heeled sandals yet somehow purports to promote elegant, almost-zenlike simplicity…kind of like Dwell for the wardrobe. Any old how, I guess the implication is that you’re lucky if you can drop that kind of dough on the ephemera of fashion, but I prefer my own kind of sartorial luck.
Stray clothes.
I found a really great shirt on my way to work on Sunday on Central Ave./West 9th St. in the West Bottoms. It was just lying in the gutter, buttonless and filthy, but I liked the look of the print and colors and thought that if it cleaned up okay, I’d replace the buttons. It did, and I did, so here it is:
Here’s a detail of the buttons. They probably date back to the early 1950s – they’re recycled from a much older blouse that was too shot to keep. But they seem to fit just perfectly on this 1970s blouse, and there were exactly the right number of buttons to retrofit this blouse, so it had to be serendipity, right?
I realized today that I have enough stuff around to compose at least one outfit of clothing entirely found either on the street or in the trash. So here it is:
I have another pair of pants (full-length, brown, brushed-cotton office pants) that would have been better yet, but they were in the wash. They were from the same haul that netted these pedal pushers.
The head-scarf is something I found on the street in York on New Year’s Eve of 1999/2000, while walking home from a pretty awesome SciFi Club party out near the University. I found it within about a block of the Minster, half frozen in a puddle of slush. I’ve since taken the tag off it, but I recall that it proudly claimed composition of 80% silk, 20% “metallic fibre”. I usually wear it as a neck scarf or a belt, but it just seemed to suggest itself as a headband for this get-up.
I’ve been on a real sewing binge lately, so here’s some of the stuff I have made:
Applique-decorated capri pants. (Front)
and back
In action (with a shirt I made last winter)
Gratuitous butt-shot.
This is the other cool pair of pants I made. Yes, they are bell bottoms. They are also AWESOME.
The rear view is the best part of these pants. The pockets are from another pattern. This one was drafted to have welt pockets, but I didn’t have the patience to make welt pockets – and I think these are better anyway.
I also made two pair of regular office pants. Khaki. One pair is cargo style, the other is just pants style. Boring. Not worth photographing, especially. The just-pants style ones have buttons holding down the belt loops and the cargo ones have leopard-print buttons, so they don’t totally spew boredom out into the world. Maybe I’ll photograph them when I photograph the shirts I recently made.
Coming soon, then…semi-boring office pants and a bunch of shirts made in different styles from the same pattern. Stay tuned…or something like that.
Hi, hi! I’m just lollygagging around tonight and trying a new approach to the abuse of GIF images. Don’t mind me. I’m sure I never do.
I have a favorite little animated GIF, a self-drawing rosette that I may end up using more again, if this embedding process looks any good. We shall see how that goes.
I have a habit of saving cute little GIFS whenever I find them, so I have some for any occasion. And some that aren’t so cute and aren’t good for any occasion, but I saved them anyway. For example, there is simply no excuse for this kind of thing.
It’s like, WTF, right?
Anyway, I will try not to be tooooo obnoxious with these little guys, but only add ’em in when a little bit of cute is appropriate.
Home Despot inspires a particularly delirious delusional state in me.
I think it’s the fact that you can find pretty much everything there with which to make or destroy your average house and all of its accessory structures and miscellaneous appurtenances.
A few years ago, I required a crowbar, as one does.
So I hied myself hither to Home Depot to select the ideal iron bar for the job. After the crowbar was acquired, I decided to have a browse around, ’cause it’s a waste to go to Home Despot without leering at the spray paint, trying to find the most hideously ostentatious “chandelier,” considering the Garden Weasel, and pricing toilets.
I was sashaying about, crowbar in hand, enjoying its iron heft, and within minutes my brain had switched into mayhem mode, and I was daydreaming about the entertainment possibilities that could lie in just stomping around town, crowbar in hand, to see what people’s reactions would be.
Bear in mind that at the time of my crowbar acquisition, I tended to dress like a candy-raver on Casual Friday:
I reckon I might have missed my calling in the arena of performance art. Obviously I need to go and seek a grant.
I guess I only have one eyeshadow compact (lovely earthtone set from Covergirl) I used to have one for doing “smoky eyes” and I liked it a lot, but I accidentally dropped it in the toilet, and there’s no going back from there.
let alone many guns which would necessitate an entire rack.”
