Pale Pink Pants Plus Pestilent Plague

Pale pink silk eighties track pants - $6.00 op-shop

Grey marle ribbed top - $2 op-shop

Grey marle beaded top - $70 Sass & Bide warehouse sale

Grey distressed leather Mogil boots - $8 op-shop

I'm looking a bit sheepish in that photo, and rightly so - after all, there are silk pants, and then there are silk tracksuit pants. With fleecy lining. Real eighties fleecy lining, which feels so deliciously warm and snuggly (there's the trap), and looks so decidedly daggy.

Tracksuit + bling = ghetto dagulous?

Perhaps I could try passing it all off as "sport luxe" or one of those other made up fashion genres that magazines come up with - except that I think that might only apply to cashmere tracksuits for wearing on private jets. Not fleecy lined silk tracky daks worn to little dude swimming lessons.

Hazy head disappearing in the fog.

In my defence I have been in the grip of yet another winter virus, which has left me with a head full of static, a runny nose, and no voice. It is quite difficult to wrangle a truculent newly four year old boy/ferret when lacking the power of speech, far more than enough to drive a woman straight into the seductive fleece lining of a pair of slouchy old pants!

This photo above is one of those poses which looks like the posee (poseur?) is holding in a desperate need for a pee, but I'm not sure how to describe the one below. Although it has the look of one of my ill-starred attempts at creative photo composition, I think it is actually just a misadventure with the self-timer.

The living embodiment of slump.

Now I'm going to bed to do more snuggling in welcoming warm fleece (blanket not pants) and try to shake this damn virus once and for all!

xx

Skye

ps. Also fleecy, The Gruffalo:

Four!

Seventy mini cupcakes baked (and then eaten), sixty satay sticks marinated and barbecued, fifteen loot bags distributed, one voice lost (mine, from talking to thirty five guests), umpteen presents ripped open with gusto, no rain (thank god), at least forty bashes to beat my handmade monster pinata to death, one kilo of lollies released to the waiting horde of kidlets below, and four magnificent years of little dude on the planet!

And now everyone needs at least thirty minutes of nap time, most of all me.

xx

skye

Crunch

Just some wholly gratuitous little dude photos, to blow any lingering wisps of scariness away with the breeze...

xx

Skye

PS. He'd never seen autumn leaves like that before, he almost cried when the council took them all away, and put an end to the cavorting and underfoot crunching.

Afterlife

Vintage cream cotton coat dress (early 70s) - $10 op-shop

French Connection ribbed tights - $10 on clearance

Grey marle top - $2 op-shop

Brown leather lace up tall boots - via Duo

When I got up and got dressed in this outfit (and walked, or more precisely, strutted around in it all day) I was feeling kind of late sixties/early seventies rock wife. In my delusional mind's eye I was looking kind of rock wife as well, in my utterly beautiful intricate indian cream coat.

I think this was someone's wedding coat once upon a time.

I continued tripping along in this happy delusion right up until I sat down and had a look at my photos, and realised that I wasn't channelling Marianne Faithfull at all. Quite to the contrary, it seemed I was possessed rather more of a Restless Ghost of Victorian Orphan Thrown in A Well kind of vibe.

See what I'm saying.

So I'm walking/strutting around all "I've been to see the Maharishi and he's so groovy" and actually I look like I've just crawled out of my watery grave and am about to suck your soul out through your nostrils. Awesome!

Sadako/Skye, it's all the same.

You know you have to show someone else this blog post now, or I'll be slithering out of your screen and scaring you senseless soon, so very soon. You didn't really think a little thing like the death of the VHS format would stop me and my well-dwelling sisters on our reign of slippery terror, did you?

Probably I shouldn't wear the coat again until I get my fringe trimmed, I'm not going to stop wearing it completely though - even if I'm inadvertently terrifying the locals with my Sadako style. It's just too damn pretty.

