Jul 31, 2012

Transition Pieces

I have a pair of dress short but I never really give them the respect they deserve. They are a pretty tan color with bits of metallic gold throughout. I just need to show them some love. September is around the corner and I think that would be the perfect time to pair some dress shorts with a nice knit top - kick it up a notch.
I am head over heels for the shorts that TopShop has to offer. I paired them with some of their knits and then drooled over their boots....Here's what I came up with:
Transition

LOOK at those boots!!! Ahhhhhh. Aren't those sparkly shorts divine? Why have I not won the lottery? Probably would help if I would actually play it. BUT, here's the good part. TopShop isn't outrageously priced. Bad part, I've never ordered anything from them so I don't know how the sizing goes for a more curvy girl like me. Sometimes the shoes from overseas are too narrow for me too. Have any of you ordered from TopShop before?

Jul 29, 2012

Crafting Trip Girl

Dress; NY&Co, Sandals: Belk, Bag: Charming Charlies

I traded a trip to Home Depot for Brian for a trip to JoAnn Fabrics for me. Win-win.






Jul 27, 2012

Grey Girl

Sweater: Cato, Trousers: Gap, Heels: Target

Nope. Haven't read 50 Shades of Grey. I probably won't. I have heard all the juicy parts and I don't think there is much I'm missing in the writing. I digress.

Aren't these flowers pretty? I rushed right over to get some photos with them in the background.

Heading into the weekend...you guys have fun!



I have been wearing eyeshadow (gasp!) and eyeliner lately. I haven't done that on a consistant basis in years. I thought it might be fun to do a makeup photo here and there. We'll see how long I keep that up!

On this day I went for the purples since I had a cool color sweater on. I love using grays and purples when I'm wearing cooler colors. I did have light pink lip gloss on but I didn't reapply before these photos. :( I will have to get better at this!



Jul 26, 2012

LBD Girl

Dress: Thrifted, Wedges: Target

A simple black dress suits every occasion just perfectly.

 


thanks hubby for the photos :)

Jul 25, 2012

Beach Waves Girl

Tunic & Leggings: NY&Co, Sandals: Target, Necklace: Chictopia

Hip hip hooray for a good hair day!




 

Jul 24, 2012

Just a Monday Girl

 Top & Skirt: NY&Co, Sandals: Kohls

A gray and pink Monday


thanks hubby for the photos :)

Jul 21, 2012

Holding Up the Wall Girl

 
Top: Forever 21, Jeans: Thrifted, Heels: Belk, Necklace: Charming Charlies

I hope you all are having a fabulous Saturday. Today is the hubby's birthday. He got to fill his garage with lots of man things and then I surprised him with a friendship bracelet I made. No matter how small or how silly - he really loves homemade things thrown in the mix. My son and I stamped, painted and colored birthday cards. He ended up with a total of 3 cards. Even one from the dog.






Jul 20, 2012

Cupcake Wars Girl


Top: Thrifted, Pants: Gift, Necklace: NY&Co

This top reminds of me of the icing on top of one of the cupcakes on Cupcake Wars. Yum. I love that show. Even my son watches it with me. I mean, who doesn't love a cupcake? Or at least looking at them. I like seeing how they take some crazy ingredient and work it in without making it disgusting. The other night they had to choose from lemongrass, rose water or lavender and something else - I forget. I could have bit through the tv for a taste of that lavender cupcake. I've had a slice of lavender cake before and I told the waitress it is like a visit to the spa in your mouth. It's the most unusual taste but refreshing and delicious all at the same time.






Jul 19, 2012

My Reading List

Reading List

Reading, for me, gets put on the back burner most of the time. I'm usually plugged in instead. But I would really like to change that. I've rounded up a good variety of books that I want to sink my teeth into sooner rather than later. I like a variety but, really, I just love a good non-fiction! I still fancy a  little fiction story here and there and I'm addicted to old hollywood or high society of ages gone by. I also love getting into deep subjects like the one from Light in August. If you've read any of these let me know what you thought!