I have a bit of a makeup problem in the sense that I have many pouches, cases, and other containers devoted to the convenient storage thereof, but relatively little makeup to store in them. I have, at last count, two eyeshadow compacts, three individual eye shadow discs, four lipsticks and two eyeliner pencils. I also have a tube of mascara coming on order from Avon. All of this fits pretty handily in one of the drawers of my Sterilite three-drawer organizer that mainly houses my formidable hair-clippie collection. For while I am lackadaisical about the facial spackle, I’m probably overly enthusiastic about hair ornaments.
Anyway, as I was saying in my excessive and prolix way, I have a lot of makeup pouches and suchlike and not a lot of makeup. So I like to make use of the shit I have around, and I have a specific and minute mania for organization. On the macro level, I am a chaotic slob, but on the micro level, I can be quite organized if the resources are right and the stars are aligned.
Recently, I took it upon myself to organize my backpack.
I have a tendency to carry entirely too much crap in my backpack, so I decided to weed it down to the essentials, then package them up conveniently, so that anything else rattling around in my bag could easily be identified and eliminated when and as necessary.
I solved two problems at once, too; I put to use some of the unused makeup bags that had been floating around, and I got my backpack into pretty good order.
I really like Clinique’s Black Honey “Almost Lipstick” tinted lipgloss. It is the bim-bomb-diggedy. A while back I bought a new tube of this wondrous goo because I’d used up my previous one, and they were doing some sort of promotional deal where they threw in this little zip bag with some moisturizer samples in it. I wasn’t especially swayed; I’d just as soon stick with my Aveeno “Positively Radient” which is way cheaper and also sunscreeny, but I thought the bag was kind of cute…it even has a bicycle on it! It now houses my first aid supplies, comprising a small ziplock full of assorted band aids, another containing aspirin and advil, a travel bottle of hand sanitizer, a few tampons, toothpaste, tooth brush, safety pins, pocket knife, and citronella oil.
The little clear-and-aqua windowpane check bag dates back to my highschool days; I used to use it to carry shampoo, conditioner, and deodorant for Gym class. Now, it is full to the gizzard with inner tubes for any bike I could conceivably find myself riding. The other bag is The Prettiest Toolkit Ever! It has rhinestones on it.
It had originally contained some lavender scented bath products and one of those fluffy shower-gell-puffer-things. The bath products have long since been enjoyed, and the fluffy puffer thingy has been destroyed by the cats. Now, this handy-dandy little bag contains patch kits, tire levers, a crescent wrench, some Tri-Flo oil, a multitool, and yet another road tube.
It’s so much easier to find stuff when I need it, and I’m finally getting some good use out of these little pouches.
And now on to my next fab re-purposing.
I found a Caboodles the other day. About a million years ago, when I was in Junior High in the early 1990s, these things were considered the schizznit. Many of my girlfriends had them, to better store and tote their stashes of Scrunchies and Love’s Baby Soft. I never had one, preferring my hot-pink-and-teal Gitano overnight bag for such duties. All the same, I recognized the general niftiness of these glorified, color-coordinated tackleboxes.
Anyway, the other day I was taking Ruby on her daily run, and we were trolling the back alleys of the West Bottoms (lots of things to sniff and piddle on) when I spied something hot pink that looked promising. Lo, it was a vintage Caboodle!
I couldn’t really conscience leaving it there in the alley behind “>the very private club so I dug around in the trash heap a little more, found a piece of coaxial cable, and tied the Caboodle to my package rack. I wasn’t 100% sure what I’d use it for, but it was too good of a bit of detritus to pass up.
Well, when I got home with it, I realised that it would be way better for storing my thread than the old Searsonite travel case I’d been using:
Plus, also, this Samsonite-knockoff smells strongly of vitamins. I guess the previous owner used to store their iron pills and other nostrums in here.
When I got done sorting, de-tangling, and re-winding, this was the end result. Highly satisfying, and now I can find pretty much any color I might have occasion to need. Whoot!
Now I need to find a good use for the old blue case that smells like vitamins. I’m sure it will come to me eventually, and in the meantime, it stows nicely under the futon in my office.
Man, oh man, yesterday I had two flats at once and it was a pain in the ass.
