ticker tape parade no. 9

Photos from The Snug Bug

As someone who also uses a little point-and-shoot camera, I really appreciated the photo tutorial on Snug Bug. Though maybe someday I too will own a fancy DSLR! (Also I think Patty is adorable so I couldn't resist the chance to look at copious amounts of pictures of her!)

I've been thinking recently on the difference between pushing myself to try new things clothing-wise (and show them off on this here blog) and wearing something because I think blog-land would approve. Shey at Modesty is Pretty wrote a post on almost exactly this recently!

Gertie wrote a post about how plus sized women's bodies are hidden in the media. She makes the point that if when women are shown bodies that look like their own but are covered up and minimized so that less attention is paid to them how are they supposed to feel proud of their own bodies? There are so many places this conversation could go, but I'm pretty disappointed by many of them commenters bringing more fat shaming to the space.

For something a bit more light-hearted, this video of a fellow filming a makeup tutorial on his partner is so cute!

I really love the blog Already Pretty. So I was really excited to see that right after there was a post on Already Pretty about breaking color pairing taboos, E. at academichic wore red and pink together! Take that Valentines day!

Finally, I started following Chaos Words (this is a friend's tumblr, it's mostly poetry and pictures), Grosgrain, MADE, and Yonder.

basil seedlings

This is a short, sneaky post while I'm working on another one. But I'm so excited about seedlings from my planting project that I couldn't stop myself. THEY ARE SO CUTE.

Not that I went digging for them or anything... I might be just a tiny bit impatient.

ticker tape parade no. 8

First of all, the video above. I LOVE the sound that little penguin makes. I want to tickle it all day and be best friends. I first saw this video on Tea & Chickadees and oh boy did it make me happy.

I finally learned a little bit about Google Friend Connect and started following some blogs through it, but I still don't quite understand what it is. Or what the difference is between following something on Blogger and following something through Google Friend Connect. On the same note I also started using Google reader. I didn't even try to go as far as Bloglovin. (Please don't make fun of my lack of blogosphere savvy! Or if you do, could you also explain it to me?)

There has been a lot of talk around the internet about the pink nail polish J.Crew ad. As far as responses to the trans-bashing that has been going on around the ad I really like this post on Academichic.

"Retro high-waisted panties" love at Gertie's New Blog. I'll readily admit that I love big comfy undergarments.

It's been a quiet week here (read internet light) because I'm still getting used to the new job tapping the old cha-ching.

herb garden

My quickie before-work project yesterday was to start some herb seeds! I think I'm starting them late, but I'm also not sure if this really matters because I think they'll be indoor plants. The egg carton for this has been patiently sitting on the kitchen table for about a week, just waiting for me to get out of the house on time and get some potting soil.


I started cilantro, rosemary, mint, basil, sage and parsley seeds. I know I'm missing a whole bunch of others but I only had so much space!

Rosemary is probably one of my favorite herbs, we sell so much cilantro where I work that I really wanted to grow some just to smell it all the time, and I have really fond memories of my mom having huge pots with basil plants on our front step so I couldn't help it.

Then last night I had a dream that they all sprouted. I wasn't disappointed when I woke up because I knew they hadn't, but wouldn't it be nice if once you put seeds in a little soil and dumped some water on them they said, "Ok, we're sprouted!" and then got it done?


I'm considering building raised garden beds on wheels to plant vegetables in. The house we live in is rented and I don't think the landlords would let me plant a garden, but I could put the beds in the driveway where they wouldn't leave dents in the lawn and could be moved easily.

I think I'm really late in starting vegetables. But I have to figure out if I'm actually going to build raised beds before I start any seeds. And finish another carton of eggs. The one we have in the fridge has 18 cells, so the possibilities are endless!

overall retirement party

Shirt: thrifted Talbots; overall shorts: thrifted; boots: swapped

It's amazing that looking at a picture can make you realize things about clothing that looking in a mirror can't. I love my body, and I think it's beautiful. However, I think I've just fallen out of love with these overall shorts.

I thrifted them almost two years ago and knew that they didn't fit then. They were too short lengthwise, too wide at the waist, AND they were seriously faded. They just weren't built to flatter my body type. But I wanted them really, really bad.


I took them home, lovingly dyed them which took care of the fading, and hardly wore them. When I did they wedgied really easily, and did nothing in the way of figure flattery. They make me look very bottom-of-the-tum plump, and not in a sexy-full-hips way.

