manic

perhaps you can relate, perhaps i've gone crazy.
i worked way harder than i normally do last week, listing about 20 new items in the store. lately, i've been lucky to get myself to do 5 in a week. that productivity has opened the floodgates in me with more ideas for ways to keep myself busy from now until eternity apparently.
a mere taste of my current to-do list:

• learn dreamweaver (blast adobe for changing their program when i've just finally got golive down pat!
• relearn how to knit so i can start making awesome vintage-inspired sweaters this fall
• finally post at least one of the ideas i've been mulling over for the blog
• attack and conquer that gargantuan pile of clothes that need to be altered into fantabulociousness
• turn my blossoming collection of vintage fabrics into the dresses i've been dreaming of for years now
• take advantage of the 10-classes-for-$10 deal at my local yoga studio and, you know, reach enlightenment

and so on, and so forth...
this looks like about 68 hours a day worth of stuff to do. i've heard that writing down goals makes them 85% more likely to get accomplished. hopefully it also increases the amount of time between sunup and sundown and decreases the desire one might have to just take a nap.

i wanna do this

images originally uploaded by the sartorialist

a couple years ago i was on my first and only trip abroad in scotland and couldn't get enough of staring at the fashions of the city people there. i remember sitting on a bench in glasgow and wishing i had the nerve to ask people passing by if i could snap their picture. instead, i dreamt of a future in which i would be paid to travel and document local style all over the world.
the sartorialist made my dream his reality. the bastard! he captures street fashion in new york, paris, and milan and blogs his work to inspire fashion designers, magazine editors, and probably millions of his addicted readers. the european pics are especially wonderful, showing that people do still 'get dressed' to leave the house and that some people can still smoke cigarettes without being bullied into a gutter (or maybe that only happens in seattle and the entire state of california). for those reasons, i'd even say his pics have a vintage feel to them. they remind me of the 1940's streets of new york where every man wears a hat, coat, and tie, and the women are all in heels and dresses.
maybe someday the sartorialist will enlist me to cover the rest of the chic cities of the world. if you're reading this sir, i'm ready right now.

etcetera, etcetera, etcetera

i'm adding a new section to the shop. it's called 'etcetera' shockingly enough. look here for little trinkets for the home. i always find such cute things that now my house is thoroughly overloaded and i want to help decorate yours!

set of four plastic placemats

stripey yellow pillowcase

perfectly-thin-for-summer full sheet

cutest pattern king size fitted sheet

shoes.

lots of great , yummy, and delicious shoes coming soon....
sizes range from 6 to 8.5 i think and they're in fabulous condition. they'll be in the shop by the end of next week. yippee!

back to work

agh! it's so hard to 'work at home' when you could be watching movies and going to coffee and sleeping and doing the crossword instead. all the days i've set aside in the last few weeks to take pictures and list new clothes got squandered - also partly to do with the fact that i hate the wall i've been taking the shots in front of.
today i set up a new backdrop and put some time into taking photos of the things that have been sitting in my closet for at least a month. i love love love the light in these photos (yay for the bathroom!) so i expect to actually keep up on things now that it's fun.
here's what's coming up next week - plus there will be a whole bunch more that is currently strewn about my apartment. if only i could work, and keep a clean house, and do fun things all at the same time. bah!









click here to shop. <3 djv

there really are no rules

i was all set to rant about the comeback of 90's fashion. it's too soon! it wasn't even that cute to begin with! how can i buy 'vintage' clothes that i've already owned - i'm only 23! but when i began searching for photos with which to prove my point, i found more outfits that i actually liked than ones i wanted to make fun of. rats. la meow proves my previous conviction that you really can wear whatever the hell you want - what should be ugly and outdated looks precious, modern, and even sexy on her. i'm going shopping for mom-butt jeans tomorrow and i will be sure to roll the tapered legs so that they become even more taper-y!
love it.

originally uploaded by la meow on flickr

grunge revival: i never thought i'd be so down for bringing it back. but i'm starting to think this might work. the following photos are all listed on ebay right now just in case you don't actually have these dresses in your closet already.

the robot parade vintage clothing

playground vintage. seriously, i had this exact dress when i was nine.