I picked up some goat-head thorns during one of Ruby’s and my excursions into the West Bottoms. The dog likes to run, and I don’t, so what we do to compromise is I leash her up and we roll down to the bike/ped bridge into the Bottoms and then cruise up and down the alleys in the bottoms for a little bit until she gets the naughties worn off.
She’ll run flat out across the bridge and well into the bottoms…she’s been known to keep up a steady gallop until we reach the halfway house that’s probably a mile and a half from our house. Then she slows to a four-beat trot that she’ll carry on for another two miles before she starts to show signs of flagging.
The other day, City crews had been mowing alongside the walkway just east of the bridge, and a lot of the trimmings and crud were heaped up on the walkway. Apparently, there were burrs hiding in the chopped up vegetation, and some of them worked their way into my tires.
I noticed my front tire getting low on my way to work, but it was a slow leak and I was able to make it in to the office. I mean to go out to the library on my lunch break, so I figured I’d just change the tube then.
Well, by the time my lunch break rolled around, my bike was sitting on two flats. So I pulled the tires and found the tubes had been Swiss Cheezed by a good half-dozen thorns each. Moreover, somehow or another, my pocket knife which I always keep in my toolkit had gone missing. I didn’t have any needle-nose pliers or even any tweezers, so I was kind of screwed.
I went back into the office to see if any of my co-workers had tweezers, but when they heard I wanted to use them to dig thorns out of my bike tires, they were less than willing to admit to tweezer-ownership. Goodness only knows why! They suggested I ask the maintenance guys if they had some needle-nose pliers I could borrow.
I went down to the maintenance shop and learned that while they do have some needle-nose pliers, their needle-nose pliers are roached and were certainly unfit for plucking thorns out of a 28C road tire, Moreover, I also was reminded why I hate to ask most guys for anything related to tools and fixing things.
Because so many guys get all grabby and want to butt in and take over when their help is neither wanted or needed. Before you know it, three different guys were hovering over my tire jabbing at it ineffectually with blunted needle-nose pliers. When one guy started prying at my tire with a flat-head screwdriver and another suggested a pair of wire-clippers, I got a bit shirty and insisted they hand my tire back. If anyone was going to ruin my tire, I’d just as soon it be me.
I eventually managed to get the thorns picked out by misusing a large-sized safety pin and a lot of cuss words. And when I got home, Joel gave me a spare pocket knife that is quite a few steps superior to my old one, so I’m ready for the next time I need a knife.
Griswald is banned from the Great Outdoors because he always gets “the call of the wild” and tries to break for broader and greener pastures. Then I have to chase all over the neighborhood trying to recapture him. Also, he is very, very, very stupid and will get himself stuck and/or lost and I have to track him down by his howling and hysterics. Then he scratches the bejezus out of me when I rescue him and I have to restrain myself from grabbing his tail and grabbing his snoot and tying him into a gigantic furry knot.
So, only Minnie gets outside privileges, and even then, she must be monitored, ’cause you really can trust a cat only as far as you can see her, and we do live near a very busy street.
Fortunately for both Minnie and me, Minnie is not an ambitious cat. Her sole objective, once out of doors, is to find the nearest clump of grass and ingest as much of it as possible. She’ll guzzle grass until she’s full to the gizzard. Then, I will let her inside, and she will hork up wads of undigested herbage in random heaps around the house.
Nom x infinity
I hate it when I’m right.
Ruby was out at the same time, and engaged in a little friendly cat-heckling.
Looming
Cornering her in our “new” bathtub.
Getting mouthy.
Aaaaand an action-shot of cat-heckling.
This is one way we can amuse ourselves around here on a lovely springtime afternoon.
Joel cut my hair for me recently. I’d gotten into the old ponytail rut, and there’s not much less flattering than a ponytail on me.
I’d long admired Ichii Sayaka’s haircut, especially from the Chokotto Love era of Pucchi Moni:
For reference, she’s the girl with the short, choppy hairdo, mostly in the center of the choreography.
So, I found a bunch of pictures where you could get a good look at her hairstyle and showed them to Joel.
We looked up a few instruction pages for hair cutting online, and last Tuesday, I sharpened up my best sewing scissors and asked Joel to make free with my hair.
