Summer Days

This outfit is back from a couple of weeks ago...it now seems unimaginable that we'd been having weather down in the 60's, given last week's Northeast heat wave.  Makes me warm just looking at this outfit.  Jeans and a blazer?  Granted, this would still be absolutely appropriately-warm clothing for inside my lab.  That's the challenge I have every summer...how to make it out of the house to the T to the Lab without overheating while still being able to be warm all day at the Lab.  Sweaters help some, but what do I do with my legs?  Bare legs and sandals are necessary during a week like last week, but not comfortable for long stretches of time in frigid air conditioning.  Maybe I need to bring a pair of leggings to put on once I get in.  Anybody have tips on how to handle major differences between outdoor heat and indoor cold?

So I've been fairly busy, mostly with my General Exams for my Ph.D. program...a combination of a 3-hour oral exam on my planned dissertation area and three fields relevant to it that I'd chosen and studied (which I took and passed two weeks ago), two 24-hour written exam papers (which I took last week), and one journal-level article (have most of a draft done, planning to finish over the next week).  Other than that, I've been trying to spend more time cleaning the apartment, definitely inspired by reading old entries in UFYH -- take a look, if you like being pushed to clean things and don't mind some bad language and sparkly GIFs.

I've also been crossing some things off the 101 in 1001 list, including a trip to a Cirque du Soleil show yesterday (amazing!) and trying a bunch of different variations on green smoothies (now that my community farm share has started for the summer).  Banana and apple and romaine lettuce is actually pretty good:

Not so good?  The one I tried with grapefruit, lime, kale, and cilantro.  I'll take my smoothies with less bitterness and my cilantro at times other than breakfast...

Too Darn Hot

Does that Cole Porter song get stuck in anyone else's head any time it gets really, really warm? The last two days on the East Coast have definitely been far too hot for me...upper nineties! The name of the game in dressing has been just to keep reasonably cool (and then throw on a sweater or two at the lab).


These cuffed linen shorts have gotten a fair amount of wear over the past five or six years I've owned them, but I still like them quite a bit. They're a good length for me, with just enough detail. (Though they do get overly wrinkled after a couple of wearings, as shown here!)

Shorts: Banana Republic. Shirt: Charlotte, thrifted. Shoes: Miz Mooz, thrifted. Purse: thrifted.


This was today's outfit, my own version of the "it's really hot, so put on a gauzy long dress" that I've been seeing a lot this summer. Black is perhaps not the most appropriate color for this technique, I found. Nor was this length as cool as I'd expected...there's an interesting balance between keeping off the sun and having skin exposed to whatever breeze might come by.

Dress: Express, thrifted. Sash: thrifted. Sandals: Wet Seal. Earrings: Ebay junk jewelry lot.

Also, apparently it's September already. Who knew? This summer has been FLYING by...I leave for Europe with the opera in just a week and a half. Goodness...

A Little Pop of Color

Today was a quiet day, finally a little warmer and sunnier after the gray spell that hit the Northeast most of this week. It's funny, this first taste of fall... Saturday was beautiful, crisp and sunny, reminding me what I love about fall in New England. Then the rain and chill and unlifting gray started on Sunday, reminding me what fall in New England is actually like. I've been slogging around in tights and rainboots the last few days. But with today's sun, I went with an easy outfit combo I've done a lot: this little lace dress worn as a top (as it's scandalously short on me), a black skirt, and some sort of belt for a little color and more shaping.


Dress (worn as top): All That Jazz, thrifted something like 10 years ago. Skirt: Old Navy, thrifted. Shoes: Miz Mooz "Hazel" sandals, thrifted. Belt: thrifted. Earrings: handmade.


These Miz Mooz sandals are a new thrifted favorite, which I'd originally looked at due to their faint resemblance to those amazing Jeffery Campbell sandals that have been saturating the style blogs and striking desire in the hearts of many other bloggers. These have some of the same elements (wooden-ish base, ankle strap, black leather, studded trim, chunky heel), while also being really comfortable and actually being within my price range (I picked them up for $6, with only a little crack in the sole)!

Also, I'm interested to see that Miz Mooz still is selling these sandals. How long have they been selling this style, I wonder? Or how quick was their journey from newly purchased sandals to Goodwill secondhand shoes to me? The quick turnover of fashion...

An Experiment with a Hat

Really, this outfit was all about the hat, for me. I'm not sure whether it reads a bit too "country girl" for my taste, but it was a good start at the challenge that is hat-wearing. I'm starting to really love hats...so pretty! So helpful for making an outfit feel considered and polished! This has led to me picking up over the last couple of years a handful of lovely things in thrift stores, at the Dollar-A-Pound, on Ebay. And yet, I find hats very hard for me to wear, if only for how much I feel they stand out (especially the vintage hats that I particularly like). A baseball cap would pass unnoticed, in this city, or a utilitarian winter hat, but a hat that is clearly being worn for the purpose of a sort of old-fashioned fashion? I feel quite visible. And what are the propriety rules for women and hats these days? Should you take your hat off indoors? Does the subway count as indoors?


