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Resilience  – the most beautiful of words. It is the description of something birthed from misfortune and able to rise above it time and again. It ties greatness to its often unassumingly painful or sad beginning  It embodies the human experience. Until we die – we are resilient. We fuck up time and again – all in a days work we are capable of feeling  awful and then picking ourselves up. Resilience is the sole word that defines what we sometimes see as inevitable. Just when we think we’ve digressed – something lifts us up – something only recognized in retrospect… That we did not digress, but actually survived or even bettered ourselves.

Always remember, if you are alive – if you are breathing and waking up each day -you are resilient. This is no feel-good Pinterest quote – resilience is real. You go on and on every day of your life. You ARE resilient.

Reducing Tedium

When bored -add lace. Lace is a agonizingly slow process of intentional scribbles.

When your 5 minutes of lag time becomes an eternity – draw a wedding dress and add lace… and color in your flowers and add a floral crown and color in those flowers.

Voila! You’ve spent 30 minutes bringing life to your daydreams rather than liking really shitty Instagram pictures and play-by-play Facebook statuses that have absolutely no purpose but to reduce the boredom of the people writing them.

Accommodating your Habits: A How-To

This past weekend, I ate a lot.

This is normal. As a proud member of an Central/East European family – I am well trained in the art of eating every morsel of food on your plate… and then some. What is not normal, was my inadvertence towards anything even remotely healthy and  my weekend love affair with highly caloric, artery clogging bliss. Typically, I am all for a little bit of both. You can have too much of a good thing – both in good-for-you and good-for-your-taste-buds food. Alas, this weekend was so filled with bacon, I’m quite sure I, myself, have become a pig and might be the next thing sizzling on your frying pan.

With this cannibalistic thought in mind, I turn the topic into a positive situation. I am going to make a gut-hiding skirt -the kind that disguises that stubborn pooch of chocolate love and makes you look fabulous. I already have one of these skirts but it has been my overeating partner in crime for a long time and is probably ready to retire. I give you – my pattern and fabric of choice.

Next questionable sewing project – Commence! 

I bought this SwEeT aSs pattern for a whopping 69 cents… whoa Goodwill, you’re a little perverted.

I’m making this cool skirt.

I know… you all wanted me to make these hot pants instead. I’m all for looking like a genie enthusiast, but these pants don’t seem too flattering so I think they might contradict my purpose of the skirt – to hide and flatter a pooch.

And this is the fabric. I was feeling a little JCrew-esque.

Wish me luck!

The Mirage

I am sitting in my car, inching slowly… homeward bound in the mass of exhausted nine-to-fivers. The daily commute and all of its mundane glory. It is 100+ degrees outside but my air conditioning is sputtering its last breath of chilled air so I roll down my window, put up my hair and prepare for the rare puffs of hot, polluted breeze to “cool me off.”

I am unexpectedly pulled out of my own misery when I spot a hand draped lifelessly on the partially rolled down window of my fellow commuter. Her phantom body hidden by the shaded windows, all I see is her grossly skeletal hand dangling a cigarette.  It’s funny -for how decrepit and evil her hand looks – its skin is glowing and has freshly french-manicured nails. I imagine this puckered, pampered woman to be something of a modern day Cruella de Vil… her hand draped so lazily, looking drained from the inside out… maintaining the facade of beauty but quite literally rotting on the inside.

In an instant, she speeds ahead and flicks her cigarette to the ground – its spark of glowing ash, snapping me out this bizarre train of thought. Her car’s passing, sending a gush of hot air my way… a small break from the still, dry heat of summer. Perhaps she was a mirage.

Modern-Day Cruella de Vil

“There is no charm equal to the tenderness of heart.” – Jane Austin

Bejeweled

Oh how I love the changing colors of fall.  The turning of the leaves is symbolic of the turning of my soul and the sound of the wind…JUST KIDDING. I am talking about all those fabulous jewel tones that trickle through saturated blackness of Fall fashion shows.

