In Salem with the rents
Warning: there will be a lot of photos in this post because I am super proud of this skirt I made and I’m in love with the jacket that I bought from American Apparel with this money. I feel like this is slowly developing into a sewing blog, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
The skirt is made from a sparkly gold and black stretch knit, and the sweater is houndstooth jacquard. The skirt was fairly simple to make; just an elastic waistband and rolled edge hem, but I’m proud of it nonetheless. I’m wearing a hand-me-down Le Tigre tee shirt from Eliz and saddle shoes from Etsy.
I want you to fully embrace the beauty of this jacket, so I have presented you with multiple close-ups for your viewing pleasure.
I spun around to show off my circle skirt and ended up having way too much fun.
To sew my first dress, I modified the Selfish Seamstress’s Coffee Date Dress. (The first link is her blog’s download page and the other is the pattern itself.) I took out the ruffle and gathered the waist instead of sewing darts because the darts made it too small on me. Also, I have to use Flickr to upload my photos now because, with the new Tumblr layout, the quality of photos inserted into text posts is painfully low. Sorry for the little boxes on your dashboard :/ The photos are always better quality on my actual blog.
I used a plain cotton fabric with black plaid lines. I wanted to look a tad little-kiddish so I wore floral print tights from Pink Zone in San Diego and saddle shoes from Etsy. The big cashmere sweater from the thirties used to be my mother’s; she bought it at a thrift store in the seventies! It actually has a detachable mink collar that would be more appropriate for a formal occasion. I got the plastic beads from a thrift store.
This was meant to be portrait rather than landscape but it captures my room very well.
It’s been a while since I last wore saddle shoes.
I leftover fabric from this skirt to make this bow. I’ll have you know, it is very difficult to take a photo of your own hair! I suppose I could have taken the bow out of my hair first, but that option didn’t occur to me.
The second thing I made on my new sewing machine was a super simple skirt with an elastic waistband. I’d love to give credit to the blog tutorial I used to make it, but I didn’t save the link and I can’t find it again. The pattern was very simple, however: sew two rectangular strips of fabric together, hem the bottom, fold over the top and sew in an elastic waistband. It sits low on my hips so I wore it with a sweater tucked out. (These photos were taken pre-Nemo.)
F21 vest, shirt my mom bought, AA socks and thifted shoes.
I was distracted by the elementary school bus driving by.
I also sewed myself a dress today! I’ll have to post pictures of it when I wear it.
I was eating a cheeseburger in Provincetown this summer with my parents when a young woman with a thick French accent asked if she could take my picture. I said sure, and she explained to me that she and the man who was with her were traveling around New England, looking at all of the different styles of clothing and compiling them on their blog, People Are Strange. About six months passed, but sure enough, they posted the pictures they took of me that day.
The caption:
Robe H&M, petit sac, chaussures et lunettes noires font leur petit effet. Cette jeune vacancière bostonienne de 15 ans nous dit que pour trouver des jeunes stylés et de belles fringues à Boston, il faut aller à la Newbury street. La vérité sort de la bouche des enfants. On ira demain.
I don’t know French, but I do know it’s something about my recommendation that the two of them visit Newbury Street in Boston (they had asked about the best shopping spots). You can see the full blog post here, and of course all credits go to People Are Strange.
P.S. I had just bought that houndstooth dress from H&M for $10 and was extremely pleased that somebody noticed it on the first day I wore it.
For Hanukkah, I got a Singer Stylist sewing machine and I’ve spent a couple weeks teaching myself how to use it.
The first thing I made, aside from little things like scrunchies, was a circle skirt using this tutorial from Dana Made It. I used an ugly markdown fabric ($4 for two yards!) from the mill store because I didn’t want to waste nice fabric on the very first thing I sewed.
It’s winter in New England, meaning that the sun, which barely peeps out from behind the clouds during the day, sets at 4:30, hence the dark photos taken ~4:00.
I wore an Abbey Road tee-shirt, a sweater Eliz gave me, thrifted shoes and black tights that were subsequently ripped to shreds.
I made a hair bow out of the same fabric I used for the skirt, but it’s hard to see since it blends in with the color of my hair.
I have about half a yard of fabric left; any ideas on what to do with it?
I pixelated the background to spare your eyes from the pigsty that is my room.
My sister got me this awesome shirt that has JFK with the Ziggy Stardust lightning bolt and “CHA CHA CHANGES” underneath. I think it’s pretty perfect but my freshman year history teacher was the only person who seemed to “get” it.
Those are actually pants, not a skirt, that I got at a thrift store. They’re transparent so I have to wear thick leggings underneath them. Thrifted shoes and F21 vest.
This is a very schlumpy sweater, but isn’t the transition period from fall to winter generally a pretty schlumpy time of year? I got it at the Salvation Army for $2? $3? American Apparel skirt and hair thing, UO leggings, thrifted shoes.
