There is no season I welcome more than Spring. I love the scent of azaleas and honeysuckle that hits me when I step out of the house. I am here for the sunshine that starts to peek through and hang around until early evening. But, most of all (and I know my fellow educators can relate), I’m pretty sure I wait for Spring with baited breath for the simple fact that I can see the light at the end of a very long semester…
This is always the part of the semester where the exhaustion kicks in and you start counting down to fall break, visions of sloth-like movie watching and catching up on sewing projects dancing in my head. However, given this is no normal semester, I pretty much started the academic year already exhausted and, with fall break cancelled, there is no end in sight. The sloth-like movie watching and sewing, however, I still hope to fit in….
In a discussion awhile back with my fellow vintage maven Mimosa, we came to realize that we immediately associate certain prints or design details with certain people in our community. Almost as if they don’t have a name. Cat prints = Blue Wren Vintage. Floral = Jamie. Cactus prints = Rose. And (no shocker here), I am synonymous with trompe l’oeil. I’m not sure I even need to justify that one, as my heart literally faints when I see prints that trick the eye into thinking they’re actually leaping off the fabric…
When I was a teenager, one of my favorite movies to watch with friends was Rocky Horror Picture Show – it was silly and weird and just on the right side of scandalous. Huge fans of musical theatre, my best friends and I knew all the words by heart and would unabashedly belt them out while zipping to the mall to wander around and buy literally nothing. Our favorite song was the Time Warp (no originality there. But we were 15…).
Ever hear the phrase, “If you want the rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain”? Never has this been more true than the strange world we currently find ourselves in. Between important protests worldwide, quarantine, murder hornets, and sandstorms, the world feels like it’s experiencing some important long-overdue changes, coupled with apocalyptic catastrophe. I feel we are somehow both barreling forward and standing completely still. I guess this is the very definition of the rain before the rainbow….
We have all experienced personal tragedy in our lives. Moments that throw our world upside down and off track, where we are just scrambling to find a foothold. And the weirdest thing that happens, is lifting my head from the weight of personal sorrow to find the world kept turning. I’m surprised every time. To see it didn’t pause for my grief, or wait for me to get back in my feet. It continued to spin as if this huge, tragic thing never happened.
Around this time last year, I interviewed the amazing Nikki Redcliffe. And she was everything I want to be when I grow up – confident, brilliant, and unapologetically fabulous. Whenever I feature a fellow vintage-loving lady, I get the fun part of trolling through their blogs or IG feeds for some of my favorite outfits they’ve shared. And Nikki’s feed is chock full of 1950’s swoon-worthy finery. I need to pause for a minute to wipe the drool…
As most of you know by now, I’m a planner. But I can’t help it when life (a little more than) occasionally goes awry. A short while back, I was set to give a rather important presentation to my Department. This was but one task on the long winding road to tenure. And I’d planned the day out oh-so-carefully. My talk was polished, but not over-rehearsed. I planned a time buffer to get to the room early to check out the IT setup. I packed adapters, and power cords, and even a backup laser pointer (should the first one fail).…
More and more lately, I have found myself reaching out to people who can do amazing things I have no idea how to do. Artists whose art is very different from mine. Although it once intimidated me, I realized that most of us crave that connection and that ability to share the joy we each find in our individual art. Plus, the worst that can happen is that they’ll say no! I’ve found that in taking the leap towards the merging of ideas, incredible things can be created. This can range from working with graphic artists to design a print…
Almost immediately following my last collaboration with the amazing Lucy Baribeau, where we brought one of my most coveted vintage trompe l’oeil prints into a modern day reality, we started chatting about the next colorway. Truthfully, they have all stolen my heart in different ways, and it was only a matter of time before each one ventured to my sewing table…