OMG! BANGS! I haven’t intentionally worn bangs for about five years…a bad case of bangs precipitated one of my many forays into home-made haircuts. But this time, the bangs are more subtly administered. I’m not working the furry forehead mat look this time, and I can brush them to the sides or pin them up if I want to feel the breeze on my forehead.
I wash my hair at night before I go to bed, so I usually wake up with some odd shapes. I’ve decided to just work with my bedhead, by creatively placing clips, barrettes, or decorative bobby pins, so that it looks intentional. So today the bangs are pinned back, since they were parting to the sides anyway.
I feel like the back of my head is the true masterpiece of this haircut. It’s so beautifully tufty, just how I like it. I just have to riffle a little pomade through it, turn my head upside down and rough it up, and it is good to go.
I have “Teflon hair,” in all honesty. I can do pretty much whatever I want to it, and it will be about the same. Springy. A little unruly. A haircut like this, where it is supposed to be kind of messy is probably the best bet for me. Also, it recovers from the bike helmet fairly gracefully. I just fluff it up, maybe moosh a little more hair goo in it, and I’m presentable for the office.
When I was in college, I worked as a “housekeeper†at a Super 8. Mostly, it was a pretty crappy job. The manager was a freaky, uptight racist, the customers tended to leave a godawful mess, the pay was pathetic, and I had to get up way earlier than is constitutionally congenial to me.
There was, however, one significant perk to the position. You might call it “the rule of Finders-Keepers.â€
Now if a customer left behind something important or expensive we had to turn it in to lost-and-found, but if it was something consumable, like shampoo or a (wrapped) candy bar, it was fair game. I worked at that job for two summers and I didn’t buy shampoo for myself for nearly three years. Sometimes people left behind “the cheap 99-cent kind,†but sometimes they left behind good stuff…Aveda or Toni & Guy. All of us cleaning ladies would compare notes and if I got something I couldn’t use (like dry-hair conditioner) I’d probably be able to swap it up with somebody who got a bottle of clarifying shampoo that would wreck their hair.
One thing I can tell you from my years of shampoo smorgasbord is that there really isn’t any appreciable different among brands of shampoo. The only real difference is the scent. A conditioning shampoo from the cheap brand is as good as conditioning shampoo from an expensive brand. It will be different from a clarifying shampoo…but only because of the difference between clarifying versus conditioning, not because of any real difference between one brand and another.
Suave used to have an “Aloe Vera†formula that smelled really good. Pantene’s scent used to be really nice until about 1997…then they changed it to a much stronger and vaguely fruity scent that I really don’t enjoy. Most of the shampoos (at least the ones you can get at the grocery store) have gone to really strong and fruity-ish scents that really bug me. Even the so-called floral scents smell like a Jolly Rancher. Bleh.
If and when I can get it for cheap, I really like Paul Mitchell products. They don’t have too much scent, and the scent they have is pretty unobtrusive. My hair-good du jour is Paul Mitchell Wax Works.
The truth is that I can wash my hair with pretty much whatever I want and the end result is the same. On Joel’s and my big cross-country adventure, I regularly washed it with Dawn dish soap or the rank pink hand goo in gas-station bathrooms. It was none the worse for the wear. The only thing that seems to disagree with my nearly-indestructible hair is bar soap. If the soap is liquid, be it shower gel, dish soap, hand soap, or official shampoo, it is fine, but if the soap comes in a solid chunk, it seems to render my hair tangly, rough, and ratty.
I had a really good dinner tonight. It was another festival of garbanzo beans (I’ve really been digging the garbanzo beans lately…also I keep trying to spell it been, and may just go ahead and end up doing that)
I had a sack of red lentils that needed to be used up, so I cooked them down as for dhal but I accidentally made it a little runny, so I cooked it down longer until it had the consistency of gravy. Then I seasoned it with a packet of Parampara Biryani Mix (which is DELICIOUSSSSS) and added a can of garbanzo beans and let the lot of it simmer for the suggested 15 minutes.
Because the quantity of dhal was excessive in relation to the contents of the spice packet, I had to add two teaspoons of salt and a tablespoon of lemon juice, but the finished flavor is really good. The fragrant biryani spices mix well with the slightly sweet lentils and the earthy garbanzo beans.
I had some on basmati rice, and will be taking this for my lunch for the next couple of days.
