The ILFWDA Show at London Fashion Week

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had the great opportunity to attend a show during London Fashion Week, but I've been a bit under the weather since and unable to share my experience until now. Sorry for the delay. I'm feeling much better now, so I'm excited to share some of what I saw.

I attended the Independent London Fashion Week Designers Association Show (ILFWDA) on Friday, February 16th, two weeks ago exactly. Even though some time has passed, I'm still relishing the experience as if it just happened yesterday. This was my first time attending London Fashion Week and I certainly hope it's not my last. I've loved fashion since I was a young girl and I've been wanting to attend a show such as this for a long time. Being there was definitely a full circle moment. It was the epitome of how I see my life now as I hold onto the many things that I've always wanted to do, but they seem to take a bit of time to achieve....I remember this...Delayed is not denied.

This experience has reaffirmed to me that it's never too late and that I just need to go full steam ahead with what I want to do. If things are meant to be, they will be, but if they're not I'm still going to be okay. Just because something doesn't happen today, it doesn't mean that it'll never happen. I just have to do my best, let go and have faith. Seeing the creations of the various designers was an excellent reminder that we are all here to give whatever our "thing" is to the world. We may be designers, writers, musicians, nurses, doctors, carpenters, etc...whatever we do, but we just have to show up and do our best.

The ILFWDA Show was beautifully varied and spectacular. I really loved the designs from Jeff Garner and NanaLola Couture. The dresses were so elegant. I also loved the jewellery by A Touch of Gems Wirral. Below are some of my favorite looks from the show from several of the designers. I liked so much of what I saw, but there's sadly not enough room to show everything here. You can see bits of video from the show on my Instagram account in the highlights section here  and a some still photographs here. I hope that you enjoy taking a look!

 

Hello Again

When I started my break back in October, I didn't know how long or how short it would be. I just knew that I needed to take a break because to be perfectly honest I didn't know what in the world to talk about anymore. Lol. I  was boring myself a bit, so I figured I was probably boring the heck out of those of you out there who were visiting me :)

So I thought that it was time to take a step back and then come back here with a new perspective and fresh eyes. I know that I did the right thing. When I took my break, I was also not feeling very well healthwise at the time. I needed to take a break to feel better and I do now. Thank you for continuing to visit me here even while I was gone. I appreciate it so much!

I don't know if things will be any more entertaining or interesting this time around, but I'm going to give it my very best try :) This time I want to have a more focused concentration on the things that I love, such as:

That list looks quite full, but I think as humans we're drawn to many things, so I'll be doing my smorgasbord blogging over here ;-)   If I were a tree and I was able to 'show my rings', these are the things that would show up within my rings. I love a little of this and a little of that, so I figure why not embrace that and celebrate the variety of life. Also, my mind wanders, so I need a few different places to wander.

Oh and I almost forgot...how dare I. I'll be sharing some of my photos from time to time. I just have to get back out there and take some new ones. (By the way: Yes, I forgot to put it on the image above. Oops! Lol.)

I know one thing though...I'm so glad to be back! I hope you'll come back and visit me from time to time.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Remembering Shirley Temple Black

 

Like many of you, I woke up this morning to the news that Shirley Temple has passed away at the age of 85. Her name was actually Shirley Temple Black as an adult, but the sweet name from her childhood sticks in my mind so much because I LOVED her movies when I was a child.

 

When I was a little girl I'd get up on weekend mornings and ask my mom if there were any Shirley Temple movies scheduled to be shown. My activities for the day often hinged upon whether or not one of her movies was going to be on that day :-)  That was a sweet and wonderful memory that crossed my mind this morning when I heard the news.

 

I have a lot of wonderful memories of singing and dancing along with Shirley Temple movies throughout my childhood. I didn't know it then, but those fun performances alongside the television shaped a lot of my love for all things creative. They helped me to dream and to express myself and that is why I remember Shirley and her films so fondly now as an adult. They fired my imagination so very much and for that I am grateful.

 

Farewell Shirley Temple and thank you....

Getting Back to Creativity

I don't know if I've ever mentioned it here before, but I love jewelry, especially unusual pieces. So the other day, I got a new pair of earrings at a street market. They were inexpensive and I just loved the look of them. They're not too large or too small...they're just right...light and airy.

They're tree of life earrings and I thought that they were interesting.

I used to make jewelry a few years ago and lately I've been thinking of starting up again because I used to enjoy it so much. Now that I'm finished with my university work, I'm interested in moving ahead with my creative pursuits again.

I'm having to work up to it with the creativity though. I've had my head stuck in the books for so long with all of my study and analysis, therefore my creativity has gone a bit rusty. I'm sure you know what it's like when you've been so into one way of using your brain and then you want to switch over but you can't. Well, that's me right now. However, slowly but surely I'm finally finding my creative feet again. It just takes time.

I'm finding that taking the time to appreciate other people's creativity is opening me up again. I guess that it's like physically having to work a muscle to get it back into shape again. It's like waking up again in a way. I guess that my creativity has only been sleeping and now it's stretching and awakening to a new day...the next chapter in my life :-)

Memories Through Cornbread

It’s been a while since I did a cooking post, so it just seemed like a good idea for today’s post, since I need to get back into the blogging hot tub. I don’t love to cook, but I like it pretty well and hey, we've all gotta eat don’t we? For those times when I don’t want to cook, a frozen dinner is my best friend ;-)

There are times when I like cooking and times when I loathe it. It’s all about balance ;-) In those times of enjoyment, the thing that pulls me in is the chance to be creative, so that aspect is right up my alley.