Dress: H&M, thrifted. White skirt: Forever21. Sandals: Chinese Laundry, thriftd. Straw hat: thrifted. Earrings: Claire's.

Hope everyone has some lovely weekend plans!

Triple the fun

So now that I'm back to quiet days at the lab, I have a little more time to play with my style. I even was pretty good about taking pictures over the last few days (if not posting them immediately). Helpful in this effort is the cheap extensible tripod I picked up a couple of weeks ago. It fits in my handbags easily, but goes up to 40 inches or so. I had tried the gorillapod flexible wrapping tripod idea, but one of the legs on the one I got popped off within a few days, and I generally had a hard time than I'd expected finding trees/posts/other things around which to wrap a tripod. So this new one is working much better for me.


This was Tuesday's outfit. Top: H&M, thrifted. Skirt: thrifted. Shoes: Nordstroms, thrifted (I can't tell you how many times I've worn these sandals since I got them early in the summer...). Bag: thrifted. Earrings: handmade.

Wednesday:

Dress: thrifted. Black silk blouse: Calvin Klein, thrifted. Shoes: Chinese Laundry, thrifted. Bag: thrifted. Belt: thrifted. This outfit started with me trying to wear this cream dress that I'd gotten a while ago but hadn't worn, yet. But it's strapless, so I chickened out from wearing something strapless to the lab and layered another blouse over it. I need to find some occasions to wear strapless, somewhat-dressy things before the end of the summer!

Thursday:

Dress: thrifted. Skirt: Forever21. Sandals: Wet Seal. Belt: thrifted. I had a couple of casual meetings this day with people I had not yet met, which always makes me a bit over-conscious of what I'm wearing. I liked this outfit well enough. Also, look! It's obvious that I only rarely change handbags...I just stick all my stuff into one and leave it there for a while.

I really would like to take some time soon to go through my closet and figure out some fun outfits, instead of trying to pull something together in the morning right before I head out for the lab. I feel like I'm in a period of being kind of unsatisfied with my closet...not so much for the contents, as for my inability to figure out how I want to wear some of these things. I've been leaning toward a more vintage-inspired style recently, and would really like to do more experimentation with silhouette and shape, but it can be tricky for me to find outfits that make me feel pulled-together and stylish. Because I'm somewhat curvy, good fit and certain proportions seem to be really important for clothes to show off my shape rather than make me look schlumpy. For instance, though I dearly want to wear a couple of the thrifted blazers I've picked up over the last year or so, I haven't figured out a way to wear something with defined shoulders that balances well with the rest of my body and doesn't just make me look square all over (or that could at least do that in a way that pleased me). I'm still learning what works well on me/fits how I'd like to look, though. The creativity of the style blogosphere helps, here, in inspiration and exploration. Though it's also easy for me to fall into the trap of "If only I had some of their cute vintage dresses and beautiful shoes, then I too could be effortlessly stylish!" forgetting that what looks amazing on one person with particular coloring and a particular body type/height might or might not be flattering on me. Anyway. I've been thinking about this for a few days, and wanted to share...

Hope everyone has exciting weekends ahead!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled life...

I have survived the opera rehearsal period! And all of the technical elements I'm responsible for worked well enough. So that's a good thing. After a couple of weeks of daily 15-16-hour days in the theater (they let us in at 8AM and kicked us out by 11, or midnight if we'd arranged that beforehand...weekdays, weekends), we had an open dress rehearsal for an invited audience, packed up everything, and just put it on a boat for Europe, where the show will open in September. It's an amazing, crazy process. And now I am incredibly drained, physically and mentally. And have a fair amount to do before we go meet the show in mid-September. I took last weekend completely off, which helped a bit...

In the hot days of July, I really wanted to spend a lot of days looking like this (taken a couple of weeks ago before rehearsals picked up):


Shirt: Ann Taylor, thrifted. Skirt: Forever 21. Sandals: Wet Seal. Bag: thrifted.

But most of the time, I looked something more like this:


Top: BCBG, thrifted. Capris: Forever 21. Shoes: thrifted. Giant bag that could hold all my stuff going back and forth each day: thrifted.

Only imagine versions of this with a long sweater, because it was COLD in the theater! And with long jeans or black pants, because it was...cold in the theater. Still with the sneakers and flat shoes, though, because I had to be ready at any time to climb to the catwalks and do whatever was needed technically.

But it was all good. And we made things happen (though I can't take credit for the robots, I did make the set piece hanging in the second photo into a musical instrument, and have been helping the interactive visual elements):




Absolutely a traditional piece of theater, right?

