More Roses & Japanese Gardens

Saturday was jam-packed, starting with traditional visitor’s brunch at Screen Door, followed by another visit to the Rose Gardens and the Japanese Gardens! We got really zen-ed out, naturally. I wore this floral dress that I painted for ModCloth’s office, which was great for such a hot day!

9 comments | July 27th, 2010

Cacharel Resort 2011: Print Madness

These crazy prints from the Cacharel Resort 2011 collection are killin’ me! I saw these really late at night a while back and saved the images one after another, I felt surprised at how much I was enjoying them. The mixed prints are so in-your-face and bright, but still somehow are totally mellow and cool. I guess that’s the beauty of a resort collection! Get wild and chill out.

4 comments | July 26th, 2010

Shop Update!

1. 1950′s sheer periwinkle polka dot party dress

All of these items are up in the shop now! They’ve actually been up since before the weekend, but my days were busy and I didn’t have time to post about them till now. I think just one dress is sold so far, so have at it friends! Oh, also, I’ve gone back to modeling the clothing instead of using the dress form for some of the shots. I just can’t make clothing look normal on a dress form, some people can but not me! Enough people mentioned that they preferred it that way too, so I did it for y’all!

2. 1950′s cherry pie plaid dress
3. 1960′s soft madras pocket dress
4. 1970′s handmade paisley skirt
5. 1970′s pansies and vines skirt

6. 1980′s sailor gal casual cotton dress
7. 1980′s cherry sundae silk blouse
8. 1970′s handmade nautical stripe button skirt

9. 1980′s berry plaid flannel dress
10. grunge dark sage green bodysuit
19. 1980′s summer denim shift dress
20. 1970′s hidden roses floral paisley skirt

21. 1980′s navy vines button dress
22. 1970′s mushroom universe blouse
23. 1980′s abstract rayon blouse

4 comments | July 26th, 2010

Friday Night in Downtown Portland

On Friday afternoon a car full of my friends from Canada rolled into town, including Rachel, Maya, Jordan and Sean. We went downtown for beers and snacks at Henry’s, which I believe is Jordan’s favorite Portland brewpub, and it felt so good to sit outside on the patio- perfect temperature, great beers (we tried a lot of kinds! they have a very huge beer menu), incredible waffle fries, a great summer evening. Afterwards, Maya and I split off from the other three since they were going to the Blitzen Trapper show, and we headed home for a bit before the rest of our night continued on, including a quick drink/visit with Rachel (the Portland one!) and Annie at the Goodfoot, then downstairs soul night dancin’ (although it was more like disco/soul) in front of a giant fan. I got to see Rachel & Annie earlier in the day too, we hit up a cool estate sale and I picked up some neat dresses and hats for the shop! Here are a few more photos from the evening in downtown Portland, and I’ll share more from our Saturday later!

8 comments | July 25th, 2010

Roses, Pt. I

Spent the afternoon today with Madeline, we visited Portland’s famous International Rose Test Garden, which was founded in 1917. It also served as a safe place for hybrid European roses during World War I, because people were afraid that their rose varieties would be completely destroyed. The rose garden is quite big and has lots of cool sections, like the ultra super mini rose garden zone, the Portland Rose Festival Queen walk of fame (featuring signatures from all of the past queens!) (not official names of garden sections), and, well, I can’t remember what the other ones were but we made a lot of jokes about it. Also saw some total loser hydrangeas acting like total posers on the garden’s edge! Oh, I also want to mention that this beautiful dress was a gift from Amelia, it had a matching jacket as well that Amelia owns. She’s such a pro at outfit documentation, there must be a photo of it somewhere!

Um, I am calling bullshit on the very first Rose Festival Queen. Her name was really FLORA? Rigged! Edited to add: Ok, I looked it up and the first queen was actually named Carrie Lee Chamberlain, the governor’s daughter, and listen to this!! : “From 1908 to 1913, the festival’s ruler was a king – Rex Oregonus — a local figure selected by committee who kept his identity hidden beneath a mask until he was ‘unveiled’ at the annual ball.” Sounds like the old school Rose Festival was way cooler than the one we have now!

We smelled so many roses and judged them on their rosiness. You really gotta wonder if smelling that many roses in a day does something to your brain chemistry. Probably, it makes you want to eat noodles, which we did later at Saucebox.

Nothing like a giant rose to make you feel small! Small, but impressed. Nice work, rose. I wish I had taken more photos of the rose variety names, I told Madeline that I really like the ones that sound like 80′s lipstick shades. We overheard a guy saying that you should add “in bed” to the end of all the names, which I scoffed at for a second cause I didn’t think it would apply to rose names, but the trick still worked. In my opinion, the worst one was “Pink Promise” (haha, sorry). Thanks to Madeline for snapping some photos of me in rose land!

