Be Back Soon

Sorry, the lights have been out and the shutters down with no explanation - a combination of blogger ennui, a household full of winter sickness (I've lost my voice, and there is a river of snot flowing through the place), and the fact that we are packing up and moving house again, is to blame for the eerie silence. Be back soon, I'd estimate a bit under a week before the boxes are unpacked and the broadband is back on...

lots of love
Skye
PS. The little dude saying bye bye to the Love Shack in a rare (and shortlived) moment of toddler contemplation:

One Stop Beyond

Black tank - $20 General Pants
Black leggings - $10 Valley Girl
Blue rose print jersey 80s bomber jacket - $3.50 op-shop
Brown 90s Italian granny boots - $6 op-shop



So I'm not pregnant, not yet anyway. However, I am still working away on that little project (I was going to say "beavering away" but that seemed very wrong in a Beavis & Butthead kind of way), which has had a rather strange side effect - not on my body, but on my wardrobe. The weather here has just started to give a tiny hint of slight wintriness to come (and I mean slight - I'm sitting here in a tank top at 8pm with nary a goosebump to be seen) and I was faced with the dilemma of needing to buy winter clothes but not wanting to invest in stuff which might only get five minutes of wear if I do actually get pregnant. With the little dude I morphed from human lady to spherical whale creature in very short order - within two months people were asking me when I was due and giving me their seats on buses.


Ok, so I was more than 2 months pregnant here, but not that much more. Alarming!

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but spherical whale creatures don't wear things with structure, they wear black slouchy things made from soft and forgiving fabrics. So I have been trying to collect stuff which might kind of sort of work for a non-pregnant person (me now) or an SWC (me maybe some time this winter) and today's outfit is a classic example.



I think this blue bomber jacket might be The One I have been seeking for a while, certainly I have worn it every morning (for the cold couple of hours before the sun resumes business as usual) since I bought it. It does an ok job of covering up the SWC uniform of loose tank and leggings which I wore for an op-shopping ninja mission to the Lifeline Winter Clothing Sale this morning. Picture a small warehouse full of tables covered in mounds of clothes (all of which are $2 each), and many frenzied women rummaging and grabbing and kung-fu fighting each other for stuff, and you've pretty much got the picture. I rustled up a pile of little things for the little dude, and a large heap of stuff for myself which I then whittled down to a handful of things I'll actually wear. In a land without change rooms the SWC ninja suit was a most perfectly appropriate costume because I could just chuck on whatever I needed to try over the top of my clothes.



I managed to get out of the sale with my dignity mostly intact - there was one gnarly moment when I grabbed a jacket sleeve and actually engaged in a momentary tug-of-war with a white haired lady over a brass buttoned navy blue wool blazer which was not only size 16, but something I would never, ever wear unless by some freaky twist of fate I actually ended up as a retired admiral. At that point I made a tactical retreat, before I could get into some kind of Incredible Hulk-style roid rage and give the next aggressive granny in my path a roundhouse kick to the head with my granny boots. Which would probably have sparked an all-in brawl (tensions were running high in that room) and ended in mass carnage and blood on the floor. Much better to sit outside in the sunshine and review the fruits of my scavenging:



Meet the two dollar leather biker jacket. Battered, needs about a gallon of leather conditioner, a bit long in the arms, but two bucks! Two bucks! I'll say it again, two bucks! No weird pleated bits, odd extraneous flaps, or bulbous shoulder pads, just a classic cut black leather biker jacket.



Khaki is a colour I don't really wear on my top half (or on my bottom half since the Age of Cargo Pants has more or less ended), but sometimes a khaki shirt or jacket or whatever the hell this thing is, comes along and makes me think I need to hit the khaki more often. My eyes are hazel, half green and half brown, and at best they're a kind of swampy shade of...khaki, a bit like this washed silk shirt/jacket:



Click on this photo of me and my lunch and you can see my khaki eyes - if you can see past the antennae of my tiger prawn friend there. We stopped off at the trawlers on the way home from the Lifeline sale (and an adventure playground stop for the little dude) and in a fit of gluttony acquired some spanner crabs and a kilo of mega-prawns for lunch. Very good!


I think this might just be the greatest photo of me ever taken.


Poor spanner crabs didn't stand a chance, reduced to a bowl of shell shrapnel in minutes!

