Apr 10, 2010 | Fashion
Trenchcoat: Kenneth Cole New York (similar here)
Infinity Scarf: Steve Madden (similar here)
Black Bar Necklace: Forever21
Long-sleeved top: Forever21
Printed camisole: Marc Jacobs
Watch: Forever21
Rings: Forever21 and Icing by Claire’s
Vero Moda Casual Tailored Chinos: ASOS.com
Wedge-heel boots: Forever21 (similar here)
Excuse the grimace; it was crazy-bright in the beginning of shooting these.
I’m not sure at what age I should stop wearing this cute camisole. It’s got a pinafore back, which might make its expiration date somewhere in one’s 20’s. Ohdear.
I’ve been hankering after a pair of slouchy pants in a neutral color, so I ordered these from ASOS.com.
I ended up ordering them 2 sizes too big for me. (I always have trouble ordering pants without trying them on; my tuchus and thighs are a bit larger than what’s usually allowed in a size 4/6…which is what my hips work out to. If they fit on my hips, they usually will be too snug in the seat…so I ordered up a size…er, two. Woops. British sizing always confuses me. LOL) The pants are also very khaki; I thought they would be more silvery-bisque. (The color is called “aluminum grey” on the ASOS website for goodness’s sakes!!) But ohwell. I like them quite alot, tho I’m wondering if they look like I swiped Hub’s pants or something. Perhaps I shall alter them so they’re a little less baggy and more high-waisted. Thoughts?
(I’ve been fearful of the whole pegged-leg, pleated-front, highwaisted trouser ever since it came back into style this year…I have horrible memories of being stuffed into such pieces as a child during the 80’s, since these were the only type of cut my mother would buy for me when it came to pants or jeans. The legs never fully went down to my ankles!!! And the pants were turquoise in most cases, or light denim in the case of jeans. Eeeeek. Ensue hideous teasing from school-aged peers. Significant mental scarring has been accomplished, hehe.)
I think Spring is finally here! My Japanese maple is now covered in red, red leaves – and the Spring hail has begun. (Last year, it hailed every single day for three weeks straight during the month of March…from around 2 pm – 4pm. Every. Single. Day. I’ve never seen so much hail in my life…and it looks like this year is threatening to follow suit.) Better get inside before I get pelted!!
xoxox
Carly
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Apr 9, 2010 | Fashion
I visited a Goodwill Outlet store for the first time ever last week. I had first read about these fabulous stores on CheapJap and was intrigued, to say the least.
When it comes to the life cycle of a donated piece of clothing, the thrift store is not the last stop on the line. (Goodwill is one of many charities that works tirelessly to keep articles of clothing out of the landfills – and happens to be my favorite charity when it comes to donating my used clothing!) Items of clothing that are donated to charities such as Goodwill are first sorted through; those that have minimal tears/stains/rips etc. go out on the selling floor, and those that are deemed less-than-worthy are sold to recycling companies such as Trans-America. Such companies will recycle the garments into rags for industrial usage, or insulation, auto sound dampening, or carpet padding (source) – at the rate of about 260 tons annually. Other articles of clothing are sold to developing countries at about 25-50 cents per pound. In all, about 2.5 billion pounds of clothing a year is processed by such companies and sold abroad. Imagine: that t-shirt made in a factory in China…could end up in a rural province not far from its origin someday.
However, each Goodwill chapter is at liberty to determine its own policies, so there’s no guarantee the clothing you donate will see those eventual end uses. After a certain time at the regular Goodwill retail store, many items have not been sold, and it is then that they arrive at the Goodwill Outlet Store. (There is a great photo essay here about how a garment travels through the Goodwill system of sorting and management, if you are particularly interested.)