Fun with Summer Dressing

I wore this on Monday and just loved it. I'd picked up this white blouse at the dollar-a-pound a few weeks ago (when it started getting hot and I realized that I ought to own much more white clothing). However, I hadn't figured out a way to wear it that didn't look fairly unflattering on me; a high round neck is not usually my best style, and the big sleeves and space in the torso could easily read as a baggy t-shirt. But when I tried it with this high-waisted skirt on Saturday evening while cleaning up my closet, then added a patterned belt, it worked for me.


I don't think it photographed quite as well as I would have liked, but I still really enjoyed wearing it. I've mostly been at the lab this week, working on code for the show, so it helps my energy levels to be a little bit dressy.


Shirt: Jack McQueen, thrifted. Skirt, Ann Taylor, thrifted. Belt, thrifted. Necklace, handmade from vintage pin and chain. Shoes: Naturalizers, thrifted.


A gratuitous dinner picture, too! Chicken with tomatoes, olives, and feta, plus roasted potatoes (from the farm share) with rosemary and garlic. SO good.


And this is actually what I wore today, for a long day of coding and interaction design work at the lab. I got a little portable tripod on a whim last weekend, making it much easier to take pictures outside! I still have to get used to the blogger thing of self-portraits in what could potentially be public areas. This may be why my photos from Monday were taken by a wall at the back of a building, near a dumpster.


Dress, thrifted and hemmed. Skirt (as petticoat), Forever21. Shoes, Nordstrom, thrifted.

Hope everyone's week has been going well so far!

Fireworks and a heat wave!

Wow, has it been hot this week. I feel sorry for everyone else on the East Coast...up over 100 degrees (at one point the weather report claimed 106!) on Tuesday, and in the 90's the rest of the week. Thus, dressing has been for attempting to stay cool (as I'm working in our opera space away from the lab this week, with more limited air conditioning) and as comfortable as possible, and yet stay at a socially-appropriate amount of clothing. All we can talk about this week is how much we want to leave behind opera responsibilities and go to the beach or something. Anyone have tips for how to dress when the weather is scorching and you're going to be really sweaty?


This was my Monday outfit, which worked fairly well but photographed poorly (apparently, this shirt is more see-through with a camera flash. This may have been the only appropriate picture I took). All pieces are thrifted (including the Goodwill black strappy sandals that you can't see but that I've been wearing a few times a week since I got them).


And, since I promised you pictures of the Boston fireworks celebration... here's a few! It really was a lovely evening; it's great to be out with the crowds, seeing the fireworks up close with tons of people similarly excited. My group got to the riverbank around 6:30, and it was already pretty packed. Mind you, the fireworks don't start until 10:30...


I also love how every year the show tends to have new kinds of fireworks...new shapes, new movement. I can't believe it's possible to keep inventing more variations on fireworks! My favorite were a series of small ones that started low to the river and propelled their way upwards in an undulating pattern that reminded me of jellyfish. Just beautiful.


So yes. A busy week, with the next set of opera rehearsals on the horizon. We have design meetings (and review of content) tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. I really love this stuff, though.


Hope everyone is keeping relatively cool and looking forward to a good weekend!

All Opera, All the Time

We've finally started rehearsals for this opera my group is doing. Thus, for the last two weeks, I've been going back and forth between watching rehearsals, working on my part of the technology (coding, soldering, brainstorming interaction design), production meetings, etc. Lots of fun, but also means my time to do non-work things has been significantly limited (particularly with rehearsals/work 7 days a week). It's amazing to see the performers in our rehearsal space, to see the scenes coming together at last for this show that has been in the working for years (a number of years even before I joined the lab two years ago). Everything is finally happening! Though we do have a lot of the tech to still integrate (and by "integrate" I mean "get working") And it looks good... And it reminds me how much I love being part of the theater, how I'm doing exactly what I should be doing right now.

As a tiny bit of background about the part I'm working on...in the story of this opera, the main character attempts to avoid dying by uploading his mind into a computer system built throughout his house. This happens in the end of the first scene...which means the performer goes offstage and the theatrical set has to embody that character through visuals on the walls, movement, lighting, sound. You could have all of that just be pre-programmed (a challenging enough task). However, we want the performer to be giving a live performance, to measure aspects of that expressive performance, and have that expression shape the visualizations in significant ways. My research includes measuring the live performance and working with a coworker on the interaction between the performance and the visual system. Interesting as both a technical problem and an artistic problem, I think.

So. In the rehearsal-every-day thing, it's been harder for me to take the time to a) come up with outfits I really like, b) document what I wear at all. On the plus side, I feel like the act of having taken much more care about what I wear means my outfits when I just grab something are much more dressy than my old default of jeans and a fitted t-shirt. On the other hand, I'm now aware of what I feel like when I really like what I'm wearing, and thus am aware when I'm not getting to that point. I have a couple of outfits I got pictures of, though!


