Alaskan skies

It seems an age since I have actually taken any outfit photos but I decided to yesterday as I was rather pleased with this outfit.
It all began with this beautiful skirt from Lindybop.  I realised, when I ordered it on about the 29th December (annoyingly 2 days before the 20% off bonus) that I have never ordered myself anything from Lindybop.  My three dresses from there have been presents from CBC.  I've often admired things but been remarkably restrained considering what my will power is like in a charity shop. It's taken me about 2 months to finally give in and buy this skirt- I loved it so much I gave in in the end. It features a beautiful Alaskan sky in my favourite colourscheme.

Wasn't the light beautiful in these photos!  It was such a halcyon day yesterday in the true sense of the phrase.   As I worked in the garden later on (I hasten to add, in alternative garments), I was struck with the light and gentle air.

The top is from a beautiful Vintage-inspired boutique that CBC and I found in Florence the day we got engaged.  I tried it on and he bought it for me for Christmas that year.  When I wear it, I always remember our time there.  It contains cashmere and the collar can be worn in various ways but this is my favourite one. It has only featured on the blog once about 4 years ago!

Since the Alaskan skies were starry, I decided to add these pretty diamante star pins which I purchased from a charity-shop for 45p each a few weeks ago.

Aside from tights, the final touch was this charity-shopped grey beret with charity-shopped rhinestone bow brooch (which lives upon this hat for a few years now- bought together)

Oh, and my beloved Doc Marten boots.  I wear virtually nothing else in the wet and wintery weather...

It's lovely when a set of garments makes you feel pretty. I felt that in this collection.  

Do you have any special garments from any times that draw you back to memories or other times?

Thank you again, from the bottom of my heart, for your kindness over the last few days. I realise that losing out on a house is not a great thing in the grand scheme of things and I am lucky to be able to stay in my rental house.

Hope all is well with you.

xx

Style imitating Art October: grey and peaches...

Hello there,

I hope you have had a lovely day. Mine has been surprisingly successful and enjoyable. Doing my annual Tudor minstrelling round the school with year 4 and now 3 classes.  I cause havoc but the kids adore it and the surprise was, the naughtiest class behaved really well doing it!

Then in Singing Assembly, I taught them my new Christmas song which they picked up super quickly and seemed to enjoy.

Subsequently, Year 3 recorders- not so enjoyable. Lots of children being dozy.

Finally, choir after school and they learnt their two solo songs beautifully. Hurrah for that!

Anyway, I thought I'd share the last two rounds of Style Imitating Art. In case you are unaware of the premise of this, one of the 3 curators, Salazar, Jen and Erin pick a piece of work which any participant can intrepret as an outfit. I do enjoy this challenge. You often have to think outside the box if you don't have anything suitable in your wardrobe.

Jen chose this Vogue front cover from the past with its beautiful illustration and muted colours.
I had something different planned and then I spotted this Monsoon dress which I had charity-shopped in Maldon at the start of September for £2 and suddenly realised how apt it was with its charcoal grey and its embroidered peachy flowers which reminded me of the feathers above.  I added my soft grey ruffled cardigan from Oasis which has little feathery-like flower details (not seen!) and my DIY-embroidered cat flats with Whitby-Jet necklace to finish. I was rather pleased by the overall effect. Click on Jen's name above to see how everyone else interpreted it including Jen's brilliant dress version!

 The previous challenge before that was hosted by Salazar and she chose the following painting which I can't help but notice had very similar colours except for the mustardy/tan jacket/top she is wearing.

Jean-Etiénne Liotard’s “The Chocolate Girl”

I knew which items I wanted to use but after wearing it for a day, it looked very creased and not a great photo- still I hope you can see where I went with it.

I picked out the colour of the hat with this White Stuff blouse (which I have since culled since I am not that fond of it) with my nan's ceramic-beaded necklace to pick out the teacup detail. These ancient Oasis trousers took the grey of her skirt and I tried to sort of make a hint at the blouse with these boots. 

I do urge you to come and join in the next one.  The next host is Erin at www.looplooks.net and she will post it on Monday with the details of how to get your photo to her. I'd love to see more people join in such a creative challenge!!! We even had a man in the form of the lovely Mike who has become a great regular!