1. The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones
One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honor of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savory survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor—and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief. The cook toils over mock turtle soup and a chocolate cake covered with green sugar roses, which the hungry band of visitors is not invited to taste. But nothing, it seems, will go according to plan. As the passengers wearily search for rest, the house undergoes a strange transformation. One of their number (who is most definitely not a gentleman) makes it his business to join the birthday revels. Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant parlor game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking.

2. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
In the midseventies, Steve Martin exploded onto the comedy scene. By 1978 he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up. In 1981 he quit forever. This book is, in his own words, the story of "why I did stand-up and why I walked away." Emmy and Grammy Award winner, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Martin has always been awriter. His memoir of his years in stand-up is candid, spectacularly amusing, and beautifully written. At age ten Martin started his career at Disneyland, selling guidebooks in the newly opened theme park. In the decade that followed, he worked in the Disney magic shop and the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott's Berry Farm, performing his first magic/comedy act a dozen times a week. The story of these years, during which he practiced and honed his craft, is moving and revelatory. The dedication to excellence and innovation is formed at an astonishingly early age and never wavers or wanes. Martin illuminates the sacrifice, discipline, and originality that made him an icon and informs his work to this day. To be this good, to perform so frequently, was isolating and lonely. It took Martin decades to reconnect with his parents and sister, and he tells that story with great tenderness. Martin also paints a portrait of his times -- the era of free love and protests against the war in Vietnam, the heady irreverence of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late sixties, and the transformative new voice of Saturday Night Live in the seventies. Throughout the text, Martin has placed photographs, many never seen before. Born Standing Up is a superb testament to the sheer tenacity, focus, and daring of one of the greatest and most iconoclastic comedians of all time.

3. Light in August by William Faulkner
Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.

4. The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty
A captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922 and the summer that would change them both. Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she’s in for. Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever. For Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might answer the question at the core of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place she embarks on a mission of her own. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, she is liberated in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of Cora’s relationship with Louise, her eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive. Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s,’30s, and beyond--from the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new opportunities for women--Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion and hemlines to values and attitudes, was changing at this time and what a vast difference it all made for Louise Brooks, Cora Carlisle, and others like them.

5. Escape by Carolyn Jessup
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name. Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.

6. Just Kids by Patti Smith
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

*my blog is not affiliated with Amazon.com - the links are just to site the author of the book description. Click away!

Jul 17, 2012

Stylewatch: Jessica Alba

Stylewatch: Jessica Alba

Colored jeans are the norm now, really. But it wasn't until about a week ago that I found a pair that fit and I was willing to pay the asking price for them (cheap). I don't invest heavily into trends because, well, you really just don't need to. I found these cobalt blue jeans at a super cheap store so I have no qualms with letting them go next year if I get tired of them or miraculously lose 30 pounds. Ha! Yeah right.
Anyway, here's my take on the trend!
 
 
 
 
 
Tee: Charlotte Russe, Jeans: Roses, Sandals: Target, Bag: Vintage
 
thanks hubby for the photos!

Jul 13, 2012

How Big is it? Girl

Top: Thrifted, Leggings: NY&Co, Sandals: Target

My hair was so big that while I was driving it was hitting the roof in my car. I had to duck in to get out of the car too. Hahaha...I loved it!




 



Smashion Girl

  I'm over at Smashion today in the Lounge getting interviewed.
Check it out! It's a fun website to sell and buy goodies!



Jul 11, 2012

Wish List: Stripes

Stripes

What's more fun than polka dots? Nothing.
But stripes come a close second.

Jul 10, 2012

Skirt of Many Colors Girl

Top: Target, Skirt: Thrifted, Wedges: Chadwicks

I went all out crazy today and matched my lipstick with my shirt. Whoa.
Let's see...what else...work is amazingly overwhelming. I feel like I get in a boxing match everyday with something. I take two steps forward and three steps back.
I want to see Ice Age 4 or whatever number it's on now. We just call it "The New Scrat Movie".
I did absolutely nothing last weekend. I didn't even leave the house on Saturday. I did zero crafting, zero cooking...wait! I made cupcakes. Quite delicious cupcakes. I fought the inner urge for chocolate and went with a yellow cake with caramel icing instead. Then I got the most amazing idea. I was going to put more sugar on top of the icing. I grabbed a bag of Heath bits and put those on top.
Yum.ee.