Mascara or Motor Oil

now featuring: the Bootleg Tailoring Corner!

I’ve been thinking for some time now that my blog is in need of a regular feature so here it is ladies and gents: Bootleg Tailoring! Although I have never used a sewing machine and patterns scare the crap out of me, I do a fair bit of tailoring on my own clothes. I started doing a lot of thrift store shopping with my brother when I was in junior high, and being that we were the only people in our very small town looking for things like vintage prom dresses and suspenders we found some amazing stuff. The only bummer is being a fairly small girl with somewhat different measurements (boobs and no hips or ass at all) it’s hard to find things to fit me the way I like. I took to sewing a little bit in high school but didn’t really get into it until I was about 20. For me hand sewing is one of the most relaxing, rewarding things I can do and if you add in some Project Runway I’m basically in heaven. However, like I’ve said I have no training in sewing really, I just sew logically. I’ll show you what I mean with my latest project- I picked up these amazing pants at the swap, but they were waaay too big on me.

Pretty heinous and unflattering right? I mean, I love the pattern and what they became, but I can see why everyone seemed kind of horrified when I was excitedly showing them around. I just think they’re so goofy- I mean, they actually say the words ‘primitve’ and ‘ethnic’ on them! I also love them for the extreme M.I.A. factor.

Annnyway, I started by turning them inside out and having my very handsome boyfriend pull them tight and pin all the way down. Make sure to leave enough room unpinned at the top to get out of them!

Doesn't he look so thrilled to be doing this?

So next I took them off veeeery carefully so none of the pins would fall out and laid them down to go over the hemlines with a pen. Basically just draw a line all along your pin line. Ball point pens work great for marking fabric and usually come out in the wash if you don’t want to invest in a fabric pen. (That’s what I use.)

Don't mind my little voodoo pin cushion...

Depending on how much you take them in you may need to snip some of the extra fabric from the edge so they don’t look bulky. Just make sure you leave at least a half an inch so your stitches don’t get pulled out. If you’re working with polyester you can use a lighter to singe in raw edges so it doesn’t fray- but be VERY CAREFUL not to set yourself and your garment on fire.

Sorry it's so blurry!

Tah-dah!!

I am probably the most proud of these than any other alteration I’ve done. I wore them out last night and got some great compliments on them, and they’re also super comfy since they’re a little stretchy.

I hope these tips may help some of the sewing-impaired, and there will be more Bootleg Tailoring posts very soon! Please ask if you have any questions, I’d love to help other people enjoy sewing as much as I do!

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art museum blogger date

I have to start by thanking everyone who came out to U-Swap, it was such an incredible success! Molly and I had a great time and can’t wait to do it again (although hopefully in a less sweaty place and time). The fabulous Rachel Elliott took some shots for us, so I will post those as soon as I get my hands on em! Thank you so much to Kasmira, Tamia, and Paige and all the other Cincy bloggers for coming too- it was so great to meet everyone and see the people I did know again! As always everyone looked fabulous!

These pictures are a few weeks old now since I am a slacker extraordinaire, but Molly the Sister in Second-Hand Sequins and I went to the Cincinnati Art Museum recently to check out the temporary display of antique neon signs they currently have on loan from the American Sign Museum. They only had a few, but after I saw how huge they were I understand why! If you’re near Cincy you should absolutely make a trip to the Sign Museum – they have weird hours but are also open by appointment. We had a really good time running around though- thank god that Molly had her camera and Jacob didn’t mind being our photographer.

He's comin' for ya Molly!

Hudy - delcious Cincinnati beer

I must admit in a little disclaimer here that I don’t drink beer. It just makes me feel all sloshy and sleepy so I pretty much stick to mah favorite super cheap wine: Crane Lake Riesling. Mmmmmm….

Just look how softly he glows. Like an angel.....

They had one of the balcony areas all separated with matte wallpaper and these cool frames for people to draw in!

The museum also currently has some really beautiful Charley Harper prints that are really out of his normal realm. Most of his pieces are centered around nature and look more like the picture below, but these featured a lot more industrial scenes. It was a small exhibit, but I definitely recommend it if you’re in or near Cincinnati.

I love how geometric most of his work is.

Then we ventured around the little courtyard outside to enjoy the sunshine…

The low back on Molly's leotard top is so cute!

One of my many beloved veil hats

Ain't nobody here but us style bloggers....

If only the big swing in front of the museum wasn't anchored...

I love this one that Molly snapped of herself. Suuuch a cute outfit!

All in all a very fun excursion! I love these little playdates and can’t wait to do one with Paige the Midwest Darling too!

WHAT: white cage veil hat, chicken lays an egg

daisy dress, chicken lays an egg

je taime double ring, forever 21

mustard mary janes, target

white vinyl bag, chicken lays an egg

WHERE: art museum and then work

WHEN: tuesday, sometime ago…

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don’t waste stuff

It was another crazy busy weekend at the shop last week- we got an AMAZING custom mural done in our courtyard by local artist, Chris Gliebe! He drew up this incredible sketch a few weeks ago, and I was amazed how much it looks like the finished product!