All this I never really thought about until looking at these pictures. I still think they're adorable shorts, and still love them dearly, but I don't think they're for me. They are now destined for the hand me downs for my sister for her birthday bag, and maybe they'll fit her better.

Looking at these pictures doesn't make me feel bad about my body. Maybe that sentence makes you jump and say, "But you just completely bashed yourself, how can you say this?"

If you look back over this post you'll see that my criticisms are of the fit of the overalls, not my body, and I think that's a really important distinction. Asking "How do I look" when looking in the mirror puts the focues on how your body looks, even if you love your body dearly and love how it looks. "How does this [shirt, pair of pants, dress] look on my body" seems very different to me. Every piece of clothing is not going to look good on every person, but that's not a reason to feel bad about the shape of your body. But it's really hard to unlearn negative thinking when it comes to your own body.


However, what looking at these pictures makes me remember is what I really wanted when I bought these overalls. My dream was a piece of clothing with a vintage play suit feeling. Shorts that fit closely at the waist, nipping in where I curve to accentuate and flatter that curve, and a fitted bib that was more like the bodice of a dress that could be worn with or without a shirt underneath.

I have a sewing machine. I may not have the skills to make exactly this right now, but I think it's a great goal for this summer.

What do you do when you feel down about clothing that doesn't make you feel fabulous?

P.S. While goofing around on the internet this morning after writing this post I found a link through Casey's Elegant Musings (this post! More body love!) to a post on Style Trumps Fashion about yesterday being a day for shameless blogging. A day for celebrating your body the way it is? Yes please! Let's do this everyday.

ticker tape parade no. 7

Image from the silk shirt alteration tutorial at One Pearl Button

There's a really fantastic tutorial on how to alter a silk button down shirt (or any button down shirt, but silk is such a nice fabric) over at One Pearl Button. This girl has so many sweet tutorials! She's also hosting a four year blogging anniversary giveaway. You should really check her out!

I think next week I'm going to participate in the Inspiration Monday project on the Two Birds blog. I want to connect with more bloggers, and this seems like a good place to start. Especially because I thrifted a really nice plaid flannel this week and this is the inspiration picture!

I also started following Love Elycia and Q's Daydream this week. Both are completely adorable.

And then I wanted to leave this bit-of-a-rant for last:

A blog that I've been following for years posted this article, Why You're Not Married, by Tracy McMillan, calling it an "an honest and in your face assessment of how single women manage to stay single." This made me so mad when I first read it. I pulled up the two articles that I knew of that break down why this article is so harmful to women, one by Feministing and one by Jezebel (though the Jezebel post doesn't so much break it down as satirically point out how it's harmful), and wanted to post a comment - which I've never done on this blog - with links to Feministing and Jezebel. Then I stepped back. How would you react if someone you had never had any contact with left a comment about how wrong something you thought was - something that's been shoved down your throat your entire life - like sexist ideas about women? My comment wouldn't do anything to change how this person thinks about marriage and why they're not married, and would probably just solidify how crazy those feminists are. This post makes me want to stop reading this blog, even though I don't read it for it's feminist politics but because I like how the person dresses. How do I reconcile my politics with really prevalent women bashing in the fashion world, by women themselves? I don't know.

adorable long haired peace loving children jewelry

When I found these earrings at the Goodwill I thought they were handmade because they looked like they might be made from old magazine images. They also had kittens on them, and you can't go wrong with kittens, so I brought them home.


Turns out Fran Mar, which is the company name on the back of the earrings, made a lot of jewelry throughout the sixties and seventies with "moppets." Adorable long haired peace loving children jewelry.

teeny tiny pigtails

The theme for today's post is "look what I can do!" Teeny tiny pigtails!

Right now I'm not so much growing my hair out as not bothering to cut it, and I'm having a lot of fun playing with it. I think I want to get it cut (around the beginning of the year I got my first professional haircut in years and was more impressed by it than by my buzzer haircuts), but I'm not sure if I want to let the front grow out. So I don't want to pay to get it cut, leave the front long, then decide that I want the front short as well. So I'm just not cutting it for now. And look what I can do!

ticker tape parade no. 6

30th Anniversary Reproductive Justice Conference is this weekend! Actually it starts this afternoon! I wish my life were as interesting as it's seemed the past few weeks, I usually don't go to this many conferences, it's just that time of year.

