Ever So Scrumptious

The new year is tomorrow, and we’re all a little older. At my age – I’m still young – no, I’m old, I’m over it -  I can’t keep track any more. I’m the walking version of this classic optical-illusion drawing. Am I the dewy girl or the dowager? Is there anything in between?

According to high fashion – no, there isn’t. Fashion’s darlings right now are lovely young things in the flowers of youth, like Tavi Gevinson, and “delicious old darlings of about a hundred”, to grab a Nancy Mitford quote and take a peek at Advanced Style. It’s the years in the middle that are tricky. Colette had a delicious aside about aging beauty in her novel Claudine Married.

“It’s in Paris that you see the most fascinating faces whose beauty is waning – women of forty, frantically made-up and tightlaced, who have kept their delicate noses and eyes like a young girl’s. Women who let themselves be stared at with a mixture of pleasure and bitterness.”

The collision of time and youthful beauty has inspired more modern writing, too. Mistress Matisse has Random and Disjointed Thoughts On Being A Pretty Girl (NSFW) and acknowledges the privilege and unfairness of it all. A “nerdy frog who became a princess” after some appearance fixes is flummoxed by the power of beauty and the time that polished, modern beauty requires. Elizabeth Wurtzel, once a willowy beauty who brought the drama, now looking good “for her age”, reflects bitterly on her lost privilege and how she abused it.

A lot of the “mature style” out there doesn’t speak to me – maybe because of my own awkward age, maybe because of regional differences. I’d come across as stuffy and overdressed in the Hermes-garnished ensembles from the blog Une femme d’une certain age, though I do admire her writing and thoughts on “going forwards.” In Wellington, my 40something contemporaries are spending this Antipodean summer in maxi-dresses that show off their new tattoos and cowboy boots. The quirkydorable vintage/pinup look that a lot of us admire is exemplified by such early-20s beauties as Solanah at Vixen Vintage. This blogger has advice on wearing vintage “when you’re a bit vintage yourself“; there are also thoughts on keeping longer hair as an older woman.

For this year coming up, my two main style goals are to take care of my physical infrastructure – to eat well, sleep well,get lots of exercise, and take care of “the elements” level details – and to finish some of that sewing I’m always talking about. I look forwards to spending autumn (my favorite season, still to come) in a soft teal dress and brown boots, but I’ve got to make the dress first.

A last note for the new year: the amusing I Sleep Easier Now, a little Cole Porter ditty. “When I was prettier, when I was prettier, in bed I did not read Whittier. I sleep easier now.”

It is time. It is time for the Global Online Shopping Post. My in-box is filling up with freakish pre-season discounts. The gift-giving season is around the corner. And “Where’d you get that?” “I got it…online!” is my endless refrain.

Yes, online global shopping brings up issues of consumerism and of global-versus-local. But sometimes I just want a chartreuse dress, or shoes that fit and don’t cost a fortune, or some wackadoo precisely sized jewelry finding.

Think Before You Shop

It’s easy to get carried away and stuck with lemons via online shopping. I try to keep my eye on items that have a good return-on-investment for me. For example, I have an unusual shoe size, so I get greater selection and value when I shop for shoes online.

Still, I’ve bought cosmetics, bed linens, vintage accessories, dresses, fabric, specialty craft items, jewelry findings, eyeglasses, loose gemstones…the list goes on and on.

Important Online Shopping Tips

• Search For Reviews. Many sites now include starred reviews of items. Where this isn’t the case, thank you, bloggers and Facebookers of the world, for reviewing every last item you purchase.
• Use Sales To Your Advantage. Antipodean shoppers, search for and hit those “Sale” and “Clearance” pages. You’ll be ordering discounted items for the previous summer/winter that will arrive in time for your spring/fall.
• Search For Coupons and Discounts To Apply. This is so easy. A Google search for “retailer name” and any of the following words – code, promotion, coupon – may reveal a discount coupon for your order, which you apply for an additional discount.
• How Long Should It Take To Get A Package In NZ? From Asia and Europe: Two – three weeks. Items from Singapore or Hong Kong can come faster than that. From Australia: One week. From the USA: Two weeks.
• Source Gifts For Overseas Folks Overseas. Living in NZ, I order gifts for my American family from USA vendors, and for my UK family from UK vendors. This way, more of my gift budget goes towards the present itself, and less towards its shipping.
• When In Doubt Go A Size Up. Too big can often be fixed, too small usually can’t. This is frustrating if you’ve gone online for size issues.
• For US Shipping, If Possible, Ask For USPS International Priority Mail. This is the most affordable way to get items shipped from the US A- check the rates here. Clothes and shoes aren’t, as a rule, fragile, so this is a good way to go with Etsy and eBay vendors. This box shown below is your friend when it comes to shipping a garment or fabric from overseas.

Behind the cut: how to get items shipped to you, and The List of Retailers, including lingerie, pretty retro dresses, and much much more, plus Buyer Beware advice. When I say mondo, I mean mondo![Read more]

I’ve been watching the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement, and its questions of profit, corporate control, and the enduring effects of industralized consumer goods. Those of us who like to make arts and crafts (or, let’s be honest, dream of having time to do so) have been grappling with some of these issues for about 150 years. Essays and links follow!

In the hands of yarn bombers, knitting overflows, taking over the landscape and the city. Contrast the yarn bombers, and how they change and play with spaces, to the classic Situationist/Futurist essay Formulary for a New Urbanism, “We don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure. We propose to invent new, changeable decors….”

Yarn bombed bull, captured by Daintytime, re-used under Creative Commons, click image for link. Thanks Daintytime!

The delightful Bread & Puppet Theater Cheap Art Manifesto. “Art has to be CHEAP and AVAILABLE to EVERYBODY.”

Is there a crafter alive with broadband who hasn’t seen  “Put A Bird On It?” But wait, there’s more! After reading about a crafter’s own tangle with “Put A Bird On It,” including extinct birds, mechanical reproduction, and copyright, I’m about to join Emily Yoffee whittling them there tobacco-planting sticks.

Embroidering your own pillowcases and having artisanal interiors has had political/social significance earlier in history. Here is an introduction to William Morris and the Western Arts & Crafts movement, the Victorian/Edwardian reaction to industrialism.

Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a foundation essay on the topic, unpacking post-industrial anxiety about art reproduction and power. The end gets heavy, consider that Walter Benjamin was Jewish and writing this essay in Germany in 1936.

Emily Yoffe spends time as an 18^th century US colonial re-enactor and is amazed at how different and fulfilling hands-on work is compared to her usual tapping at computers A quote: “Once humans spent most of their days doing useful things with their hands, and I realized that we were designed to get a deep satisfaction from this. As Hughes put it, “You have the feeling people were supposed to do this kind of work, rather than data entry, which is amazingly horrible.””

The Craftster 2011 Indie Craft Report peers into the state of craft today.