I'm not quite sure what I should do with this oversized 80s jacket. It's made out of that weird fabric that used to exist in the eighties which sort of looked a bit leathery or a bit vinyl-y but was really just a kind of heavy jersey polyester stuff. I thought I might crop it and make it into a jacket a bit like this one from Shakuhachi's A/W08 collection, but then again voluminous all-encompassing garments can be a friend to an SWC in need. What do you reckon?





Unlike my new biker jacket buddy, these leather pants are in no need of leather conditioner - they're ridiculously soft. They are in need of a bit of a clean, so I might save them and their excellent geometric flourishes for a day cold enough to actually wear them.



I only picked up this ikat bag so I had something to cart my finds around in while I browsed/skirmished, but by the time I reached the checkout I'd taken a shine to it and it's tiger-ish neutral tones so handed over an extra two dollars for it. Here it is still stuffed full of little dude stuff from the sale:



A very small stowaway might also be lurking in the bag up there - I know I'm probably jinxing myself buying anything for a little baby but could not resist this tiny wee elephant jumper.



After all, we are the crazy pachyderm people and need to indoctrinate our offspring as early as possible...



xx
Skye
PS. Guest photographer today is my magnificent husband, who toddler-wrangled while I shopped this morning, and indulged my spur of the moment crustacean cravings, and took all these photos one stop beyond so that you can actually see something for a change. Bonus: he makes me laugh (and made chicken and leek pies for dinner too)!

Order Restored

Well, in the little dude's play area, anyway!

Evidence that the love shack is not usually a giant pile of chaos and madness:



xx
Skye

Captain Hugwash & Salvador Darling

Do you ever have that feeling of being at sixes and sevens and not quite knowing which way is up?


Of not being sure from one day to the next exactly what is going on?

That is decidedly the way things are around the shack at the moment, with the movie so close now that we can smell the paint drying on the sets, but still no money in the bank - and my ongoing project to conjure up another little dude-type personage also occupying my mind. Do we have a movie or not? Am I pregnant or not? Who knows! In any case it is playing havoc with my blogging motivation, hence the prolonged radio silence around here.


I bought this preposterous eighties jacket ages ago because it amused me, and because I had grand plans to write a long and elaborate post on the imminent global "strong" shoulder pandemic, from the perspective of one who lived through the last outbreak. As a veteran of a time when t-shirts, bathrobes, school uniforms and even tank tops had great wads of shoulder padding stuffed into them, I feel like I have some useful survival tips to pass on. For a start, looking at these photos it becomes apparent to me exactly why people in the Eighties had such big hair - it was to stop their heads looking teeny tiny in comparison to their mega-shoulders!


Silk top $5 op-shop, Black satin pants $20 Bardot sale, Tony Bianco patent leather platforms $12 op-shop

Sadly this post won't actually be the magnificent shoulder boulder expose that I envisioned, the fact that my photos are decidedly crappy is a bit of a stumbling bloke*. I tried desperately to get a decent picture of this moderately "shoulder-enhanced" (yes, I actually read that in a magazine) black silk top, even resorting to huddling in our shower cubicle in an attempt to scrounge up as much light as I could (don't look too closely, there's probably mould on the grouting):



Back in the eighties I was a little surfie chick, and the big-shouldered look was at odds with my wardrobe of broderie anglaise crop tops, chambray ra-ra skirts and fluro pink short shorts. I used to cut the pads out of my tops and dresses, and keep them in a plastic bag in the bottom of my wardrobe. I sometimes see those bags of shoulder-pads in op-shops, if you see one then snatch it up, because now is the time to stockpile them again - especially the ones with velcro - as I forsee a time when the haberdashery aisles of Spotlight will be emptied of shoulder pads, and people will be hoarding them and guarding them jealously (not to mention selling them for grossly inflated prices on Ebay).



Somewhere in the gloom there, I am demonstrating exactly why the velcro shoulder pad evolved. I am wearing a top with padded shoulders, and then a jacket with padded shoulders, and the padding situation is getting out of control. The stacked pad effect results in a turtle-like neckless look, which is fine on 200 year old denizens of the Galapagos, but dire on me. If, however I unstick the velcro pads in my jacket then, hey presto, the double pad dilemma is solved!


Uh oh! I spy polterwang...