How brave! Casey of Elegant Musings is doing a 30x30 challenge right now by herself! I think I could do a 30x30 challenge with the one million other bloggers that do the challenge when Kendi puts one out there, but I don't know if I'd do it by myself.

A post on Little Girl Big Closet about what Tara's blog means to her and what she wants out of it kind of hit home. The past six weeks (these Friday favorites are a great way to keep track of how long I've been writing this blog) I've been trying to figure out what this blog is. It's not completely a style blog, not completely a crafting blog, not completely a thrifting blog. What it is is a little piece of my world put out there for someone else to find, hopefully like what they see and want to share too. Now I need to quit being sentimental about my little fledgling blog. We really should be friends though.

Along the line of blog-things, I've been working on a "worthwhile reads" page. I used to have them in a long list down the side bar, but it really bothered me that the side bar was longer than my posts (neurotic? Very possibly). I'm not affiliated with any of these blogs, and am still working on the courage to comment on many of them, but I really do think they're worthwhile reads!

So in that respect, I started following Cakies, Lemon and Raspberry, Flashlights and Arrows, and Two Birds this week.

espressos, cappuccinos, americanos, lattes...

This is the newest addition to our household's coffee brewing devices: an espresso maker!

It's not quite as epic and sinister looking as I lead you to believe.

The past couple days I've been pretty consistently giddy, so it's probably not surprising (at least I'm not surprised) that I got so excited about finding an espresso maker at the Goodwill today. Me and (let's skip the whole initials thing and just call him by his name) Don were wandering around the Goodwill when we found not one, but two espresso makers for three dollars each. After finding a book about espresso making as well, and deliberating for a while on the knowledge gleaned from some quick reading, this is the one we chose. When we got home I immediately went town cleaning it up. It was pretty dingy looking before.

Now, neither of us has ever used an espresso maker.


So this is the first cup of espresso I've ever made! Slightly silty, but still tasty. However, I'm not sure if someone who knew what they were doing would agree with me. I think that I'm going to be over caffeinated for a while because all I want to do is make cup after cup to perfect the skill.

I'm also kind of afraid of the milk steamer. I want to learn how to use it but figure I'll learn how to make decent espresso first THEN try steaming milk. Let's not get carried away here.

blue suede shoes

Sweater: thrifted; dress: thrifted; belt: thrifted; tights: gifted Hue; shoes: thrifted

Today I started a new job! I've been jobless for the past few months, and it is so stressful. I'm just working as a cashier in a small grocery store, but when I got home I was seriously giddy. Just from finding any work.

(Another way to deal with awkward facial expressions is to include blurry dancing pictures. This is how I dance.)


So after work I went to the Goodwill (celebratory thrifting) and found these shoes. Then I came home and changed into something that matched, just so I could wear them. They really are blue suede shoes. The dress is a muumuu that someone else chopped the bottom off of. It's a much better length than floor length but the chop is messy and unhemmed. I don't want it any shorter, so I've never bothered to hem it and it doesn't unravel.

The blue dots on the dress look like a 7th grade diagram of a mitochondria, but they match the shoes pretty well.

ticker tape parade no. 5

This is not my Grammy. However, I think they would get along.

I wish it was an April Fool's joke, but me and the fellow (can we call him D. from now on? That makes things so much easier) have been laid up with The Cold From Hell for the past week, which is why it's been so quiet here. We're starting to feel better so hopefully things will be picking up again. You know what's also not a funny April Fool's Day joke? It snowed last night. Thankfully it's all melted again by now.

This post by Tania at What Would a Nerd Wear is, however, a very funny joke.

The videos in this post at My Girl Thursday I really, really like. Whenever I look at Advanced Style I wonder what my Grammy would thin. She loves style to the point where she can date old movies (and she watches a lot of them) to within a couple years just by the costuming. I love my Grammy so much.

Started following Tea and Chickadees, PuNk rAwK pUrL, Vixen Vintage, and Advanced Style. The last two are more blogs that I've been unofficially following for a while.

I also finished reading Kalpa Imperial by Ang&eacutelica Gorodischer. This was one of my Christmas presents from D., and it was definitely one of the best books I've read in awhile. Right now both D. and I are reading Moby Dick, though he's much farther along in it than I am.