I have been a bad, bad blogger. I won’t bore you with the excuses; suffice to say, I have been so bogged down with work that I almost saved the draft of this blog post as ‘conferencepaper_v3’. Even though it feels like it’s all been work… it’s not all been work. (I would damn well hope so, considering how little I’ve produced.)
ANYWAY. No one cares about that (I’m boring myself just thinking about it), so! It’s almost coat season in Sydney and all my coats are ready to play. Too ready, really, as it’s actually a tiny bit too hot for my heavier coats, but any drop in temperature makes me want to take them out for a stroll.
I am wearing a pale silvery-blue dress from Fleur Wood (more detailed pictures of the dress here and here), which I think bounces with the grey in the coat quite nicely. I like how it peeks out at the neckline, though I do wish the snap buttons weren’t so very large and bulky… it disturbs the line a bit. But it’s not too obvious, so I suppose I’ll survive. (Or snip the button off, bwahahaha.) The blue suede shoes from Midas — you know, the ones to which I added a burgundy bow from scraps of bias tape. They’re never the right shade of blue, really; they’re always too bright or too warm or too cool a blue for whatever piece I’m trying to match it with at the time, but they seem to work when seen from far away. And when you can’t see much blue (like in this outfit). I find that it’s easier to co-ordinate hopelessly non-matching shades of the same colour by keeping them very very far apart. No one notices that the colours clash when one shade is on your hair and the other is on your feet. Very tricksy.
My stockings are cream with a very subtle mauve stripe. They’re called ‘Style Me Pretty’ and were from Alannah Hill’s Spring/Summer 10 collection. I’ve almost thoroughly trashed this pair, but I’ve still got a spare in pristine condition. Almost too scared to use the spare because I don’t want to ruin them. I get ridiculously attached to my clothes. I find that these stockings are perfect when mediating colour clashes, too — the Fleur Wood dress and the shoes really don’t go together at all unless I have pink-y pale hosiery.
My coat is from Alannah Hill’s Autumn/Winter 10 collection and is called ‘The Waiting Game’. It also came in a charcoal (you can see it here) but I have a Thing for red coats. I think it stems from having played the Carmen Sandiego computer games a lot. She had the most amazing red outfit in the universe.
…And I’ve just looked at the link to the charcoal coat and realised that my coat is officially orange, not red. Which has just blown my mind, because I’ve always thought of it as red. I suppose it’s a very bright, warm red. Like what the red Crayola pencil should have been, really. (You know. There’s the orange-red pencil, which is indisputably orange with bits of red mixed in; there’s the red-orange pencil, which looks like fire trucks and McDonald’s and Coca Cola and Maltesers packets and is indisputably red, and then there’s the plain red pencil which suddenly looks suspiciously plummy burgundy, because everyone knows that red = McDonald’s and fire trucks. I like the red now but it certainly didn’t look like a proper red when I was younger.)
The coat isn’t only red (that’s right, I’m going to insist it’s red), it has a bow. And bows make everything amazing. True fact.
You can’t really see the bow on the coat in these shots, can you? I think the bow is the Crowning Detail of Awesome. I remember seeing it in store and dying. And then trying it on and dying of heat exhaustion, because it was warm inside the store and I had just been walking at a fairly quick pace for half an hour. While wearing a leather jacket. I was almost put off this coat because it made me feel as though I had just donned a furnace but, thankfully, (ir)rationality prevailed and I am the very happy owner of one of the most twee coats in existence.
Look on the bow and say that it is not (one of) the most twee things in existence:
Okay, that’s not the clearest shot but the rest of the photos tend to feature me being a bit of a dork so… it’s this one or nothing. And, please ignore the fact that my beret looks like a giant melted marshmallow. I’m not quite sure how it ended up looking like that.
Speaking of marshmallows, do you know what is amazingly amazing? Marshmallows melted on chocolate chip cookies. Pop some chocolate chip cookies in the oven (toaster oven is best, really) and top each one with a marshmallow. Heat till marshmallow is all gooey goodness. Gobble. Enjoy. It’s like s’mores for lazy people.
strangely incoherent love letters 