Who's inspired? Who's going to join in??

xx

Red-haired angel

Saluations Mes Amigos suss (mixture of languages there!)!

Source

I'd never usually consider posing on my blog in a hoodie, but you know, with TARDIS Tuesday, I'm all up for the variety! So, above, you see Amy Pond from the episode, Time of the angels and Flesh and stone- two episodes featuring the scary weeping angels. Simple enough to recreate from what I have already- red hoodie, black mini-skirt, grey tights, Converse trainers, brown headband, forgot the black socks.  

But any reference to Amy Pond cosplay (what dressing up as a character is now apparently known as) seems to say that the red hair is obligatory.  So..... da naaaaaaaaa!!!!

"Gasp!!! She has red hair!!" whispers Amy!

Source

Alas, I have always wanted bright red or genuinely ginger hair but I was not blessed with those genes.  I rather like it!

CBC's not at all keen on dyed hair so I haven't really gone there...though wish I could!

I discovered I could mess around with my hair colour in Pic Monkey- you can pay for the premium service to use the hair dye function but I discovered you can use the lipstick function to equally good measure!

Back to school today! We had a rather busy weekend of cleaning and cooking which I will tell you more about soon but all to good purpose.  Rather nervous about tomorrow- I am running a parents' workshop for our parents in Reception to teach them some songs and games and ideas for how they can use music with their children.  Not done anything like this before so still doing my usual procrastination as I fret over it. Of course I know it will be fine but you know, I don't know WHAT exactly what they do with their kids in any way musically and don't want to patronize them in anyway!!! Also, have not taught their kids music as I don't teach Reception this year- I am very sad about this fact!

Hope all is well with you.
xx


Linking to TARDIS Tuesday with Maricel

A touch of red

Hi there!

How has your weekend been?  Enjoyable, I hope.
I had an exciting/interesting weekend in some ways, including a cookery course and Sunday roast club, a walk in the park, picking up of a parcel, great church service and some housework!

Image borrowed from wornontv.net

Since TARDIS Tuesday and Visible Monday are upon us, I decided to try and cosplay in a tenuous way, this outfit worn by Clara Oswald in Doctor Who.

The main features I tried to incorporate were the 

• red and black pattered skater skirt
• Asymmetric cropped jacket
• Heeled lace-ups
• Red collar detail

Image borrowed from DanielfFaust

Here I finally  christened my charity-shopped grey wool jacket (this is as close as I personally will currently be getting to a leather jacket in current times), Bailey and Quinn red leather handbag and Clarks ox-blood shoes both bought in the post-Christmas sales.



Underneath the jacket, I wore a Peter-pan collared top and Cashmere jumper, both from Primark, ancient. Black tights are presumably ancient. Who can tell the difference between black tights?

 Admittedly, what I am wearing is a bit different but not a bad Cosplay, I hope!  

I must dash. Have not been free to blog all weekend so this is it! Breathe a sigh of relief....

Enjoying linking with 3 lovely ladies...
Linking with the lovely Maricel of My closet catalogue for TARDIS Tuesday.

P

Creative Mondays with Claire Justine



Linking to Visible Monday with the ever wonderful Patti at Not dead yet style



A

I water the shrubs only when dressed in a white lacy petticoat

Berthe Morisot
Young woman watering a shrub

A beautiful painting was chosen by Salazar of this young women watering a shrub. I could imagine doing a full-on summer recreation of this but alas, we are in the bleak mid winter.

Taking inspiration from the young gardener's attire, I wore this charity-shopped Select blouse with its white wafty neckline and black bow-detail and paired it with a white lacy jumper worn underneath for warmth (it being cold).  Taking inspiration from the muted greens of the garden, I teamed it with the charity-shopped vintage Aquascutum skirt, black tights and Clarks dove-grey leather shoes (great as they are elasticated so easy to put on in fearful hurry and comfy too)

To top it off, I added this watering can charm to my necklace and added my charityshopped green earrings. All in all, though not my usual sillhouette (I don't really do fitted skirts),it was nice to wear something different.


