Package from Arika!

Presents from Arika!

I got an awesome package from Arika a couple weeks ago. This included some great tea samples, including the tea flowers that open in hot water, which I love!

Arika also included scented candle wax thing in Sweet Orange and Chili Pepper, which Ansell is a huge fan of.

I LOVED the jewelry Arika sent me too. The sparrow necklace is gorgeous and fits in perfect with my upcoming fall wardrobe. It’s a little long so I’m going to add a loop further down the chain to shorten it. I also received stunning chandelier earrings that I wore to the 1920s party I went to. It worked great with my outfit and I really like how it looks with my short hair.

I miss my girls!

And, of course, I received some make-up. The lip color is nice but I have to be careful what I wear it with since it pales my lips out a lot. The eye shadows are great! A lot are from the Egyptian Treasure collection from Meow Cosmetics, which is a fav collection of mine. Again, these samples are perfect for the upcoming fall. Arika has great timing!

I am super happy and pleased with my package! Who doesn’t like a fun package, especially when it’s from someone who is so in tune with your likes and dislikes?

Thanks Arika!

x o x o

Playing with the new hair!

 I have been playing around with ways to style my new hair.

I did a style where it was lightly curled. Just enough to give it body and have it look a little fun. This is the first time I wore my bangs side swept and I like it a lot.

A little note, I look great with high-necked tops now. The short hairstyle gives my wardrobe a completely new look, which is great!

This is one where it’s completely straight and blunt. I didn’t even turn it under at the tips. I wore it with a tux shirt, mini skirt and wide belt. The look was great although the picture turned out crappy.

This is the first time I really played with doing a masculine look and I like it a lot.

Out for a picnic! Tight spiral curls everywhere! This took me a full hour. Which is ridiculous considering how short the hair is. Next time I’m going to do leave-in rollers. However, it looked great and Ansell loved it. I definitely want to do it again but leave it overnight with more product. The curls dropped and by the end of the day it looked like the first picture in this blog.

Again, I feel like the hairstyle gives my wardrobe new life and makes everything a little more edgy.

PS Check out those shoes. I love them.

Annnnnnnd Ansell, who always looks great. He made us a fantastic pasta salad for lunch and we had a picnic at the Georgetown Waterfront. Ansell is my number 1 inspiration for wardrobe style right now. He ALWAYS looks fashionable and classic but definitely has his own personal look.

I’m hoping to do some more styles with my hair in terms of braids and other fun. For now, I’m enjoying how light and easy it is!

Art Festival in Old Town

Last Sunday while Ansell while out getting drunk with his college program on a winery tour I was enjoying the big Art Festival in Old Town.






I started the day off with brunch at my new favorite brunch place Bread & Chocolate. For $15 you get tea or coffee, juice, a breakfast entree, and a little basket of baked treats from their bakery. I really love the omelette there. It's delish!

The Art Festival was huge and extended several blocks down King St and traffic was blocked off. They had various different artists but I was only impressed/interested in about 5 of them. 

However, I was really glad that we get to have events like this and throughly enjoyed myself!

By the way, I looked fab with slicked back hair, a fedora, and red lips (although mostly worn off after brunch). :)

New hairstyle!

On September 1^st I went to Lorraine Aprile Salon to get my long blonde hair chopped off. I was super excited! I was bored by my long locks and ready for something new.

In short (pun intended), I wanted a modern 1920s bob.

A true 1920s bob was very short, cut bluntly across the cheekbones with thick bangs cut ending above the eyebrows and symmetrical all the way around.

I wanted my hair to end a little longer, before my chin and my bangs to fall a bit over my eyebrows. I used Katie Holmes bob pictures as reference. (Cutting her hair short was the best thing Katie H ever did.)

This length:

These bangs:

Most importantly I wanted razor cut ends to add some texture.

My stylist was Kris and she knew exactly what I wanted. She had plenty of experience with retro hairstyles and she was great to work with. They also gave me free wine so that was a bonus. Even better, the first cut was half off, so I ended up only paying $33 for it!

This is the end result! I love it!

It’s super easy to deal with. Quick to blow dry and I only need to use a round brush to get the look. I can’t wait to play with it and see what else I can do. :)

 

Edible Worlds by Christopher Boffoli

Christopher Boffoli – Edible Worlds

Once again owning an exotic pet was proving to be
nothing but trouble.

In New York Ansell and I visited several galleries. My favorite by far was the Winston Wachter Gallery, which had a solo show for Christopher Boffoli’s Edible Worlds.