Of course the velcro pad presents quite enough difficulties of its own - they have a tendency to wander, and even escape, leaving the wearer with sadly lopsided shoulders, and sometimes a rogue third breast as well. This mutant tuxedo/biker jacket ($10 op-shop) has velcro shoulder pads, it also has:

- Fringing
- Lace
- Brocade
- Zips
- Elaborate silver buttons

In a word, insanity!


Look closely and you can see the giant fringing on the back.

In the eighties I wouldn't have worn this in ten million years, but now it's nuttiness appeals and I feel all kind of fuzzy and nostalgic when I stroke its fringing and unzip it's pointless zips. It's a funny thing how stuff can gain a warm patina of nostalgia like that - I bought this (objectively hideous) Moschino shirt the other day ($3.50 op-shop) which I would probably have burnt in disgust if it had fallen into my clutches in the nineties. The label represented all that I (in my magnificently disdainful youth) considered naff and tasteless. It's still naff and tasteless, no doubt about that, but now I find that unabashed silliness quite appealing and playful. Look at the print of slot machines full of little smiley faces and peace signs, it's like a pug puppy - so ugly that it's adorable!





On the subject of adorable things (what a segue), please enjoy these photos of the little dude in pirate mode, with hat stapled together from copy paper and cutlass cut from cardboard salvaged from our recycling bin. Such are the desperate measures I am forced to take when confronted by early morning demands for pirate hats and swords from Captain Hugwash** himself!





This is one of his other alter-egos, Salvador Darling:



This is what pirates/surrealists eat for lunch:



This is what a toddler play area looks like after a pirate/surrelist comes through on a pillaging rampage and creates an installation:



And this is what I look like trying to blog amongst the chaos:


Note rabbit-in-the-headlights look of harried blogger photographed against will by fiendish husband.

Actually our shack is usually pretty tidy and pleasant and nice, but things can degenerate rapidly with a little dude on the loose, is it any wonder I sometimes lose the will to blog!

xx
Skye

*Yes, I know it's really block, that's just one for the fans...
** Yes, I know it's really Pugwash, but Hugwash is the little dude's interpretation, and I like it!

Nope, not me!

Just a quick note (in response to a query):

No, that's not my listing on ebay for a Yeojin Bae dress, just some cheeky monkey who's nicked my photo sans permission. The hide of it!

xx
Skye
PS. Promise to post properly soon. Still waiting for the seasons to change here.
PPS. My little cease and desist notice worked a treat, and the seller has now removed the offending photo. Thank you!

A Note on Petticoats

Now it may seem that a creature like me could only have sprung fully formed from a (possibly sequinned) egg on a mountain top Monkey-style:



but in fact I do have the usual human parents including a mother who lives in Scotland and is something like Alexis Carrington Colby, but with more corgis and haggis. She was also an actual fifties girl/minx-about-town in the actual nineteen fifties and therefore has quite a store of arcane knowledge and ancient wisdom on subjects including (but certainly not limited to) the lost art of "damping down", how to ballroom dance with a Tongan prince, the correct technique for flirting your way out of a tight scrape - and the proper way to wear a fifites frock. Here is an email I received yesterday regarding that very subject - read it and learn!

Dearest Minnikin

A note re your latest blog.

The fifties look cannot be (and never was) achieved without the
assistance of at least two enormous gathered petticoats (half
petticoats) made of cotton and starched within an inch of their lives.
 And I mean startched!  Not the wussy spray on kind of starch but the
kind you soaked them in for hours, dried them on the clothes line and
then attempted to iron them.  The correctly starched petticoat would
stand on the floor by itself.

When the petticoat was showing below the hemline the discreet comment
"it's snowing down south" alerted to the wearer that there was a BIG
problem.

I had one petticoat that was broderie anglaise that used to shred the
back of my stockings when it was seriously starched and the scalloped
edge scraped against my legs.

You undoubtedly know all this petticoat 'lore' but i just thought I'd
mention it due to the pretty 50's number you were wearing.  Won't work
sans petticoats and that's that.  If you have the series 'Mad Men'
showing on TV in Oz they do the 50's look quite well, especially the
pointy bras.

Once synthetic fabrics appeared it all went to hell on a rail of
course. Sadly missed.

