Owl Shirt! And New Plush in the ol' Etsy!

Excuse the weirdness of expression, please. I look like I'm concentrating really hard on something.

Anyway, I wore this shirt today. It's very cute!

Here's the little plushie I made the other day. It's heartbreaking putting him up for sale. I do hope he goes to a good home! He's just such a cutie!

We had a fun photo shoot today, including my sister's drum set (above), a joy of cooking cookbook, and a Korean painting.

I got all these clothes last night - FOR FREE!

Yeah, you read that right. everything in the following pictures was unwanted by one of my friends, but very much wanted by me. The first picture is of everything sitting in a big pile, and the rest are some highlights.

Pictures will have to wait until tomorrow, I'm afraid, as I am positively exhausted by tonight's events. Exhausted in a good way, of course! In an I've-been-wading-through-a-pile-of-clothes-for-perfect-gems-for-three-hours kind of way.

I just hosted a naked lady party. Pretty much my favorite kind of party. You invite a bunch of friends, everyone brings a bag full of old clothes, and then you swap! It's lovely!

I found some really great pieces - a suede skirt that's PERFECT except the zipper's broken, several vintage sweaters, lovely retro pink heels.

But. You will have to wait in suspense until tomorrow, I'm afraid. I'm going to sleep now.

G'night, Internet.

Today's Shopping Scores

Today, my grandmother, mom, sister and I (three generations of my family!) went shopping at the Towson Town Center. Let me tell you, that mall is huge. Or at least compared to what I'm used to.

I stopped by the shoe store completely on a whim, to discover much to my delight that most of the shoes were around $10! That's how much this pair cost. They're more purple than they look in the picture.

The tank and dress both came from XXI (Forever 21 trying to be upscale?) and were $15 and $20, respectively. The best part is that the tank is covered with owls!!! I do love me some owls.

And sorry the pictures aren't great. I took them about ten minutes ago when I decided I wanted to blog about my clothes before going to bed but didn't have pictures of them.

The Bibliophile in her Native Habitat

My mom was my photographer today, and let's just say she took a little artistic license with the pictures. When I looked over at her and saw that she was holding the camera crooked she actually seemed surprised when I asked her to hold the camera straight.

The cardigan is from H&M and the shoes were a present from my grandmother, but what I'm most proud of is the dress. When I bought it from Goodwill, it was white, but I dyed it and some other clothes (a t-shirt and a pair of shorts) pink yesterday. Well, I really was just trying to give the faded shorts some new life, and the t-shirt was in my "to give away" pile, so I really didn't care about it, but I was very excited to see how the dress would turn out. And I must say, I'm very happy with the dusty pink color.

The dyeing process:

Note how the colors fade from the original violent fuschia to the pale pink of the last picture (which, the clothes still being wet, is darker than they eventually turned out). The shorts did darken up a bit, which is nice.

I spent today running errands with my mom. I came home from the library with three books and a movie: Remains of the Day, God is Dead, Push, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I decided to check the movie out after reading this post at The Clothes Horse. I was going to watch it tonight but I'm far too tired for a movie before bed so it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

And I admit, I got a bit carried away with myself with the books. I'm going to take them all with me when I go to the Outer Banks with my family next week, but I have to finish Love in the Time of Cholera before I start any of them!

What I've Got To Work With: Scarves

Despite the fact that I have a cold, and have to pause every few minutes for a coughing fit, I decided that today would be a good day to work on cleaning my room! What began as an innocent straightening up turned into rearranging half my furniture, and I must say that I'm very pleased with what I've got going on so far. I'll post before and after shots once everything's spick and span.

So, as I cleaned today I took a good hard look at everything I own, trying to decide if it's worthy of being in my life or if it's time to move on. And I decided I'd take a look at some categories of my wardrobe. So today is scarves!

All of my scarves but the LOVE one I got together at a yard sale for fifty cents for all of them. Needless to say, I couldn't pass up such a bargain! My resolution from now on is to incorporate them into my outfits more.