He completed this masterpiece in FOUR HOURS! That blew me away. I will do a separate post for that though, because I’d like to try to make a gif out of all the pictures that Maya took while he was painting it.

So we had a little shindig that night to celebrate, complete with lots of PBR and NorthSlice Pizza, the deeeeeliocious new pizza place that just opened across the street from us. It was a spectacular night and hopefully I’ll have some more pictures from the party soon too…… We’ll see what I can finagle.

Anyway- this post is really about not wasting stuff! My fellow Cincy blogger, Paige of Midwest Darling has set everyone to the challenge of saving a once-loved but now ruined item of clothing and make it wearable again. I really love the spirit of this challenge, we could all save a little more. I do a fair amount of altering and hemming on my own clothes, and have recently started to do a little tweaking on some clothes at Chicken Lays An Egg. A very fashion-forward friend and photographer was in the shop the other day when he suggested that we start doing some serious alterations (more in the vein of upcycling). I am really excited by this idea and although I have never used a sewing machine and have very limited sewing education, I think I could do it. I’m sure I’ll mess up a few dresses along the way, but this idea is really exciting to me. Since Rosie of The Brush Factory will be doing alterations at U-Swap on Saturday, I plan on chatting with her about that a little.

Right now I don’t really have anything that has been messed up and needs a new chance at life, so I thought I’d show you guys some little things that I’ve altered or hemmed instead. This first one I found at a yard sale for $1, at just had to buy it even though it was about 5 sizes too big and 3 feet too long for me.

That's about what it looked like (before I cut that big chunk out of the middle to hem up)

So to fix the giant waist, I added a pleat in the back. Thankfully the material is busy enough to hide it for the most part.

To accomplish this I just kind of pulled the slack inside and then folded the elastic waistband down to stitch it. Sorry the picture doesn’t illustrate that very well…

Sorry the picture is so blurry, my camera would not focus on what I wanted it to.

In the end, it was a fantastic save. Just look how deep the pockets are in this thing!

This next project actually was more of a destroyed piece that I brought back to life. Dana brought this beautiful dress into the shop, and the original material that was in the sunburst was very sheer and light and was very quickly ripped in the dressing room. I told her I’d fix it and bring it back, but instead she just gave it to me! (She’s very generous like that.) I was thrilled and couldn’t decide what to use to replace the ripped fabric until I found this super shiny gold shirt at the thrift store.

Now I just need to lose a few pounds (or ribs maybe) to fit into it… I think I can do it. I do also have a dress that I recently picked up at a thrift store and would really like to repurpose into a little tube dress for myself (with maybe a little sweetheart neckline?)

I haven’t ever really tried anything that ambitious though, so we’ll see how it turns out. Thanks to Paige for encouraging more reusing, we should all do it when we can!

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trashbiscuit

I recently found out that one of my favorite designers from Cincinnati Fashion Week is going to be in the next season of Project Runway!! AJ Thouveno and Ryan Coyne are the creative force behind TrashBiscuit, a ‘glam and pop rock inspired label that is all about taffeta, spandex, and killer heels’ according to their website. The duo’s work obviously impressed Tim Gunn and the other interviewers, since AJ is IN! I really enjoyed their work when I saw the runway show in April- here are a few pictures from that show that I snagged from their Facebook page (hence the quality). EDIT: Since I posted this entry they have debuted their very own beautiful website!

latex stewardess

at CFW modeled by Ana Gilmore

You may recognize this button up from his bio video...

Kiki Lane rockin' that Trash Biscuit

The always stunning Jessica Cornetet

I think their pieces have a really great spirit about them, and have a serious soft spot for the trashy. I’m really interested to see what kind of garments that he’s going to have to make for the clients with more classic (read: boring) style. God I hope Nina doesn’t tear his stuff apart. She’s the one I always worry about….

Anyway, I want to extend a huge CONGRATULATIONS to both AJ and Ryan!!

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stopped (for now)

I just heard that BP has finally sealed off the leak (we’ll see how well it works) and I am skeptical but very hopeful. Coincidentally the outfit I’m wearing seems surprisingly nautical outfit for a sweaty day in the Midwest.

I love my little jointed fishie.

Like perfect little sand dollars

Although I thought this dress was adorable when I saw it on their site, I must say I was a bit apprehensive about wearing something with a dropped waist. I just usually don’t like how they fit, and with this being jersey I figured it would be way too clingy in all the wrong spots. I was very pleasantly surprised though when I saw how it looked on! It’s super comfy and light too so I’ve been wearing the crap out of it lately. Shabby Apple also donates a portion of their proceeds to Unitus to help women throughout the world get micro-loans, which is a nice perk to buying a cute dress.

I was pretty tickled to see that Tieka from Selective Potential picked out the same dress in red!

WHAT: Baja dress, courtsey of Shabby Apple

floppy fish necklace, chicken lays an egg

sand dollar belt, chicken lays an egg

high heel cowboy boots, thrift

WHERE: work at the shop, findlay market, running errards

WHEN: thursday, july 15

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this is how we do it

Since I have been the biggest slacker this summer, I’m just now putting up the pictures of us from the Northside Fourth of July parade. Honestly I was waiting to see if I could get higher resolution copies of these pictures from the people who took them, but no luck. I apologize for the sub-par quality on them, I had to save Facebook versions which we all know have crap resolution.