hippo gorilla giraffe vintage

fire and blood vintage

better than your mom's vintage photo albums: bill owens

i grew up spending summers at my grandma's house poring over our family pictures and falling in love with the clothes my mommy and her mommy were wearing. even the poses were captivating - i guess people stopped taking pictures of children lined up on front lawns and family members in front of fireplaces and ladies sipping cocktails and smoking on a beautifully ugly couch sometime around 1987.
my fond memories of those photos that i've practically committed to memory over the years is probably what spurred my interest in bill owens' photography series 'suburbia'. with striking resemblance to family photo albums, owens' photos document life in the 'burbs from the late '60s and early '70s. there is a bit of a twist though...i don't know how many grannies you've ever seen watering the geraniums growing from a toilet bowl in the front yard.
check out this artist: while you're getting a bit of a socio-historical lesson-in-pictures on america, you can also pick up a ton of fashion inspiration!
here's a taste....

if you're gonna blog...

...you better have something to blog about!
it seems i've been wasting a lot of time on the internet lately, only skipping back and forth from the shop, the myspace, my email, and free full episodes of south park on comedycentral.com. (damn you comedy central and the lack of arm-twisting it takes you to get me to watch hours of south park in the middle of the day!)
what i should be doing - besides shopping, taking pictures, shipping, listing, blogging, graphic designing, etc - is actually surfing the world wide web. apparently, there's all kinds of things to read out there and interesting pictures to look at!
i'm giving myself another assignment: to read other blogs - fashion and otherwise - and search random topics for reportage.
today i gave myself a break and just finally went to liebemarlene vintage's blog. she's super famous on the few blogs i have been reading and she was just featured in lucky magazine too! check her out for these reasons: 1) she's super cute and her outfits are adorable; 2) she actually updates daily and keeps a well-stocked ebay store; and 3) in this picture she is wearing a pair of jeffrey campbell shoes that i have been obsessed with for about 5 years - like, i actually kept a jpg of them on my desktop so i could look at them everyday - so we are basically best friends and you should support my friends.


i also stumbled upon punkystyle, another prolific blogger who will be good inspiration for me in keeping up this page. i now heart her too for these reasons: 1) i want her backyard; 2) she's a fellow etsy seller; and 3) she blogged about being credit card free, paying down debt, and buying a $4 thrift store dress rather than one from the mall - kudos!

salvation army delivers?

that's what my dad asked me when i received my new favorite shoes in the mail from urban outfitters last week.
vintage design, modern fit and awesomeness, and they're actually leather. i loooooove them.
however, let it also be known that i am not the biggest fan of urban. their best items are over-priced, blatant ripoffs of vintage duds. i suggest taking the time to find the real thing, like say, in online vintage shops or your grandma's closet. save urban outfitters for a quick fix when you can't shake shopping laziness. i'm using that as my excuse in this case.

another direction

as you can possibly tell by my inconsistency in keeping up this blog, i don't always have things to say. well, actually, that's not true - i generally have something to say about everything.
i think the real action-stopper is that i don't always have something to say about fashion. (except for "look at the clothes i bought for the shop! think they're cute! now buy them!")
my mind has been wandering more and more towards other subjects recently. some interesting conversations have come up between myself, my friends, my parents, and my larger community, and i've found myself wishing i had some kind of public forum in which to spout my ideas - in a totally non-soapbox kind of way of course. hmm, maybe i should become a writer and actually get some of these ideas out into the world.
oh, that's right, i totally have my own blog, and i could totally write about whatever i want on these pages. what a clever idea!
while this blog was originally meant to just be a plug for the shop (i guess; i'm still not really sure why i started it), i think it might be okay to include other topics as well. i sometimes think about starting a magazine - kind of a vogue or a harper's for girls with different priorities. a little more simple, realistic, economical, sustainable, maybe even a little political.
loving fashion doesn't have to mean ignoring other types of art or current events, so why should this blog be so restricted?
i wonder if this future i'm assigning myself is proof that i really did enjoy essay writing in college. who knew?

p.s. i'll make up for this slight rant by posting a new slideshow of pretty clothes shortly. we can't get ALL serious.