The Goodwill Outlet Store is the last stop along the line in the life cycle of your average garment – if it fails to sell here, it is compacted by the baler and sold to the rag trade. The idea of rescuing perfectly-usable items that would otherwise be thoughtlessly discarded appeals to me greatly, so I’ve been wanting to stop by and see how I could help (and how creative I could get with the results!) Why the heck don’t they have a Project Runway episode with the designers scavenging their raw material from here??? I think that would be fabulous!
I love going to Goodwill (the Salvation Army “boutique shops” near me are ridiculously overpriced and have few pieces to pick through, Buffalo Exchange is fabulous but quite pricey, and I dislike going to “vintage stores” since the prices are usually enough to scare me out the door as soon as I glance at a tag). But Goodwill is consistently a source of great pieces…the problem is that you just have to look. (I’m not one for combing vintage stores for a great find; I usually find it insanely tedious. But the fabled DOLLAR A POUND for clothing was way too good a lure to pass up. I mean, even at fabric stores here in Portland I have never found fabric for a dollar a yard, so even if I found some cool sheets or something that I could use as raw materials I would be saving money. [Okay, you New Yorkers – I know $1/yd of fabric is nothing new to you…but here in Portland it’s a bit revolutionary – rarely seen even from the jobbers that pass thru here from time to time.]) Now that Lil Tot is in school more and I am still technically unemployed, I have a lot more free time, and so I decided to spend one early afternoon braving The Bins. Perhaps I would even find something with a designer label on it – the Holy Grail of shopping vintage.
CheapJap offers some great tips for visiting one of these places, and for sorting through everything (except I could only find one of my rubber gloves before leaving the house – I’m not sure where the left one went), so I spent about 2 hours sorting one-handed through more than 30 dumpster-sized bins in this gigantic warehouse. People were looking at me strangely (for the single glove, I suppose), but when I saw that the workers there were wearing face masks, I didn’t feel so ridiculous. There were some dirty clothes in there, man. I was also surprised at how many families were there – parents and their numerous children were also combing through everything, spreading out and moving from bin to bin en masse. The people with their carts the fullest were likely those who were trying to re-sell the clothes…one woman I talked to had a shop on Etsy where she made her living (re-)selling vintage pieces.
There were TVs too!
As I was going through everything, my head was just spinning with possibilities. There were so many fabrics, so many ways I could give new life to these clothes – so many possible alterations…
Of course, most knit fabrics (i.e., t-shirts) were pretty much there for a reason: stained, hideously pilled, or worn. There wasn’t much reuse potential there, I found.
But polyester garments had, on the whole, fared pretty well in The Bins; leather pieces had a lovely, beaten-up quality to them (though there were some in close-to-pristine condition); cotton items ran the gamut, tho most were crumpled (but could probably be restored with a good washing and pressing). I focused mostly on wovens or synthetic fabrics, in large sizes so I had a lot of fabric to work with. There were of course items in excellent, near-perfect salable condition with nary a stain in sight, as well as the odd designer label peeking out here and there.
I spotted: Banana Republic, DKNY, Tommy Hilfiger, Volcom, Barney’s New York, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bebe, for instance.
There was a large amount of Jones New York, Talbots, Metro7, Isaac Mizrahi, Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Levi’s, and Old Navy…which I think says a lot about the things people get rid of and that which is in excessive supply in the marketplace. Private label companies for mass merchandisers…are you listening???
I piled up my shopping cart (and I mean – PILED up, so mountainous I could barely navigate turning it), and then at the end, dumped it all out and went meticulously through it, chanting to myself “$1 a pound, $1 a pound!” I eliminated many of the gigantic leather jackets I found since they were quite heavy, as well as the denim. Light poly, chiffon, and lace stuff got a pass since it would work out to pretty much nothing at the register.
Okay, Carly…I think that’s enough. Greedy girl!!
Despite my best efforts, when the lady at the register rolled my cart onto the scale, she read out “48 pounds.” I almost died. FORTY-EIGHT POUNDS OF CLOTHES!! Say it to yourself. Forty-eight pounds of clothing. It’s unreal.