Needless to say this was a style (as so many are) that only teenagers
with 18 inch waists could seeriously contemplate.  Fortunately for me
I fitted into that category briefly when the petticoats were at their
zenith.

XXXX

Mu


So there you have it!

xx (or should that be XXXX)
Skye

Things That Just Don't Suit Me - Case File #1

Fifties eyelet frock - $8 op-shop
Andrea & Joen blue patent leather shoes - $10 Bondi markets
Gold plated blue bird locket - $3 garage sale



The blog world is full of girls who look just dandy in a fifties full-skirted frock. They've got the right hats and pumps and foundation garments (for nipped in waists and jaunty jutting busts), the perfect alligator bags and white gloves and cherry red-lipsticked lips. They know how to make a french roll or a chignon or whatever those things are called, and they like wearing stockings, even on sunny days.



And then there's me.

Look at me, all apologetic and schlumpy slumpy shouldered there in what is actually a perfectly pretty little dress. It's so rare these days to actually find a fifties frock in an op-shop, let alone one which is a lovely creamy beige embroidered eyelet, so I felt compelled to buy it. All the while knowing that it just wouldn't suit me at all.


Pretty!

I did try to make it work, I promise you. I put my hair up, and then had to take it down again because it was even stragglier up than down. I put some lipstick on, then wiped it off because it made me look hard and old and a little bit mean. I put on my juttingest bra, then took it off because it made me look matronly rather than jaunty, and I ransacked the back of my wardrobe for the right shoes until I was forced to give up in defeat. The best I could manage were my blue shoes, and (much as I love them) they obviously aren't quite the thing.



I could have kept working at it, tried harder, made more of an effort. I briefly considered having a look for a belt which might give my waist the vaguest hint of nipped in - but one peek in the writhing snake pit which is my belt drawer put paid to that plan. Really though I am far too lazy for outfits which are that much hard work, especially when there are so many things in my wardrobe which I love unreservedly and which feel exactly like me when I throw them on.



Our house and this dress are of just about the same vintage, so (as a last ditch effort) I thought maybe I'd take some photos inside - as though perhaps the pure fifties-ness of the shack would bring out some heretofore untapped ability in me to wear pleated skirts without looking dumpy. The photos all turned out like this, with me blurrily haunting the frame like a disconsolate ghost - condemned to roam the a halls for all eternity entirely without a waist!



There are lots of things which I am, or might be, or would like to be, or could be - but fifties girl isn't one of them. I am not demure and I am not prim, nor am I pin-up girl sexy or seamed stockings sophisticated, I do not have an hourglass figure (nor the inclination to squish myself into underwear which might give me one) and I am far too happy with the wings and eggs and sparkles I wear already - so I'm not quite sure what to do next time I find a little fifties frock hanging on the op-shop rack. What would you do, in my shoes? Leave it in the hope that a fifties girl will find it and give it a loving home before the rapacious secondhand dealers get hold of it, or take it home yourself just to look at?

xx
Skye
PS. In another bit of classic Sunday night business I bring to you this tag response. I haven't done one of these for an absolute age - this one comes courtesy of Hammie, not only brave enough to post photos of her spiral permed (and gorgeous) teenage self, but nice enough to tag me with the Q&A meme.

Here are the guidelines:

1. Respond and rework. Answer the questions on your blog, replace one question you dislike with a question of your own invention; add a question of your own.

2. Tag eight other un-tagged people.

What is your current obsession? Attempting to make another little dude-type person for our family. Although I'm trying not to obsess about it, because that's not at all helpful.

Good fika place? (That would be coffee to us non-Swedes) - Ok, I'm replacing this one because I don't drink coffee. My replacement question is:

Good yum-cha place? Ming Palace, Broadbeach.

Do you nap a lot? I often nap when the little dude naps, or at least have a little lie down and read a book. I think I should have been born in a siesta-having country, either that or someone needs to convince my fellow Australians that a siesta would really work here.

Who was the last person you hugged? The little dude, when he went to bed just now.

What’s for dinner? Sunday night is povvo night when no one can be bothered cooking, so dinner was canned tomato soup and parmesan cheese toast.

What was the last thing you bought? A mango smoothie. Last fashiony thing was a ruffly silk 80s blouse which I might have to try and post about soon. It is delicious (as the little dude would say).

What are you listening to right now? Geckos chirruping as they run across the ceiling.