In past years we just kind of crashed the parade from our friend Skip’s house since it’s right on the route, and this year was no different! We still are official members, but if you start at the beginning you have to wait in a hot parking lot for an hour before it even starts. This year we wanted to actually do something a little political so our theme was ‘Disaster at Muscle Beach’.

The muscle man that Skip hired was a HUGE hit.

The lovely Sam gettin' all gussied up, taken by Rachel Elliott

Mabel was rockin' my hat hard!

Rachel always makes me look so good!

Maya the hula hoop queen

I love that freakin' dress.

The palest person and the most tan person

Although I look like Vanna White in this one, I was actually tossing candy filled eggs at kids.

Skip and the muscle man

I don't know how David Sorcher made it look like we were all dancing in unison, but it's AMAZING!!

We had a such a fantastic time again this year and can’t wait to do it again next year! <3 Northside!!

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art is hard

Sorry I’ve been away so long dear readers, for the moment I’m done with all the big projects I’ve been working on so I will be back much more! No pictures today but I had to share this poem from my brother’s blog, Musings From An Educated Hillbilly Iconoclast. He writes compelling and hilarious articles about everything from the racial implications of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire to the history of Shurons (the glasses Buddy Holly wore), as well as some poetry of his own. There is such a great voice and humor and about his writing that really echoes his personality. This was definitely my favorite poem…

on making art
art is ethereal
it cannot be measured or quantified
you can’t weigh it by the pound
it cannot be stored in a vault
or it dies like a crimson orchid locked in a dark closet
it cannot be caught in a mason jar like a firefly on a warm june evening
it cannot be tamed
sometimes it can’t even have a name
it simply appears one morning like a baby in a basket on your doorstep
a serendipitous apparition
it comes with no instruction manual
and even if it did the manual would be wrong and clumsy
full of typos and punctuation mistakes
it would say ‘insert tab a into slot b’
but there would be no slot b
and maybe tab a would turn out to be a reuben sandwich
making art is like trying to roller skate underwater
mistakes will be made
but they may be indistinguishable from graceful acts of brief genius
and in the end
if every cell in your body is bursting with life
all the while
it makes no difference

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u.swap

I can’t believe I failed to mention the clothing swap that Molly and I are putting together! If you live near Cincy please bring yourself, some friends, and some clothes you don’t wear! It’s gonna be amazing!!

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spring grove blogger date

Often when I read the blogs of lucky girls who live in really big cities I get jealous of their ability to meet up in person with other style bloggers. So lately instead of just being envious, I’ve been chatting more with some of the lovely style bloggers of Cincinnati. I’m dying to organize some sort of big blogger picnic or something with the ladies of Cincy: Kasmira of What I Wore Today, Paige is Midwest Darling, Tamia from Style Sample, Lauren of Paper Gown Fashions, and Molly the Sister in Second-Hand Sequins.

I’ve been hanging with Molly a bunch ever since we ran into each other at my favorite bar a few months ago. We had our first blogger date at Spring Grove Cemetery on Father’s Day. I know you’re probably thinking, ‘They hung out for the first time at a cemetery? How emo.’ Actually when Spring Grove was built in the late 1800s, it was modeled after French parks from that time so it has some beautiful landscape architecture. Not to mention that it encompasses over 700 acres, including 12 ponds and a ton of really incredible Gothic Revival architecture. I remember going there with my mom a lot when I was little to watch the swans, but I actually hadn’t been back since then. We had a great time wandering around even if it was like 1000 degrees. Anyway, here are a few of the pictures we took that day. (The ones with the rounded edges were taken by Molly and her awesome friend Patricia.)

How picturesque is that?!

These cute little bridges were everywhere!

I'm still experimenting with filters...

There must have been thousands of snails in this pond, all along the entire edge.

I wasn't totally happy with my outfit, but I overslept that morning. Also I am so insanely jealous of Molly's hat.

Patricia, conqueror of trees.

Behind the scenes

They were having a horse and carriage drive at Spring Grove that day, so we got to see a little parade of people in their period clothes and carriages!

My favorite cart

How cute is this little mule!

Sorry for so many pictures, but I hope you enjoyed our field trip as much as we did!!

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eco go-go fashion show

Whew!! What an insane and spectacularly fun weekend! Northside, where my shop is, puts on this incredible Fourth of July parade and Rock N Roll Carnival so we spent the day dancing and paradin’ ourselves around. I promise some amazing pictures very very soon of those festivities.

Now that my camera has been broken it’s been really hard for me to keep up my momentum of blogging, so I apologize for the lack of posts lately. I still have this great collection of pictures from the Eco Go-Go fashion show that Chicken Lays An Egg participated in a few weeks ago and I need to let you guys see how much fun we had! Chicken Lays An Egg was the finale to the show and since the theme was eco-friendly fashion, we did a vintage wedding! Of course, we still did it in complete over the top Chicken style. Unfortunately since I was in the show I didn’t get to take any pictures during, but I hope you enjoy these!