Looking through looks upon looks of shows upon shows I can blissfully conclude that black, my favorite color (shade for all you sticklers), is very prevalent.  Timeless and obvious, black is eternally chic. Even if a piece of clothing looks like shit in every other sense, black somehow lets it transgress every fashion rule and instantly look just a little bit better, a little bit more agreeable.

Although I’m all for the black and its universal approval, I am intrigued by the deep and daring boldness of jewel tones. All at once, demure and striking – muted and loud.

I mean… LOOK at these colors. Simple. Rich. Wow.

Marchesa Fall 2013
Credit Vogue.com
Photo: Photo:
Stefano Masse/InDigitalteam/GoRunway.com

Alberta Ferreti Fall 2013
Credit Vogue.com
Photo:
Marcus Tondo/InDigitalteam/GoRunway.com

Valentino Fall 2013
Credit Vogue.com
Yannis Vlamos/InDigitalteam/GoRunway.com

A little-ruby-dress for a night out.

Blood Red Crepe Dress

Freedom before the Revolution

I love the library. More specifically, I love the biography section in the library. I’ve always been intrigued by the history of one single person; the face they showed the world and their true actions that both compliment and defy it. A blooming feminist at the ripe age of 11, I was completely fascinated by the monumental women of history – the women who played the confining game of societal expectations while all at once defying the norm and carving themselves a spot in history.

Marie Antoinette.

I’ll be honest, my initial interest in her was her gowns. Call me vain – but I only cared for her vanity. It wasn’t until I started learning  about her aristocratic, short life that I came to the realization that I both loathed and adored her. Her naive approach (or lack of any approach) towards the state of her nation absolutely repulsed me – a true product of her blinded, lavish upbringing. Her daring, opulent, scandalous way of dressing has eternally dazzled me. She didn’t know shit about politics but she knew her shit about style.  Marie was an original risk taker – she dressed to awaken both contempt and intrigue. With no one to please but herself. That’s one stylish lady.

Of all her absurdly ornate styling, my personal favorite was her most simple look – muslin chemises with a sash. Daringly simple. Empire Waist. Breathy and free.

Empire Waist Gown with Floral Lace Applique

Where is Heaven?

I am a frequent visitor of the pattern section at Joanne’s. Some of the patterns I see – I can only imagine belong somewhere pious and confined by rules of modesty. Even the most beautiful of models look homely and ill fitted in their shapeless, stiff linen skirts, cutting off sharply at their ankles. With cruel judgement, I digress… there is also a plethora – literally drawers and drawers of modern, stunning (albeit too hard to attempt at the moment) patterns. I’ll spend ages looking through patterns and make that hefty $2 purchase only to breeze past the fabric section and head straight to my intended destination – SAS Fabrics.

How do I even begin to describe SAS?

Like this: It is simply the most heavenly form of organized chaos. Upon entering the store you’re immediately greeted by shoe-box-sized Tupperware bins, brimming with strange plastic trinkets I assume are for baby showers – plastic babies the size of newborn mice, candy-sized pacifiers and scrolling writing of congratulations in blue or pink. Turn around and you will find an entire wall, 7 or 8 shelves deep of rolled lace. Ugly old lady lace, beautiful Chantilly lace, lace that I am quite positive they ordered and back stocked since 1970. Massive rollers of leather, velvet, interior and exterior decorating fabric, bins of zippers,  a back wall of tulle, a section that is not called “tacky beauty pageant/flamboyant dance costume” section, but I’m calling it that.

And then… THEN the pile of my dreams. From afar, you simply see a sign that reads “dress fabric”… Getting closer you realize it is not a section of fabric for dresses but of EVERY clothing fabric you could imagine, dumped into a massive, 6 ft tall, black-hole of patterned, crazy, textured heaven. I imagine myself physically diving into it every time – just jumping in and going at it because I have an inkling that there is some seriously cool shit hiding in its depths – in the center at the very bottom.

But in real life, I simply rummage through the sides and find fabrics like this…

And then I make tops like this…

Did I mention that SAS Fabrics is CRAZY cheap? This fabric was like… $5 a yard! That’s not even real life. But SAS Fabrics never is…

Longing for It

I live in the Arizona desert. You would love it here if you were from Chicago or Maine or Canada… Canadians LOVE migrating to the desert with its toasty warm bliss.