What is your favourite weather? Lovely golden afternoons at any time of year.

What’s on your bedside table? Nothing, I don't have one. I just have a little stack of books under my side of the bed.

Say something to the person/s who tagged you. Hammie, hurry up and get that book deal I'm always hassling you about. The parents of the world need your guidance!

If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished anywhere in the world, where would you want it to be? Wategos Beach at Byron Bay. That's not very exotic, but it would work for us really well since it's just down the highway from here. We had our honeymoon there too.

Favourite vacation spot? Anywhere! Although we actually live in a holiday beach town now so every day is a little bit like a holiday.

Name the things you can’t live without. Are people "things"? Little dude, husband, love. Non-peopley things that I can't live without (apart from air/water etc) are black eyeliner, lip balm and books.

What is your favourite tea flavour? I don't drink tea either, but I like those little tubs of green tea ice-cream that they have at the sushi train. Those are pretty good.

What would you like to get rid of? Apart from all the terrible things like cancer and famine and religious fundamentalism of all stripes? I'd like the bull sharks in our lake to be banished so that we could play in the water there and the baby ducks wouldn't be constantly being eaten in front of the little dude.

If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go? I'd go to Scotland and see my mum.

What did you want to become as a child? An Olympic clown - aka a gymnast. The circus came to town the same week the Montreal Olympics was on TV.

What do you miss? Getting to sleep in whenever I please without any small persons demanding bananas at 5am. I'd miss the small person more than I miss the sleep though, so I can handle it.

What are you reading right now? At the moment I'm re-reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell. I want to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies next.



What's your favourite brand of jeans? I don't really have one, since I am not particularly denim-inclined.

What designer piece of clothing would you most like to own (new or vintage)? Far too many to list here. Probably all the dresses I endlessly pored over in my Women's Weekly Fabulous Fashion Exhibition book - pieces from Vionnet, Balenciaga, Chanel, Schiaparelli and so on.

If you could go back in time and talk to your 17 year old self, what would you say? I don't think I could stand to talk to myself at 17. The drama! The teenage Romeo & Juliet style romance! The attitude (I got on detention for "flouncing" at a teacher once, I wish I still had that detention slip, I'd frame it)! There would be no point talking to me to try and impart my ancient wisdom either, I absolutely positively knew everything when I was 17 and no one could tell me otherwise.

This is my question:

Dogs or cats? (this particular question led to some rather heated discussion at our little dinner party last night). My answer is cats because they are silly and funny and keep themselves nice.

I am tagging: I'm a bit late with this, so no doubt every other person in the world has already been tagged with it. I'll tag Claerwen, I think!

Hippety Hop

Black jersey pants - 50cents op-shop
Black eighties top - $3.50 op-shop
Pink and green tie dye scarf - $4 op-shop
Converse Chucks - $4 op-shop (new)

This is my ninja mama suit, perfectly designed for sneaking round our yard under cover of darkness, impersonating the Easter Bilby and hiding teeny weeny chocolate eggs for the little dude to find. Black is obviously essential for stealth missions, but any self-respecting bilby needs a sugar hit of easter egg pink and green and in between.


Just about cool enough to actually wear a cotton scarf without expiring and perspiring.

Not that there wasn't a mountain of sugar already hanging around the love shack this weekend. For a start I made about a bazillion Honey Joys for the little dude's kindy Easter party, with speckled candy coated chocolate eggs on top (a semi-pitiful attempt at getting them to look like little nests, rather than just sticky corn flake conglomerations).



My brand new op-shopped Chucks added a bit more sickly sweetness to the sugar high. I know that messing with the classics is rarely a good idea, and I'm sure these are considered deeply uncool - but even in ninja mode I need some kooky colour and pattern to keep me hippety hopping happily.



Do you see the little pink bunnies peeking out there?

Anyway, this is just supposed to be a quickie post to say hello and wish everyone a lovely lazy long weekend, so I'll go and leave you all guzzling your stockpiles of chocolate in peace. Let this be a warning though, this is what can happen when you have too much sugar coursing through your bloodstream (I'm sure by 10am today I already had at least 75% sucrose running through my veins):





xx
Skye
PS. Here's my little bunny dude ready for some serious egg hunting action, closely followed by some serious egg chomping action, followed by many hours of chocolate-fuelled crazy toddler antics.