Fashionably Friday January 21, 2011

Today’s Fashionably Friday is all about Spring 2011’s colors.  The Spring 2011 runways were full of bright colors…and by bright, I mean intensely eye-popping colors.  I am very excited about this!  Last fall, on a random Goodwill trip I happened to find this vintage Christian Dior suit…complete with shoulder pads, an asymmetrical button placket and hem, and guess what?  It is hot magenta pink and kind of like a pinkish-orange stripe.  It sounds crazy but the colors are very cute!  I have been waiting for a chance to wear the skirt, which is just a basic pencil skirt shape.  Now with the bright color focus for spring I can’t wait to bring out the skirt and wear it either with an equally bright top or to tone it down with black.  I have seen sooooo many images in my magazines and online of bright on bright outfits, and as cute as that skirt would look with black, I think it calls to be worn with something of similar brightness and intensity.  I think that would just make the outfit perfect!  I have a few tops in mind to wear it with, and I will have to get them all out and experiment to see which ones I like with it best.  And I will definitely be posting the winner here!  Until then, here are some images of the bright-on-bright combinations that caught my eye. 

(And I know I used the Dior necklace last week….but I can’t help it I love it!...It’s also the same colors of the suit I have)

 

Photos courtesy of Google Images

Cincinnati Art Museum

On Tuesday, during the misty rain, my sister and I visited the Cincinnati Art Museum.  It was a perfect day for staying indoors and looking at art.  I needed to go, because in my Art History class I am supposed to be writing an 8 page paper on artifacts that I was supposed to find and document while I was there.  It was like an art scavenger hunt that took me all through the Asian and Islamic art wings!  I almost ran out of time to see what I really wanted to see while I was at the museum, which was the exhibit Wedded Perfection, a display of over 200 years worth of wedding dress styles.  It was so amazing!  I loved the Zac Posen dress that was made up of red poppies!  I google image searched it because I had to show you all what it looked like....(See images below).  They told us no photography was allowed in the exhibit (my sister tried to take a picture and got caught.....that's how we found that out lol).  My art history professor told us that photography was allowed, though only without flash, on the pieces that we were supposed to look at for class so we just assumed you could take pictures of the wedding dresses too...apparently not.  But if you want to catch a glimpse of some of the dresses in the show, check out this blog, the blogger did an interview with CAM about the show, and has some pictures of it on there.  If you live in Cincinnati you need to check out the show!!  It's only in the museum through the end of this month, so get there as soon as possible!  It is free to get into the museum but parking is $4.  I am so glad I was able to go and check it out!

 

jewelry from 1790

 

the only photo  I could find of the Zac Posen gown!

Wire Wrapped Wednesday, January 19

This week's wire wrapped Wednesday post is a necklace that I made using a piece of pink wire I randomly found in my jewelry making supplies.  The interesting part about the wire is that it is actually 6 or 7 years old.  The wire was a scrap left over from my junior or senior year in high school when I made these wire wrapped candle Christmas gifts for all of my friends.  I was so excited to find it, and I had to use it for this necklace.  There was only a small piece left, and I used the whole scrap for this project.  I wrapped a piece of Italian onyx from Fire Mountain Gems as the main pendant, and then made it kind of into a tassel look with little purple beads dangling off of it.  The purple glass bead at the top also has significance, because I got that bead when I was in high school with my dad at the Pendleton Art Center down in over the Rhine.  My dad's friend Litsa used to own an art gallery there, now her gallery is Art Design Consultants near downtown Cincinnati.  We used to go to the old Pendleton building once a month for Final Fridays, a fun art event on the last Friday of the month.