22 comments | July 22nd, 2010

Elvira Madigan

I just watched Elvira Madigan, a sweet, sad and quiet Swedish film from 1967 about the ill-fated love between Elvira, a Danish tightrope walker runaway and Sixten, a military deserter from the Swedish army. They were real people, and the film is about their time together trying to make an impossible relationship work while they are wandering through the countryside trying to keep their identities a secret. Below, photos of the real couple:

This movie is quite beautiful, with soft colors and romantic clothing. They keep playing this one piece of music over and over again though, sort of in a funny way- every time their theme came on I was a little tired of it, haha. The dresses in the film reminded me a bit of this piece by Loup Charmant, an organic cotton label based in NYC.

I took a lot of screen caps during this film, I couldn’t get enough of these great colors! So, enjoy- and I would recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys pastoral scenes and tragic romances, or just 60′s films in general!

10 comments | July 21st, 2010

Miniature Village with Lalouka

This neat video was made by Lalouka and friends, featuring some great vintage-inspired designs and a really awesome little miniature village! It is currently part of a fashion video contest, and right now is the time to vote! The best videos will move on to the next stage, so head on over here and cast a vote for this creation! It’s really fun for me to see Lara’s designs in action, because I just received a package from her and am excited to take some photos of my new Lalouka pieces… and you can expect an interview with her soon too! You can also read her post about the miniature village experience.

2 comments | July 20th, 2010

Shop Update!

1. 1950′s diamond net pillbox hat
2. 1960′s bright plaid dress
3. 1960′s sweet crochet blouse
4. 1950′s handmade bright gingham jacket

Once again, I’m a little late to tell you about these shop updates, some are from last week and some were just put up a few minutes ago! I don’t like having shop posts every single day but I’m trying to update frequently, so remember that you can subscribe to my shop’s RSS feed or follow me on twitter to keep up with my updates on a daily basis. I’m also planning to stop using the dress form and go back to modeling the photos in addition to these white background shots, the dress form is too annoying and I’ve had several people tell me they prefer to see clothes on a human, so I’ll do it for you!

5. 1980′s soft safari dress
6. 1980′s silk leopard blouse
7. 1980′s umber pleated shorts

8. Grunge plaid sailor dress
9. 1950′s colorblock artist day dress
10. 1950′s flower medallion dress
11. 1970′s burgandy woven folk skirt

12. 1980′s ocean breeze striped dress
13. blue ribbon straw boater hat
14. 1980′s seaside striped bow blouse

15. 1960′s sailor gal beach blouse
16. 1960′s rope belt striped sailor jacket
17. 1970′s XOXO printed skirt
18. 1980′s sailboat plaid cotton skirt

19. 1950′s crimson rose velvet party dress
20. 1950′s fancy rose handmade jacket
21. 1950′s pearl drop velvet & veil hat
22. 1950′s wool & fur collar handmade jacket
23. 1980′s red heart scallop blouse
24. midnight black rhinestone bow necklace

3 comments | July 20th, 2010

Portland Street Style: Madeline

I’m so excited to announce a new feature for my blog- Portland street style! I’ve become increasingly interested in photographing other people, and there are so many stylish people in Portland (especially ones that love vintage!), so it seemed like a fun way to express my love for Portland, fashion and photography all at once. I thought about making a separate blog for it, but I like having everything in one place and there’s already an amazing stand-alone local street style blog called Urban Weeds that you should be following. So, you can expect to see more of this here and if you want to browse this category in the future (when there are more photos), you can click the little Portland street style link to the right.

So, let me introduce Madeline! We met at the soft rock happy hour at Holocene, I noticed her cute vintage ruffle blouse right away and our little table crew chatted (mostly about her potential photo project, Nude Dudes!) and I really had to work up the nerve to ask if I could take her photo. It’s not an easy thing to do! I’m sure it will become easier over time, but I was super lucky that Madeline is very awesome and chill. We took a whole bunch of photos and it was really fun, so not only was it a cool experience because I finally get to start this project, but I also got to meet a new friend. Who knew it could go so well?

Of course, since I was two gin & tonics deep I didn’t get all the details about her outfit, but I’m not sure I want to do that anyway- I have a bad memory and I’m afraid I’d forget everything! However, obviously the blouse is vintage and Madeline found the shorts at a giant Forever 21 after an epic search. Sometimes a treasure is hiding amongst all the weird sections of that store, and only a true dedicated hunter of amazing lace button shorts can be victorious.

Thanks to Madeline for being so rad and stylish!

15 comments | July 19th, 2010

Fudge Magazine: April Extras

Here are the rest of my favorite images from the April issue of Fudge magazine. I have two more issues waiting for me out in the suburbs, I need to try to convince the bookshop to mail them to me! It’s such a pain to go all the way out there… but it doesn’t seem like anyone else offers subscriptions to this Japanese gem.

Sorry the scan is bad on the last image, it was a small picture and that’s the best I could do with my scanner!

6 comments | July 18th, 2010