I know it’s bLURRY MY HAND WAS SHAKING I’M SORRY.
I really like the sound these shoes make when I walk, so you may now enjoy the fine visual masterpiece I crafted while getting the mail.
A+ shoe/sock combo, methinks.
![wirdyblog:
wirdy lyfe
subject: abigail
location: brooklyn flea, ny
notes: from small town in massachusetts that borders my small town in massachusetts. still in high school. the fact that someone this young and this cool lives where i grew up is astounding and inspiring. i think i am about to cry… *wipes single tear with kleenex brand tissue [all rights reserved]*
hey look, it’s me!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdzahu5iVW1ruf419o1_1280.jpg)
hey look, it’s me!wirdy lyfe
subject: abigail
location: brooklyn flea, ny
notes: from small town in massachusetts that borders my small town in massachusetts. still in high school. the fact that someone this young and this cool lives where i grew up is astounding and inspiring. i think i am about to cry… *wipes single tear with kleenex brand tissue [all rights reserved]*
here, enjoy this photo of me from two weeks ago:
cringe-worthy quality but it was around 4:30 and the sun was setting (good lord!)
I wore these shoes (photo stolen from this post).
I haven’t thought about writing or reading or being creative or just about anything for the past couple weeks. A summary of my thoughts:
- I’m tired.
- I’m hungry.
- Ouran High School Host Club
- I need music to listen to.
- I have APUSH reading to do
- yet I don’t have any motivation to do it
#typicalteenager #thishasbeenapointlesspost
I say “acquisitions” rather than “purchases” because my friend Sam gave me this sweater after her sister shrunk it in the wash.
(Something needs to be done about my room. It looks like it belongs to a five-year-old.)
One of the teachers who runs my school’s GSA said this sweater should be its mascot. Surprisingly, nobody at school said anything negative about the fact that I wore a rainbow sweater. In middle school I got called gay for wearing this shirt:
Pink Floyd shirts were subject to ridicule as well.
And, a blurry picture of my new shoes because it was dark and my hands were shaky and I was too lazy to adjust the shutter speed. They’re from Holland and they’re very ugly but they remind me of Lisa Simpson’s shoes.
Maybe I’ll be Lisa Simpson for Halloween. Either that, or David Bowie…
can we just take a minute to appreciate the fact that i have no life?
So, I took these pictures like three weeks ago but I’m posting them now, mainly because I wore this again last Friday and thought I looked like shit but I was bombarded with compliments the moment I stepped foot in school. Nobody says anything when I think I look cute, but people always comment when it’s the other way around. Maybe they know when you need to hear it.
I replaced my face with Miranda Cosgrove’s because mine looked bad.
I did that weird thing with the braids that everyone has been doing. A teacher asked me if I was going for a witchy look, what with the pentacle/pentagram, long, flowing garments, and braids on top of the head. I can’t remember if that was deliberate or not. The white dress is from UO and I think the black dress is too. My mom bought me the black one as a present last year after I got stitches in my forehead.
hiding-behind-tree.jpg
I liked the way leaves and things kept getting caught in the fringe.
The best things about “conversation pieces” are, by far, the conversations that happen as a result of them — go figure! My mom picked me up after Student Government the other day and I was in my normal surly four o’clock mood. I can’t handle four o’clock. I never have and I don’t think I ever will. We swung by Starbucks so she could get a coffee and I flopped into one of their big comfy chairs.
This is what I was wearing:
You’ve seen this dress and bracelet combo before but this time I wore my smiley face medallion.
Anyway, this old man in the chair next to me leaned over and said, “I like your happy face.”
I thanked him, and he continued, “When my daughter was little, she had one of those happy face stamps. So I woke up one morning, and I looked at my arm, and I had little happy faces all up and down my arm because she had sneaked into my bedroom in the night.”
“That’s cute,” I said.
He went on, “So years later, we had roses on the wall, on the wallpaper, and I was looking at them, and I saw that in the tiny spaces between the roses there were little happy faces.”
I asked him how old his daughter was, and he said, “She’s 39, poor thing.”
To supplement this unsatisfactorily pointless story, I have attached a picture of me spinning around barefoot because I am just a juvenile.
I went back-to-school shopping at the outlet mall with my mom a couple weeks ago to buy socks and things like that. We went into Journey’s and I realized that it had been well over a year since I bought a pair of unworn shoes, not from Etsy and not from a thrift store (aside from my track sneakers, but I don’t think those count), so I decided to get a pair of Vans.
Here’s what I wore them with:
Abigail awkwardly stands in front of a bush blog 2k12. Vintage romper, Eliz got me that sweater, AA socks, F21 belt. I feel like all of my features are scrunched into the middle of my face whenever I wear my hair pulled back. See, there’s my nose and mouth and eyes in the middle of my face, and then my huge cheeks and 5head surrounding them. WHY IS MY FOREHEAD SO BIG?
