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Tomorrow is February 29. A special day in the Gregorian Calendar and a sort of miniature Epoch, coming only every 4 years and marking a . Leap years are very special years. They are years for women to make the first move, Olympic years and big celebrations for Leaplings. A leap year and the date that makes it leap is calendarial occasion.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about life choices and directions. Making plans and goals, getting a delicious feeling of organisation and preparedness and it seems that for me, this minor historic date can be a marker for a new start in life. A new New Years, if you will. The official New Years come so fast after Christmas and is such a whirl of parties and recovery, getting back to work and making impossible plans that it become too cluttered and stopped being a proper celebration.
By February 29 you should have started and maybe failed some New Years Resolutions. You can set new, more realistic goals for the year. You have had time to take stock and take action. February 29 is the New Year we need for the big decisions.
We often hear about three year plans and five years plans. Why not a 4 year plan, marked by the arrival of Feb 29? Makes sense to me. A natural date that occurs so rarely you must pay attention to it . A finite end point for a project. If you haven’t got it done by then it’ll be another 4 years and big pile of fail.
So I have decided to make February 29 the new New Year and I have decided to set myself some goals of where I would like to be by the time the next Feb 29 rolls around. Not getting into specifics, they’re along the lines of:
1. Save for a house deposit and have purchased my first property.
2. Get a new job. (There are quite a few specifics to this one).
3. Reach an intermediate level of German language skills and finally button down some basic French.
4. Start my career as an investor.
5. Build a wardrobe of beautiful clothes that I love and am proud of.
Dear Harpers Bazaar and Vogue Australia Oscar coverage on twitter,
Love it. Keep up the good work. You made my Monday much easier to deal with.
Regards,
B
P.S. My favourite dresses would have totally clashed if they’d been in a photo together.
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A few weeks ago I spotted this t-shirt on Made in the Now and I was going to include it in a Five For Friday but then I got thinking about the subject matter, so it gets a whole blog.
A poll of 15,000 people were asked ‘what makes it great to be an Aussie’. According to those 15,000 people, it goes something like this:
Freedom
Beer
Lifestyle
Sun
Mateship
Beaches
Weather
The people
(Being an) Aussie, and
Barbecues
Made in the Now tells us there was ‘daylight’ between the first and second answers, which is comforting. It’s good to know that as much as we love a joke, deep down we as a nation have our priorities sorted. The rest of the answers are really about the lifestyle we’re lucky to enjoy. The outdoors, spending time with friends, feeling comfortable wherever you are in the country.
Sometimes I do wonder why we go anywhere else...
I got thinking about what I think makes it great to be an Aussie. I agree with freedom, the weather, the people and the lifestyle. I’d round out my top 10 list with:
And actually, come to think of it, I’d round out my list with ‘being an Aussie’.
So that’s my top ten ‘What make it great to be an Aussie’.
Jane actually posted a very similar blog on Australia Day - sorry for copy-cating Jane.
What would be on your list?
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is widely regarded as the first classic Australian play and proves this by having been on high school drama curriculum for at least 30 years. The play centres around two cane cutters, Roo and Barney, who every year for the past 17 years travel down to Melbourne during the lay-off to party hard with their girls in the city. This year – the 17th year - is different, however. One of the girls, Nancy, has just got married and everything seems to be off-kilter and not as it should be.
I had never seen any production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll before so had no expectations or comparision. I had to say though, judging by the audience response, this will be a very successful production. Every actor did a sterling job. Alison Whyte as Olive, Roo's long-standing girl carried the mood of the play from first steps through to the bitter end. Helen Thomson provided almost every laugh as the refined Pearl Cunningham persuaded to stay in place of Nancy and made me think of a cross between Meryl Streep's Julia Child in Julie and Julia and Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances. Yes, that is a compliment somehow. Steve Le Marquand and Travis McMahon as Roo and Barney were nothing if not up to the eyeballs full of beer and testosterone and total Australian-ness.
Alison Whyte and Steve Le Marquand as Olive and Roo. Photo courtesy of the Queensland Theatre Cmpany.
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a raw and emotional play and I'd be lying if I said the second and third acts were relaxing or uplifting. However, seeing this excellent production makes it clear why this is a piece of classic Australian culture, made all the better because it can still be enjoyable and recognisable to modern audiences as much as it's original 1953 production. I would recommend going to see it.