I was trying to save these clothes from ending up in a landfill – the ultimate result of excessive consumption – and as a result, I am excessively consuming them in bringing them home in the first place. Ironic.
Here’s what I bought:
*2 leather jackets
*1 pair of shoes
*1 pair of jeans
*1 bikini top
*1 pair of rabbit ears
*1 nightgown
*2 blazers
*1 lace negligee
*5 tops
*5 pillowcases
*2 t-shirts
*2 pairs of pants
*3 dresses
*1 fitted sheet
*1 trenchcoat
*7 button-down shirts
*1 pile of fabric remnants
*1 kid’s pajama bottoms
And what cost did all this work out to?
Leave your best guess in the comments;-). (It wasn’t $1 a pound, I can tell you that much!)
Edit 4/12: Great guesses, guys! But…no one got it right. Here is the proof of the pudding:
$25…for 48 POUNDS OF CLOTHING (+ a pair of shoes).
Isn’t that just PHENOMENAL??? Apparently, the more you buy at the Goodwill Outlet the more you save. It’s $1/pound until 25 pounds, above that $0.95/pound, and then above 40 lbs. it’s 89 cents/pound. I really worked for it tho! (See my dirty glove?:-)
Though I now have all this great raw material to work with….it’s now a question of when I’m going to get around to it. I really need two of me to deal with this!;-) But from here on out it’s a sewing and DIY extravaganza…and I can’t wait to share the results!
Have any of you ever been to a Goodwill Outlet store?
xoxoxo
Carly
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Apr 8, 2010 | Fashion
Kevin Abraham-Banks, a Sioux Falls, S.D., trucker, likes to knit while passing the time on the road. Here he makes a sweater for his wife. photo: Gretchen Abraham-Banks
I’m sure you guys have probably seen this already…but I thought this was super-cool!
Article By JENNIFER LEVITZ
WALCOTT, Iowa—Semi driver Dave White happily sequestered himself in his rig at a truck stop on a rural stretch of Interstate 80, waiting to pick up his next haul: 45,000 pounds of Spam. He used to loathe the downtime in his job.
Then, he bought a sewing machine.
Since last year, when the economy left drivers with fewer hauls, Mr. White, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound ex-Air Force mechanic with a bushy mustache, has hunkered down inside his truck in his many off hours, making quilts from patterns with names like “Meet Me In Paris.” When he’s not sewing, he’s daydreaming about it, he said as he ran a square of yellow cotton with little violets through his machine. “Oh, there’s many a time you’re just going down the road at O-dark-thirty in the morning and you just start thinking about a particular pattern.”
Some truckers are finding themselves with more spare time on the road. Loads of goods delivered by truckers fell 15% in 2009, to 170 million loads, the largest drop in modern history, said Bob Costello, chief economist for the American Trucking Associations. That came on top of a slow downswing in hauls because of what the industry laments as “miniaturization” of goods: It takes less space to move flat-screen TVs and iPods than their clunkier predecessors.
With declining freight, truckers who drive hundreds of miles to make a delivery may not immediately have a load lined up for the return trip. So they bide time at truck stops, where they can shower, dine and sleep in their rigs. A couple of years ago, a driver might drop off a load and pick up a new one in two hours; now the wait can be two days, said Mr. Costello.
Though evidence is anecdotal, industry groups and trucking-company owners say the increase in spare time has spawned more hobbies. “We’ve got guys who are into opera, photography, skydiving,” said Norita Taylor, spokeswoman for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers’ Association, a truckers’ group.
Mr. White’s employer, Iowa-based Don Hummer Trucking Corp., last year started a loosely organized “sewing club,” and encourages drivers who are nimble with a needle to show off their handiwork at headquarters. “We want them to pass the time to make themselves happy, rather than get frustrated waiting,” said Dena Boelter, Hummer’s human-resources manager, an avid sewer who calls the hobby a great stress reliever that can be done almost anywhere.