OOOh, I hit 100,000 page views today! I know this is titchy, but I am not visible in Googlesearch engines (my settings) and I don't really do any other social media promotion so this is kind of cool!!!
xx

Spots and tights and annoyances of the tight kind

Actually this was a blog outfit from before Christmas!  Primark did a really cute (maybe too short for this 32 year old- nah!) skater skirt in red cordhuroy, black cordhuroy and plaid/checked red and I wanted to create a festive riot of different prints with polka dots, robins and then fairisle tights. I was just too useless to post the post (or too concerned with fictional Christmas presents).

Anyway, I wanted to share my slight irritation with tights. I have lots of pairs (and I mean lots).Some are exempt from the moan here but I really do spend my time hoiking certain tights up as they slip down- if the waist-size is right, then the leg length is too short or vica-versa!  Also- I love these types of knitted printed tights BUT why does the print only go up to a certain level.  Here, I deliberately wore them with a short skirt so it was like they were long socks over tights but is that the look they are supposed to make? Because  on some types, it looks really odd when the print only comes just above your knee and then there is a long section of plain colour!

What's your deal with tights?

The colours are there if nothing else

Two weeks in Inspiration Monday with the Two birds where I shuffle my feet and try to pretend that I am wearing something similar to the inspiration model.  She's called Jennifer Laurence- no, I've not heard of her.  I actually have several long white skirts and a grey t-shirt but I wasn't feeling it today.  Instead, I have the colours..  Pity I forgot to swap my handbag to my basket bag that Sophie bought me

Broderie anglaise dress- Next via Oxfam.
Cardigan- Oasis
Shoes- Primark.
Daisy hairpins- Poppydaisy

How nice it is to have a Bank Holiday (and NO Year 6- HURRAH!).  What have you done with yours?   I've not done a huge amount so far- at CBC's house.
We've had a fairly chilled weekend- a swing-dance lesson on Saturday morning - I am officially rubbish but I still love it!  We learnt how to do the transition from a lindy-turn to backwards/tandem charleston and how to get out of it again which was cool though lots of time still spent on our basic technique!  We then headed to town to look for some brogues for CBC and I ended up buying my mum a birthday present I hope she likes- it's very useful!  Saturday later on, we wrote our wedding invitations and did some dance practice!!!  So exciting and fun to have sent invitations- we're pleased with how they've turned out!!!
Yesterday,  I had a lovely church service which had a good sermon that I had a really good point I remembered well, based on the book of Ezra and how things go well if the hand of God is with us and why his hand might not be with us.

After hand-delivering some invitations, I headed over to CBC's where we went for a lovely walk and got on with some work things.

If anyone is in London and fancies something cultural, come to my orchestra concert- it's a gorgeous programme of:
Debussy- L'apres midi d'un faun (gorgeous big famous flute solo for moi!)
Ravel- Mother Goose suite and Piano concert (more nice flute)
Rautavaara- Canctus Arcticus - Concerto for birds and orchestra (more nice flutes and hilarious recorded bird song!)

It's at St Peter's Church, Kensington Park road, Nottinghill Gate on 11/5/2013 at 7.30pm. Wine in the interval.  You could go shopping on Portobello road and then come along! Tickets are £10!

Cultural grey-out

Sometimes, I sigh with despair when I look at pictures of me! But sometimes, I quite like them!! Despite the grey, I felt very visible, confident and happy about myself in this get up so I am linking with the lovely Patti at Visible Monday!  Forgive the overload of photos, I know they all look the same but I actually liked them despite the bush of hair!!!

A brief sojourn around Trafalgar square:  I have such affection for this place.  I have paddled in those fountains on several occasions and had water fights with random people. (in fact, in fountains in several major Europeon  cities!) Once, I had to sit through an entire church service at All Souls in damp clothes after stupidly getting wet!














The fourth plinth:  I am still gutted that the interactive organ which doubles as an ATM didn't win instead of this one- I voted for the latter!


My gorgeous photographer:


Outfit details:
Hat (Christmas gift)
Umbrella (Christmas gift)
Cashmere rose sweater (Midienette, Florence: present from CBC)
Scarf and skirt (Primark)
Blazer (ASOS heritage)
Tights (Tescos)
Shoes (Irregular choice)

Verse of the day:
"Be on your guard, stand firm in the faith, be men and women of courage, do everything in love,"
I will try again and again, though I feel I don't always manage to communicate that love.

*If you know what the blog-title is referring to, you are obviously an ethnomusicologist!!!