This hair is so perfectly 1996, when I was in art school and we all had shorn hair, and I dyed it in my bathroom till my scalp burned and my hair was ashy and white. It makes me want to run-not-walk to the salon, chop it all off and dye it. But, alas, I’m neither 19 nor do I look like this woman…
[via Etsy]
I’m nosy. I love seeing the inside of other peoples’ homes. It reminds me of driving around and going to open houses with my mom when I was a kid, whether or not we were looking to move. So this profile of furniture designer Vladimir Kagan and his needlepoint goddess wife Erica Wilson on The Selby especially peaked my interest. I once saw the inside of their place firsthand (at a Christmas party a long time ago), and I liked it so much that I was thrilled to experience it again.
What thrillingly personal style, not at all ostentatious or prescribed. A true amalgam of his and her styles.
When I started up my own business this second-time-around with Love & Victory, I swore that I’d have products manufactured for me so that I could grow the business more easily. I’m not talking manufacturing in China or anything, but working with other artisans in New York, let’s say, to produce them. The first time around with my business La Voleuse, we made these rad, hand-painted ballet shoes, and while we sold a ton of them, they required a lot of our labor to make them. Sometimes inquiries about selling them, like from Henri Bendel, made us nervous that the order volume would be so high that we would have no social life!
But DIY is in my blood! And so our trip to Portland, OR where DIY is a way of life and hanging out with Sarai Mitnick was kind of a reminder of from whence I came. Sarai runs this amazing business called Colette Patterns where she creates beautiful, vintage-inspired sewing patterns for folks to make their own clothing. Brilliant and beautifully packaged, they completely make me want to break out my sewing machine. And as if her business wasn’t inspiring enough, she has this sweet blog, Sweet Sassafras and has some rockin’ vintage style herself.
[packaging photo via this is love forever]
Especially inspiring are all the pics in the Colette Patterns gallery if girls of all shapes and sizes who have made their own clothes with Sarai’s patterns. They look umpteen times better than they could in any off-the-rack bullshit (says the woman who just had a baby!).
AND, as if that wasn’t enough, if you love cocktails, historic and new-fangled both, you should check out Sarai’s husband, Kenn’s, website Cocktailia. Thankfully, he led us to some fantastic cocktails in Portland.
“Push present” is such a horrific term for a present given to a woman by her husband after she gives birth, don’t you think? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for jewels on any occasion, and having a baby seems like a worthwhile one, but somehow it simultaneously crass and as if Hallmark just came up with a new holiday.
That said, I love a memorial of any kind, and my most favorite kind is a tattoo. So I’ve been poking around quite a bit trying to figure on a tattoo to memorialize the birth of my baby (5 months old today), Louella Mae.
I’ve been getting tattooed for a few years now by Stephanie Tamez of Brooklyn Adorned, and I’m head over heels for her work. She totally gets what I’m going for: old-fashioned, flash-style tattoos but not too heavy-handed, a little femme. I absolutely want to get her on board to finish up my other arm.
Recently, I discovered the work of Bailey Hunter Robinson who works out of Saved. I’m nuts for his color work and his flowers which is sort of surprising given that all my tattoos so far are black and white. I’ve always thought that that’s because old photos of tattooed folks are in black and white, so even though I know that lots of the work was actually color, it still lives in black and white in my mind. So maybe it’s his tattoos’ straight off the Bowery charm that has me excited about color. I’m thinking of an arc of flowers over each shoulder…