Kevin Abraham-Banks, a 37-year-old trucker with a shaved head and dragon tattoos, passes time at truck stops with his cocoa and knitting.
Mr. Banks, who lives in Sioux Falls, S.D., and hauls romaine lettuce between California and the Midwest, learned to knit last year after load-volumes slowed. Creating something tangible beats sitting around the truck stop “talking about who has a bigger radio,” he said. He’s finished a scarf and socks, and is working on a sweater for his wife.
“The fact that you can take strands of thread and basically make something out of it, that’s awesome I think,” he said. “It’s pretty cool stuff, man.”
Still, trucking can be a macho world that doesn’t feel conducive to knitting or sewing. Some 95% of truckers are men, said the ATA. At the Iowa-80 Truck Stop, whose signs bill it as the “World’s Largest Truckstop,” a top request at the theater is for “Smokey and the Bandit” and the on-site dentist, Thomas Roemer, often sees drivers only after they’ve tried to yank their teeth out themselves. Crafting with fabric and yarn is “nothing I would do—my mom does that,” said Mark Sanchez, 47, a long-haul trucker.
Thomas McConnaughy, a married grandfather from Hemet, Calif., hauls cereal, reads his Bible, plays Sudoku, and talks trout fishing at truck stops. He doesn’t let on to other drivers that he keeps 15 coils of yarn in his cab and makes what he describes as “really cute slippers.”
“In the truck stops, it’s usually a bunch of guys watching football,” he said. “If I sat down with my knitting, I think there would be some funny remarks.”
Mr. White, the quilter, who is 53, came to his new passion last summer after feeling he was wasting time “waiting on freight.”
He drove 2,600 miles a week on average in 2009, versus 3,200 in 2008, even though he spent the same amount of time—about three weeks at a stretch—on the road.
He struggled to find a hobby, having burned out on reading. He tried carting along a remote-controlled helicopter, but it kept falling on him from a shelf in the truck. His wife, Dee, an accountant at their home in Colorado Springs, Colo., is a quilter and suggested he try it. By August, they had outfitted his truck’s sleeper cabin with a $179 sewing machine, supplies, and a starter’s pattern. “Boy, let me tell you, I created a monster,” she said.
Since then, Mr. White has made seven quilt tops, which are finished with a filling and backing between trips. He spends three hours a day on his hobby, sitting on his bed, with his sewing machine next to his mini-fridge. Flowered “project boxes” sit next to neat stacks of blue jeans and baseball caps. Quilting, he said, “gives you a little bit of ownership. You’ve actually accomplished something with your time off.”
He pulled over once to visit the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Ky., and if time allows, visits fabric stores in towns he rolls through.
In his truck, he showed a quilt with illustrations of fruit, and emphasized the importance of strategically placing quilt blocks so that “you don’t get three lemons in a row or two plums in a row.”
His blue eyes widened behind his glasses as he moved to the topic of thread. “There is a variegated thread that goes purple to white then back to purple,” he said. “Oh! Just beautiful.”
from the Wall Street Journal
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Apr 6, 2010 | Fashion
So The Uniform Project will soon conclude a year of stylish, inspiring outfits styled with the same black dress for 365 days straight. Now you can pre-order that very same little black dress, in your own size here (they’re only making 365!).
If you are also interested in the fabulous and many accoutrements Sheena styled her LBD with, they are now available for auction on Ebay – with all proceeds going to the Akanksha Project to bring education to struggling children in India.