UNTIL SUMMER.

Imagine taking something out of the microwave after cooking it for 2 minutes longer than you wanted – our sidewalks, seat belts  door handles, leather car seats – scorching your skin so much you wonder if it’s branded you like a baby cow.  Sticking to plastic restaurant chairs and makeup lasting as long as ice cubes in your perspirating glass of water. The cacti might amaze you and our storybook sunsets are unmatched, the no-filter Instagram that plagues all Arizonan news feeds… Still, the weather gets old. Wilting in the sun gets old. The pool water becomes bath water  and can no longer quench your browned, glowing skin. Fall is coming and we STILL won’t be able to wear long-sleeved shirts. May not even in Winter. But fuck it. I’m going to pretend that I can and start getting excited about a fall trend right now  – LONG SLEEVE DRESSES. Gimme. Gimme. As seen in Fall 2013 lines of Badgely Mischka, Carolina Herrera and Oscar de La Renta. Classics and I love them all. 

I decided to be a rebel at work and quickly scribble out a sketch in the middle of creating reports and calling clients. This lady had to have pink hair and a vibrant gown. Nothing as inspiring as highlighters! If this was created in real life, the gown would be a heavy, cascading drape of multi-colored, itty-bitty beads sprinkled down to the ground in symmetrical art-deco shapes.

Dress Numero Uno

 Over the holiday season, I promised myself to sign up for a sewing class for the upcoming “semester” and I did. My first assignment was a pair of pajama pants. Logically, I should have been excited – I never fit in the pants that I buy from the store. My legs are way too long and NOTHING bothers me more than high-waters…And I DID end up wearing them to bed during my entire snow speckled trip to London so I suppose they were useful. Regardless, it was a little anticlimactic when I was planning on becoming an epic fashion designer in two seconds!

As you can imagine,  I prematurely jumped at the chance to  make a dress for my second project. Okay… so I might have been a little to green… I might have been a little over my head… and my dress might have turned out a little bit prettier in well-lit pictures than in real life. See it’s life story below:

Bodice and Skirt still not attached.

I bought this cheapo jersey knit black fabric from goodwill for $7. With about 3.5 yards of it for such a dirt cheap price, I had room to play. My intentions were to make a mock-up dress so that I could get all the kinks out without any financial repercussions. Sidenote: I still see purpose in this technique, but the more I’ve sewn, the more I’ve seen that you can’t completely avoid mistakes, they will pop up no matter how many times you’ve sewn the same piece. You just have to learn to undo and repeat. Patience! Patience! Patience! 

Pre-Additional Straps

And the mistakes that I made! My first and largest was that I did not properly measure my bodice. My chest was much smaller than what I created and the top as shown in the above picture, was teetering on the brink of scandalous. My tatas were falling out and I needed to keep them in without making the dress look frumpy. My teacher suggested that I create a small cover up of fabric but I felt it would ruin the beautiful cut of the cleavage. I looked to for inspiration and came across the gorgeous gowns of Cushnie Et Ochs. Seriously, their design is some of the most simple and stunning stuff around.

Post-Additional Strap

My result was a simple additional strap -thicker and a fine addition to the cleavage. While the tata exposure was gone, the beautiful deep v remained. Wearable, elegant, simple. I was happy.

The Final Product

My dress finally came about and I was happy to realize I didn’t need to add a zipper. The fabric had enough stretch that I could squeeze myself into it without one. The hem was long enough. If you look close enough the straps (and additional straps) look CRAY with my I’m-A-Crack-Head wobbly stitching and the stitch down the center of the back is a little suspicious. Still, this was my first try and I won’t be selling this to anyone so no one to please but myself

A  final note on my crazy dress endeavor: Measure correctly.  Gain Patience. Relish in opportunity to stray from the pattern. Patience. Patience. Yeah, you DO have to take it apart and redo it. Patience.