Filed under: Fashion | Tags: Alexander Wang, Chanel, Delettrez, Fairground, Fashion, Ineke Otte, Jeffrey Campbell, Mandy Coon, Tom Binns
Today I heard on TV that consuming is fine, it’s when it becomes over-consumption that we get stuck in endless circles of wanting which leaves us feeling unhappy. Well, no object has ever made me feel unhappy (except that one time a pair of them twisted my ankle, the devils) so I’m just going to continue with this post then skip in a field of daisies surrounded by my stuff. Singing. Moving on… I’ve been watching too much of the History Channel, I needed a break, I love Picnik, I did this:
Not my greatest creation, but my collage program is hard to use if you don’t get lucky and have pictures that magically work together. Nothing will ever beat Paint on Windows…the only part of my old Sony laptop (so humorously named “PinkTaco” cause she was pink and it’s a laptop – figure it out) that I miss. You can figure out that this is a wish list, I intend to wear the sandals with tights, ya know, should I acquire them. They’d just make me so tall! Scary tall! Awesome. The rest is pretty weather appropriate for the coming months so no explanation needed. Of course good ol’ Tom Binns makes another appearance now that the pieces of his I actually like are available online; thank you, Luisaviaroma and Net-a-Porter. Alright, back to neck straining chair drawing and the History Channel.
If you read this blog fairly often (or even don’t) then it’s no secret that I am hugely influenced by Jane Aldridge’s blog Sea of Shoes and beyond that, am totally obsessed with it. (I’m so sorry I ended that sentence with “it”, Niles Crane would have my head.) Anyway last summer I saw her post entitled “‘Charity’-for Branded” in which she and her mother had seen an article in Australian Vogue about a furniture set that had been drawn on by children and they wanted to recreate it for charity. They took one of their old chairs, covered it in canvas, took it to a children’s hospital so they could all colour on it and then the money from the auction of the chair would go back to that hospital. The outcome of that chair:
The second I saw this I knew I wanted one. No, mine won’t be drawn on by children since I don’t know any and I won’t be auctioning it off…okay, I suck and they’re much more noble, I’m sorry, I just want a chair like that! Moving on, I knew it had to be a nice chair or else it wouldn’t look right, and I don’t have gorgeous chairs lying about my house that I can cover in canvas so the search began for a cheap, but workable, chair. That’s where one of my favourite stores comes into play, The Elegant Garage Sale. The title says it all, it’s basically a well put together junk store by Bayview and Eglinton, but they have some real gems there and usually at reasonable to shockingly low prices. I found a chair for $50.00, had the wood painted and it reupholstered with white canvas:
My chair!
This was all done last summer, the reupholstering done by October, and until now it has just been sitting in our living room covered in plastic. Until now because now it has a home! It will be moving out of the living room and into My living room come October (only took a year plus…) So I’ll be posting updates of how the chair is coming along here. It has to be drawn on on the seat, the sides, the back and the actual backside of the chair since the canvas extends that far. So far my sister has helped, my mum has promised to and friends who have been aware of the project since the very beginning either want to help or feel quasi-obligated, which is fine by me.
I’m not sure if a stranger would be able to tell the age of the person who has done the majority of the drawing, but I like to think they would guess a number far lower than 20. My mum says a lot of it looks exactly like the drawings I used to make when I was little which is either a compliment to my little self or an insult to my older self… So much more to draw and therefore more to come!
Warning: post contains T&A.
Tila and I have decided that we do not appreciate Toronto enough. Most people probably don’t, easier to go places you know, same old, same old – so we have been planning adventures. Our first one was supposed to be to a burlesque club called Jezebel which we found on blogTO:
The entrance is (or rather was) at the rear of the building that you can only get to by walking down an alley…so we walked down an alley…in an area we are unfamiliar with, in too high heels. I’d say our adventure was already going well.
We see the Jezebel sign and then two doors, one with a handle and one without, but with a peephole. The one with the handle is locked so I figured that it must be really cool and secretive and you have to knock on the door sans handle and then they’d check you out through the peephole before they let you in, or not if they decided you weren’t cool or mysterious enough. I obviously made Tila knock. Obviously nobody answered. Obviously…I’m insane. Anyway, we wandered across the street and what did we find? Burlesque! The burlesque gods weren’t letting us end the night without seeing some nipple tassels first. She was kind of dressed like Snow White, or how one would imagine Snow White to look were she about to dance on a bar and strip to covers of old 90s tunes. The place was called The Painted Lady and had fringe lamps and velvet couches, so that plus on-bar burlesque kind of made up for the night we had imagined, but there was no way we could take “tourist” like photos. We stuck out, and not cause of our purdy mugs.
Where we’ll try to secret-code-knock our way into next? Hopefully some place where the entrance is (or rather was) not in an alleyway.
I wear black 