Check out their webpage above for more information about the Project, the Akanksha initiative, and to get tons of inspiration to that eternal question: “What do I wear today?”
xoxox
Carly
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Apr 4, 2010 | Fashion
Handmade gold scarab beetle necklace
Flutter-sleeve vintage polyester dress
Gold wood-handle clutch (Accessorize.com; similar here)
Vintage watches, unknown gold cuff bangles
DIY coin bracelet
Gold cage heels (from Target like 5 years ago)
This dress was my mom’s from the 70’s or so. She gave it to me about ten years ago and I rotate it into my outfits now and again. Sometimes I feel the open circle below the bust is just showing too much skin for my liking; other times I’m okay with it. For some reason I keep returning to it since the silhouette is sexy without giving too much away. (except in that little circle 😉
I saw this scarab beetle pendant on Etsy awhile ago. Always being someone to try to make something for less than it costs to buy, I sourced the scarab beetle stamping online, and added a chain I had. I kind of like that it’s loose on the jumprings that slide back and forth on its forearms!
I also saw this coin bracelet by Yochi Design in Lucky magazine in 2003 or something. (sorry I can’t find the original clipping – it’s somewhere; I just don’t feel like going through all my mag clippings right now) I just had to make one of my own – from coin pendants from the bead supply store. (I had to weave thin wire around the coins to accommodate hanging a bead below the coins, since they weren’t double-drilled and I had no way of drilling them at home.) I was pretty pleased with the results.
Feeling disco fever, I tell ya!
xoxox
Carly
On another note, I’ve just finished stuffing all the Easter eggs for Lil Tot, setting up the baskets with goodies, chomping on the carrots we’ve left out for the Easter bunny, and placing an Easter sticker on the note Lil Tot left for our long-awaited visitor (to prove the Bunny dropped by). I’ll be getting up tomorrow morning before the sun is up to hide the eggs all around the backyard. Why go to all this trouble? The simple, sweet look of joy on Lil Tot’s face as he rushes downstairs to see if the Easter Bunny has visited. Such a wonderful moment – truly there is none like it.
(Tho, as a parent, I wonder if, a few years down the line, my elaborate attempts to infuse such a sense of wonder and magic into holidays may make Lil Tot resent me when he finds out the Easter Bunny never existed at all and his mother was just deluding him. I don’t remember realizing when the Easter Bunny/Santa Claus/the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist; so for me, there’s no memory of such a betrayal…but do any of you? Just curious.)
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Mar 30, 2010 | Fashion, Score!
SockTheory.com, a brand-new (as of January 2010!) online store devoted to legwear in all its fabulosity, has me drooling.
No, seriously. Drooling over…socks?
Well, it’s not just socks. They are purveyors of not only the trendy, but also the tasteful, elegant, everyday needs, and the hard-to-find items of legwear even the most die-hard connoisseursmight have a hard time sourcing elsewhere.
Pantyhose with toes?
Yup. They sell ’em.
Lace-up slipper socks?
Sure. (Getting that Chanel S/S 2010 look for $7 sounds like heaven to me!)
Printed stirrup-socks?
Yes, sireee.
And they also stock armwarmers too (a personal fave).
A-a-a-and everything on the site is $25 or less, with many items of legwear under $10! (Oh, and they deliver internationally – woohoo!)
Owner Morgan developed the concept of legwear as the centerpiece of an outfit, instead of just an accessory. She writes “I’ve been sock- and tights- obsessed for my whole life, so branching into this is a dream I’ve always had. When you are a lifelong New Yorker and walking Seventh Avenue every day, it’s impossible not to be fashion-minded. City-style fashion is something that inspires me.”
“Selecting only products that are unique and interesting is important. I’m not interested in carrying only your standard “top seller basics.” Sock Theory is about branching out and expanding your legware horizons =). I own, wear, and model everything you see on the site.”
SockTheory: Sexy Socks and Legwear for Any Theoretical Outfit!
Well, Morgan’s got a great eye for variety, and a gorgeous pair of gams to say the least!
And, exclusively for Chic Steals readers: enter code CHICSTEALS in the coupon code box during checkout to receive 10% off of purchases of $25 or more!
So what are you waiting for? Check out SockTheory.com now, browse through the many images of covetable legwear, get some great styling ideas, and clickety-click your way to 10% off, just in time for Easter.;-)
xoxoxo
Carly
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