A quick word on the boots - they were a gift/freebie/whatever-you-want-to-call-it from Duo Boots. I don't accept many of these offers, (due mostly to a combination of aspirations to integrity, and a dash of apathy), but I was actually pretty intrigued by these. Their whole schtick is that they do a calf width as well as a foot size, which interested me because, although I've never had trouble with calf fit, I do have short hobbit legs which often results in a sort of gumboot effect with knee high boots. Anyway these are lovely, not at all gumbooty, and avoid obvious hobbitishness - although I'm not sure slimy undead well-dweller is an actual step up from hobbit on the scale of fantastical beasties!

xx

Skye

PS. This photo is one of my ever ill-conceived attempts at "artistic" posing. When I took it I had some demented plan to crop it down and turn it into one of those Just Leave Me Alone paparazzi blocking shots. This was all part of the rock wife delusion thing. Of course it actually turned out like I'm trying to stop the flash crumbling me into dust or capturing my true ectoplasmic nature or whatever.

PPS. Don't watch this in an empty house. I know I always say that, but seriously a possum just walked across the roof above me and I almost expired from pure terror.

Flutterby

Is a twelve dollar thirties organdie dress from the op-shop considered a bargain if I will never, ever wear it?

Does it become a folly to buy a frock just to look at? Because in this dress I look like a sausage squished into a dangerously thin pink membrane of casing, threatening to split the seams and ooze out unctuously at any minute. Even at the thinnest I have ever been in my entire adult life I would have looked like a 100% pork chipolata in this thing.

This was a dress for a butterfly of a girl (or perhaps it was just sewn from butterfly wings, such is its brittle fragility), flitting and flirting and catching the breeze. Now it's here in my caterpillar cocoon, looking a little nibbled around the edges, and wrinkled around the ruffles...

...yet I love, love, love it. Love it to look at, and maybe that's enough to keep an old frock happy when its flitting days are long gone, and the butterfly girl too.

Twelve buck bargain? Yeah, I think so.

xx

Skye

PS. hello to anyone who drifts over on the breeze from Her Library Adventures!

Small Greys

Luella catseye sunglasses - sale on Asos (birthday money)

Grey marle ribbed singlet - 50 cents op-shop

Grey Gorman farmer pants - $5 Bondi markets

Grey leather flats - $17.50 Sportsgirl clearance table

Turquoise ring - Bondi markets about nine years ago, have no idea what paid.

Sass & Bide beaded top - $70 warehouse sale (reduced from A LOT)

This post has been hanging around unpublished for about a month due to my abject laziness, pure and simple. Back then it was autumn, there were leaves on the ground , my fringe was raging out of control, and I was possessed of a frenzied desire for coloured beadwork - busily browsing ebay for Zulu bracelets, and Navajo necklaces, and digging my old Masai wedding necklace out of the attic to hang on the wall.

Do you have these fleeting personal crazes, arising mysteriously from parts unknown? Sometimes I am quite sure why I suddenly want some esoteric thing - I've seen a photo (of anything, really) or someone wandering around looking fabulous - but often this stuff seems to emerge from the murky depths of my subconscious with no discernible point of inspiration. What the hell goes on in there, in amongst the floating bits of nostalgia, swathes of trivial facts, to-do lists involving bananas and bill-paying, swirling emotion and god knows what else?

I'd actually forgotten about the way there are distinct seasons in Melbourne, one day it's autumn with piles of leaves on the streets and more drifting down leisurely with the breeze, the next day the trees are bare, the magical council vacuum cleaner truck has sucked the footpaths clean, and the icy chill of winter has arrived. That just doesn't happen in Bondi, where there is a summer and a winter, but a long and winding transition between both, and Burleigh Heads where it is either summer (for most of the year) or then an ill-defined autumn-ish season in the middle. I'd only just got used to autumn with its layers and leaves, and suddenly we're smack bang in boots and coats territory and a scarf is a necessity for neck warming, not just artful accessorising.

All pointed shoes suffer this fate on my feet: scuffed.

The sight of my sock-free feet in this photo is actually making me feel cold right now, my toes are curling up into my woolly tights in sympathy! It must be time to turn up the central heating (or break out the love that must not speak its name - ugg boots), lest I end up like one of those leathery frozen ten thousand year old people dug out of glaciers in the Alps. Looking at my shrivelled hand down there, I suspect I am well on my way to my very own National Geographic cover story...

Astonishing Preserved St Kilda Housewife Dug from Bog.

xx

Skye

PS. Never far away!