A new Tumblr: graphic designer Matt Roeser reads a book then re-designed the cover. I particularly like his versions of Jasper Fforde's novels Shades of Grey and The Eyre Affair and I am a big Jasper Fforde fan. There is a part of me that wishes I were ever fabulous enough to have a bag named after me. However, this is not high on my list of life dreams, and a good thing too 'cause it ain't happening any time soon. In the mean time, Mulberry have created a new named bag the Del-Ray and I kind of love it.
Scrumptious Reads blog. I love a good food blog and this one makes me drool.
It's Leek season! What? No one else is excited by that?
When I take friends op shopping for the first time they struggle with one and three of these. The way to beat chance number one is to not be looking for anything specific and broaden your mind to what you would and wouldn't wear Price is often not an issue unless you start looking at original 1950's prom dresses and the way to beat chance number three is ...compromise.
A lot of vintage clothing has sizes but not all. Really anything pre-1970's you're lucky to get a size. So much of it was hand made or made-over the notion of it being a size 8 or a size 12 is laughable. You have to know your size, hold up the clothes and guess if it is worth trying on. Sometimes you get it horribly wrong, like I did one day when I dreamt I could fit into a leather mini dress … that poor dead-cow-tube never stood a chance …
Other times you try something on that is so obviously too big but you love it anyway and you will it to work. I did this once in Copenhagen. I'd been travelling for 5 weeks and worn nothing but jeans. There was a party that night and I was determined I would wear a dress. I could have made it easy on myself and gone to H&M but Copenhagen has such amazing vintage shops there was really no question. Working within my travel backpack and budget parameters I fell in love with a dress that was certainly a size 14 on my size 8 frame I bought a belt for it an voila! Instant outfit. I still have the dress today and I still wear it with the same belt; it is mightily comfortable.
For the record – I was the only person at that crowded party not in jeans and sneakers. I felt pretty silly at first but some charming Danish students persuaded me otherwise
Then there is that occasional, wonderful moment when you try on a dress, a pair of pants or a top and … it fits! It fits perfectly, like it was made for you. Like you could rewind the decades and have the same gasp moment when the dress maker brings out the finished cocktail dress. This happened to me late last year at the Brisbane Vintage Fashion and Homewares Fair when I found this 1960's cocktail dress. The moment when a dress fits so well you have to buy it.
For me, the joy of finding that almost miraculous perfect fit in amongst a rack of clothes at a second hand store is so much more rewarding than having it at Target or CUE or Dogstar (as much as I love them). I know what size I am in all these stores and if there is a problem I just pick out a different option. There is no other option when vintage shopping. You either take it or leave it but if you're lucky enough the dress will help you decide.
This isn't much of a problem as I don't feel a need to photograph myself that often. It has only recently become a wish after I developed a mild addiction to sartorialist websites.
I love a good sartorialist website. I also love the word sartorial. I find them inspiring. Sometimes they inspire me to want to buy new clothing but more often they inspire me to experiment more with the clothing I have and maybe be a bit more adventurous with my next purchase.
So the self-photographing issue arises because sometimes I think of an outfit related blog idea or maybe I just want to take a photo of my adorable outfit and find a reason to blog. But I then chicken out and my outfit is never recorded because I'm not good at taking photos of myself. I also have a pet peeve that most personal fashion blogs contain waaay too many photos of the same outfit. Show me three, not ten!
Attempt #1 to take self-portrait. Showing a friend how much I appreciated my christmas present of a necklace made of a tie.
Anyways, for those people who like to or want to take self-portraits, here is a simple little guide on how to take nice ones from Shrimp Salad Circus. For that bit of confidence we all need. It's short, it's comprehensible and it's persuasive. So persuasive in fact that after reading it I went out and bought myself a camera remote and stole my boy's enormous tripod (haha) and took some photos of myself.
Attempt #2. Still not good but working on it ...
You can also check out this guide on how to take good outdoor photographs from A Beautiful Mess, all of which is very good advice that I did not follow because I felt silly enough taking photos of myself without doing it in public view.
Better photos to follow soon.
Botticelli's Birth of Venus is particularly striking in how she has lost her belly and gained abs, a tiny waist and toned legs.
Botticelli's Birth of Venus.