It didn't matter how much overtime was needed. The pancake
producers were determined to catch up with their
orders before brunch.

“For this show, Boffoli features a series of crisp and vividly colored images. The viewer becomes voyeur in each captured moment and is privy to scenes of work, play, and conversation. Snapshots of saturated color and massive food items allow the miniatures who stand in Boffoli’s surreal scenes to come to life.

With his history, no one would have believed it was an accident.

This juxtaposition of scale has been inspired in party by the heavy use of this visual device in films and television from the 70’s and 80’s and the 18^th century fable, Gulliver’s’ Travels. A wide range of human interaction is captured throughout this series within a dizzying array of produce and prepared staged foods.”

Blackberry CSI

I loved this show and its art. I thought the images were fun and the little one-sentence stories added a whole story to the images. I also liked how colorful and fanciful the images were.

This was my favorite one, for obvious reasons! It was also Ansell's favorite because it involved scuba diving.

Eric always had a healthy amount of anxiety before a deep tea dive.

Sock Bun Tutorial!

Sock Bun Tutorial

To celebrate my last days of long hair I thought I would post a hair tutorial for a hair style I wear frequently.

This tutorial uses a sock to get the perfect bun. It's a quick and easy up-do that looks great with almost no effort. 

This look is very versatile. You can wear this bun smooth for a chic night out, a little messy for a more casual look, or plain for a simple yet sophisticated work look. 

Hope you enjoyed my tutorial! Now, go and give this a try!

PS You can see a bigger video version of this either by clicking the full screen version or just going directly to the YouTube video here.

NYC - Day 4 Friday 8/17

Last Day!

On our last day, we said goodbye to our nice Harlem apartment, dropped our stuff off at the luggage-holding store near Penn Station, and set out to Soho.

 The Soho area is pretty cool. It had some really interesting stores that I have never seen anywhere else. One of which was called Evolution and had everything to do with animals, insects, and humans. So, it had fossils, every kind of beetle, moth, and butterfly imaginable, bones, globes, rocks, etc. It was such a cool place and won Ansell and I’s best store in New York award.

Soho also had a little shop called Mini Cupcakes. It is exactly how it sounds. I chose the Cookie Dough one although I think the Smores would have been fun as well. It’s $1 for one, $3 for 3 and I think $5 for 6. The next time I might just get all the flavors to try it out.

These cupcakes are so small that even 6 of them probably wouldn’t add up to a full cupcake. :)

We also visited this fantastic boutique hotel/restaurant called Isola. The restaurant part is like an indoor/outdoor space. The walls and ceiling are all glass and they incorporate a lot of greenery and open space so it feels like the outdoors but temperature controlled. Ansell and I really loved it and we spent some time enjoying a drink (beer for Ansell and tea for me) while doing some quiet reading. 


I really appreciate when places allow us just to hang out and sip drink quietly while reading. The wait staff didn’t bug us much and didn’t pressure us to buy more stuff.

This is what we get in Portland.
Yeah...it's hard to top.

For lunch, we passed a cabaret place doing a $10 lunch deal and took advantage. We actually got a lot of food and it was pretty good quality for $10. It was obviously a “get-them-in-the-door” tactic though so you could meet the girls inside. I wasn’t that impressed though. If I wanted to see bored attractive girls dancing to music I’d go to a club, at least there the girls would be having fun. Besides when you used to live in Portland, OR and got to see fire dancers and gymnastics just taking off your clothes isn’t very impressive, just boring. So we ate cheaply and left.

These are all paintbrushes stuck in clear gesso.

We rounded out the day by meeting up with another of Ansell’s friends, Mitch, who is in art school and visited the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA. We timed it to coincide with their free entry period and it was packed. Despite that we had a nice time looking around. I’m not a big fan of modern art and I really appreciated Mitch filling in some of the back-story and interesting details about certain paintings, styles of art, and artists. I also appreciated how low-key he was. He never came across as those artists who are so into themselves and what they’re doing that they’re a chore to be around. Instead he was refreshingly honest and down-to-earth. You can check out his artwork at www.mitchpaster.com.

After that we went to a cool divey diner and I got way too many pancakes. I downed those pancakes like I hadn’t eaten pancakes in months, which is kinda true.

Full on pancakes & happy from our time in New York we caught the bus home to DC.

We had such a wonderful time, Ansell got to visit some old friends and I met new ones, we saw amazing things, ate lots of food, drank lots of tea and overall had a great vacation. I can’t wait to go back!

See you soon New York!