This was last Friday's outfit, for rehearsals and an opera-people BBQ. It's also interesting to try to dress for weather where it's been 85-90+ degrees outside and freezing cold in the lab...layering time!

Details:
Dress: Ann Taylor, thrifted.
Belt: thrifted.
Sandals: Chinese Laundry, thrifted.


I wore this dress yesterday, inspired by a handful of bloggers whom I've seen with similar beautiful embroidered pieces (which I believe are Mexican/Mexican-inspired). My dress appears to have been handmade and hand-embroidered (you can still see some placement marks under the embroidery). I wanted to play against the style and color of the dress with some more dressy black accessories, so I wore my recently thrifted wedge sandals. I think I got them last week (after I'd made a bad shoe choice and had to run into the local Goodwill and try to find something to replace the sandals that were already giving me blisters) and have already worn them three times since. I really felt good in this outfit...summery, comfortable, fun.


Details:
Dress: thrifted
Belt: Forever21
Shoes: Nordstrom, thrifted.

Hope everyone's having a good week! Getting close to the weekend...though I spend that in more rehearsals...

A variety of outfits

This was my outfit on Tuesday, the first day after Me-Made May. It was definitely strange not to be trying to choose from a more limited wardrobe...makes me want to keep refashioning things all summer! I definitely enjoyed the challenge of Me-Made May. Zoe has plans already for a Self-Stitched September, which I really wish I could participate in...however, I'll have to take a pass this year, as I'll be traveling to Europe for two weeks in September working on the opera, and I already am going to have a lot of trouble figuring out appropriate clothes to cover both backstage work, performances, and whatever dressy events I have to go to.


Wednesday's outfit was a combination I'd been wanting to wear since my mother gave me this thrifted tunic early in May...but as it didn't have a me-made component, went on the back burner till now.



In other exciting news, I purchased a small community farm share for the summer, meaning I get a load of fresh veggies every week! This will, I hope, a) increase my vegetable consumption, and b) get me cooking more. See, if I have a pile of fresh vegetables that needs to be eaten within a week, then I have to make sure they get eaten!


The results of my first week's share included spinach, red Russian kale, two types of lettuce, pea tendrils...


as well as endive, Japanese mustard greens, and bok choy.


Thursday's outfit was fairly simple; a little cream tunic, sweater (inside the lab, at least!), and sandals.


Friday's outfit was inspired by the Victor/Victoria challenge from Jessica of What I Wore. She set a challenge of wearing either a very ladylike outfit or a menswear inspired outfit. I had some work/school related receptions to go to, as it was graduation (technically, I am now officially a Ph.D. student!) so I went with the ladylike look.


Details:
Dress: Nine West, thrifted.
Belt: thrifted.
Shoes: Predictions, thrifted
Jewelry: handmade

On a related note, I ought to see Victor/Victoria sometime. Sometime when I'm not busy with an opera!

Opera rehearsals start later today, with at least two rehearsals with the cast + technical meetings just about every day, so it's going to be a very, very busy summer...

Start of Me-Made May Lite

I know I've been pretty absent around these parts for the last couple of weeks...my thesis is due this Friday, so I've been writing and rewriting and generally being tired of my own words. But I think I'm pretty close...one of my committee members still has to give me feedback, then I have to integrate it, but other than that I'm essentially done. I think. I will be very glad when this is printed out and turned in, though.


Also, it's now May...and thus my Me-Made-May Lite challenge kicks off! (as a reminder: I'll be wearing at least one handmade or refashioned item of clothing every day). This was yesterday's outfit; I made the strawberry print dress last summer from a thrifted sheet and bedspread. It seems to be my go-to outfit for incredibly hot days right now...I'd worn this that Wednesday a few weeks ago when it was in the 90's, and now yesterday, when it was also in the 90's. I still don't fully understand MA weather...it was 40 degrees on Wednesday, and now this. It was hard to sleep last night, it was so hot, even with a fan on me.


Details:
Dress: Me-made
Shoes: Chinese Laundry, thrifted


For the first day of May, I wore my refashioned jean skirt and handmade earrings. My boyfriend and I got up early and went to a handful of garage sales, looking for interesting things...I found a couple of pieces of costume jewelry. The big news of the day was that Boston was having a "boil water" order; the main supply pipe had broken, so the water supply was having to come from alternate reservoirs that aren't safe for drinking. I was very, very happy to live in Cambridge, which apparently has its own water supply...so I've been completely avoiding all of that hassle.


Details:
Skirt: refashioned from a pair of Joe's Jeans (interesting story...I had won a Lucky magazine contest, and gotten them for free, but they were thin fabric and wore out in the thighs within a year. So...jean skirt)
Striped top: Thrifted
Shoes: Naturalizers, thrifted
Earrings: me-made

Hope everyone is having a good start to the week!