I'm considering attempting to wear this one as a top tomorrow to a graduation party, but we'll have to see:

They're all very pretty and elegant-looking. By far the quirkiest is this one, which has pictures of trains all over it:

I'm rather at a loss for how I'd wear that one. I'm sure someone more fashionable than I could pull it off quite nicely, though.

Oh, and one more scarf came in the bundle that isn't in the group pictures, and that's because it resides permanently on my dad's cowboy-hat-that-I-stole/borrowed.

Heck Yes, Anthropologie!: Ruffles

Ruffles might just be my favorite thing. Hanging off the edge of a garment, sometimes just tacked on to some fabric at random, they might be an afterthought. But in my opinion, something beautiful can always be made beautiful-er by adding ruffles.

Ruffles add attitude, oomph, grace. A mob of ruffles, scrambling every which way. Stiff ruffles, lined up in a military procession One shy lonely ruffle, curling around and disappearing in itself. An adventurous ruffle, blazing a trail across a vast plain of cloth.

So you can imagine my excitement when on the Anthropologie home page, there's a button promising to let me "see the unexpected side of ruffles." As always, Anthropologie does not disappoint. Or, it disappoints only in only one way: Their beautiful clothes are way, WAY too expensive for the likes of myself. Sad face.

How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You

I found some sheet music of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (although I think what I found was the Rufus Wainwright version - the one on the Shrek soundtrack) and my sister has been learning it. It's so pleasant to be sitting in my room on the internet or whatever, and hear that lovely song coming up from downstairs. It's a very welcome change from her usual repertoire (Green Day, Green Day, and more Green Day!)

I was going to blog later tonight, but at the moment I'm waiting for my boyfriend to finish dinner with his family so we can go see Get Him To The Greek. So, my thoughts on the movie will have to wait until tomorrow, but I figured now was as good a time as any to share today's outfit.

I've been wanting to wear this jacket for a while, and since it's not too hot today I figured I'd go for it. Also, the movie theater is usually pretty chilly, so I always dress to keep warm. :)

Thinking about, almost everything in this outfit was free. The only thing I actually bought was the shirt. My grandmother gave me the shoes because they didn't have enough support for her feet, the jacket came from rehashclothes.com, and my necklace belonged to my great-grandmother before she died. And I made the skirt. The fabric is white with lots of lines of sheet music on it.

The top has a yoke with some embroidery on it that reminds me of the mexican shirts that are white with rainbow embroidery, except this is all the same color. I'm quite happy with this outfit!

Also, earlier today I had somewhat of an adventure into the world of 3D plush making. I made (or attempted to make) an elephant. Considering that I had no pattern and not much experience, I think he turned out pretty well. He's made out of an old sweater that got accidentally felted.

And the cat was being a giant lump as I was taking these pictures, as usual.

Update: We're going to see the movie tomorrow because if we go before noon it's only five dollars. So we're going to make a day of it. Which means I got all cute today for nothing! I haven't even been out of the house, except to drive around for a bit. And now I have to think of ANOTHER cute outfit tomorrow. This fashion thing is hard work!

I think I'll watch American Psycho tonight, maybe.

Yesterday my sister bought home a piano from Goodwill.

I just have no idea how to play it. She's pretty good, though. (Especially considering the fact that she's thirteen!) It's nice to just sit here and listen to the music going on in the living room. 

Inspired by the lovely Annebeth (or, the Styling Dutchman), I wore a maxi dress yesterday! I have two and they are so gorgeous but I rarely ever wear them. They seem impractical and I never know what shoes to wear. Well, yesterday, Annebeth wore a maxi dress and it was so cute I just had to play copycat. With it, I wore some tan sandals (although you can't see them in the pictures) and a gold bracelet, both of which came from rehashclothes.com, which is one of my favorite websites in the world. Here are some pictures, although they are rather uninteresting and do not flatter me. I need to practice taking charming pictures.

Oh, and I wore it to a block party I went to with my boyfriend, and got several compliments! Hooray!

The boyfriend's sister graduated from high school yesterday, so I made her a correspondence kit as a present. It includes an address book, postcards, envelopes and labels, all handmade, of course! (Except the labels...)

 

AND! I got a bunch of business cards in the mail yesterday! Such an eventful day!