Thrifting Tuesday January 18, 2011

The outfit that I have re-designed this week was a dress that I bought at goodwill.  It was a beautiful print in a large shapeless style with a giant and I mean GIANT hole down the back seam.  Seeing as how it was only $2, I bought it anyway to see what I could do to fix it, because I loved the sleeves and the amazing floral design, which I thought would be perfect for the Holidays.  I had it in my head for over a month what I wanted to do with the dress.  I wanted to take it in slightly, so it was a little more form fitting but still loose, because I enjoyed the loose look of it.  I wanted to fix the hole in the back by placing a big, black and gold jeans zipper down the back that I bought in the fabric store.  I just knew it would look great.  It would be perfect for Drew's Grandma's Christmas party.  I had been planning it since November.  Well, typical me I waited until the last minute to sew the dress, and this was also during my time of Non-Inspiration during my job-mental-breakdown fiasco, so there it was Christmas eve right before the party was going to start and here I was sitting at home with the old original dress in hand, not even having pinned it for fitting yet.  Rushed as I was, but still determined to get it done to wear to the party I enlisted my mom to help with the pinning and sewing.  Afterall, I thought, wouldn't two people be quicker and more efficient than one?  Well in our haste to sew the dress, my mother took it in too far on the bottom half.  I didn't really have time to try it on at her house, having to rush off to get gifts wrapped and prepare for the party and for spending the night at Drew's mom's house afterwards.  I trusted our original pinning measurements to be accurate.  Well, was I ever wrong.  At home, after wrapping what seemed like hundreds of gifts and my overnight bag and loading everything into the car, I got dressed and was bending over to put on my shoes when I heard the sound NO ONE ever wants to hear....rrrrriiippppp!  the dress split open up the side seam!  What was I going to do!? That was the outfit I had been planning for months!  And I hadn't even put the zipper in like I originally wanted to!  Having no time to change my outfit or really think about what I was doing I grabbed some jeans, threw them on, and tucked in the dress to create a holiday top.  It looked so cute!  And I still had the benefit of getting to wear the pattern that I loved!  It ended up being a win-win, and I was happy, though not 100%, with the outcome, and I still got compliments on the top!  No one ever even guessed that it had at one time been a dress!  Everything worked out well!  I don't have pictures of the original dress, or the altered one, but here are pictures of the "top" that I ended up with!

A Bit of Geometry

Today, the necklace I want to show you takes inspiration from a lot of the geometric statement pieces that are huge for Spring 2011.  I made the necklace out of the beads and pieces from a broken vintage necklace that I got from my aunt.  I loved the wooden look of some of these beads, as well as the bright turquoise color of some of the beads.  I arranged them in such a way that they almost remind me of something Egyptian, maybe the colors have something to do with that too.  And any one who knows me knows that I love anything Egypt, so I guess it makes sense that that would inspire me.

Gold Pendant Necklace

Today's necklace is a necklace that I actually made wayyyy back in November and wore on Thanksgiving.  It is an extremely long pendant necklace.  The chain I used on it is from the "bag o' vintage" jewelry that my aunt gave me from the estate sale.  The bits and pieces I used to make the pendant part of the necklace are a vintage Victorian-esque cameo piece, another vintage piece that looks like it was originally part of an earring, and opalite beads that I bought when i visited Stacey Kay back in the beginning of November.  The beads were from a bead store in Medina called  Potomac Beads.  Apparently, this bead store is a franchise-owned store that has other stores around the country....I NEED to own one of these franchises.  When Drew and I were there, he even mentioned that he would want to own a store like this, for me of course.  So now I feel like I should make that one of my goals.  To own my own bead/jewelry shoppe! :)

 an image of me wearing the necklace at Thanksgiving with my sister :)

Jewelry Sketches

Along with my other reoccurring features, I have been wanting to get back into sketching.  Drawing used to be my passion, and I used to do a drawing or sketch almost everyday.  I have not done that in years, and looking back it kind of makes me sad.  I miss it!  The urge to draw has been crazy lately, and I have been doodling on my notes during class and bits of scratch paper, so I decided maybe I should force myself back into the habit of drawing.  I know drawing is not at all like riding a bike, if you don't use the skill, you can lose it, and revert back to a worse stage in your drawing 'history'.  So, I'm not saying my sketches are going to be anything good, I just want to start doing them.  I finally have a subject that  I will not get easily bored of drawing: Ideas for clothing and jewelry that I would like to create for myself!  So every Saturday I am going to post sketches of drawings and doodles that I have made throughout the week, so you can see some of my current inspirations.  Whether those ever actually translate into existing jewelry or clothes, who knows!?  But at least I will feel like on some level I am reconnecting with a part of myself that I feel like I am losing, and hopefully improve over time!