I truly enjoy watching cooking shows, especially Barefoot Contessa. Her food inspires me to want to cook EVERYTHING and do it well. Her variety of dishes that she cooks always inspires me to try something new and I’ve learned lots of cooking techniques from her, so I love me some Contessa :-) And as a fellow Georgia girl, I love to watch Paula Deen when I’m back home visiting. I can see the Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network over here, but they don’t show Paula Deen here. So that’s where the website comes in handy. Anyway, that’s enough of my TV favorites for today. Pardon my detour ;-)

So this past weekend I cooked cornbread muffins…well actually cheese cornbread muffins. I had a taste for some. I’m not a really big fan of cornbread or any bread really, but sometimes I get the taste for it. It usually coincides with me thinking about home or back to the times when my parents were still alive. When I was growing up, my mom made cornbread everyday and I used to love to watch her make it. The memories that I have of watching her make cornbread stick firmly in my mind. I don’t know why. I guess it’s the everyday normal things that you may take for granted at the time, but when you look back, those are the things that are burned into your memory forever. As time goes by I realize that memories are TRULY the beautiful things in life :-) The simplest, beautiful things…

Over the Christmas holidays, I received a package from my sisters and I had mentioned to them when we were Skyping once that I couldn’t get cornmeal very readily where I live. So I’d asked them to send me a small bag if they could. Well, in the Christmas package there was the cornmeal…just like my mom used to use :-) The sight of the bag instantly filled me with nostalgia. Here it is:



Yeah, I took a picture of the bag of cornmeal…it’s an expat thing. LOL. Anyway, I made some cheese cornbread muffins and they turned out pretty good. My mom was strictly old school though…she just made straight cornbread and hers was great, but I love to play around with a recipe from time to time.



I’ve been nibbling on these muffins all week and yesterday I crumbled some up in a bowl of soup…mmmmmm. Now that was good! Next time I may try putting some other flavor in there to see how it turns out. See, it’s that creativity thing again ;-)

I realized the other day how much I used to love posting about my culinary creations in the earlier days of this blog and I realized that I don’t do that much anymore. Well that will definitely be a returning feature here. I’m no chef or even a really great cook, but I just love mixing stuff up and seeing what happens. And also I love photographing things…and that includes food, so I hope you’ll come back and see what I cook next :-)

Until next time…

The Road Not Taken and an Award

Hello there. In another post, I said thank you for an award that I was given and I mentioned that I would post the other one in a future post. Well today is that day :-) I always feel a bit funny when I receive blog awards. Even after two and a half years of blogging, I’m always amazed that people pass these along to me and still read my blog. Lol. And this isn’t false modesty talking here...no...I’m truly surprised and very appreciative every time I get a blog award. It’s nice to get a friendly nod from within the blogging community.

Therefore, I want to say thank you to Lis at “An American Girl in Bristol” for passing the Cherry on Top Award along to me.

Lis is embarking upon a similar path to mine so I truly wish her well and hope that her move across to England is a wonderful one! :-)



This is an interesting award because it comes with an intriguing question attached to it. Here are the rules:

1) Thank the person who gave you this award.
2) Pick 6 people/blogs and give them this award.
3) Inform the person that you have given them this award.

Then...answer this question:

If you had the chance to go back and change one thing in your life, would you and what would it be?

Well, I thought about this and I know they always say that the path that you take in life leads you to where you are right now, and if you change one thing you change many things. And a lot of the time people will say that they wouldn’t change a thing and some days I would say that too. However, there are some days when I’m honest with myself and I would say, YES I WOULD change this one thing. I guess it's the adventurer in me :-) I think that it’s fun sometimes to wonder about what things would be like if you’d taken that road instead of the one you actually took. I don’t dwell on it, but hey, a daydream is good from time to time :-)

Anyway, so if I could go back and change one thing in my life, I would change where I went to school after I graduated high school. I had been accepted at an art and design school and didn’t go because I was very young and bent to the pressure of some advice. (I hold no grudges about this advice…water under the bridge and all that) I wanted to study interior design in this program which dealt with it in the home and business settings. And my ultimate goal was to study on the west coast and then work my behind off and get into doing set design and work behind the scenes on movies and television. California was calling my name! :-) This interest in working behind the scenes was fueled early by my love of all things creative and my love of classic movies. I know that it would’ve been a tough thing to break into, but it would’ve been wonderfully freeing to have just given it a try, even if it didn’t work out. I’ve learned one thing from that road not taken…there is no harm in trying, because no matter however it turns out, you get satisfaction out of knowing that you got to do what YOU wanted to do.

I ended up going to a “normal” university and it didn’t work out so well. And I guess some would say that I could’ve went along the other path later, but as we all know, life starts to happen and sometimes you never catch up :-) Oh well. I think that that is why nowadays I’m doing my best to seek out more of a creative life for myself several years later. I didn’t take that other path, and I’ve put that to rest, but now I’m going at that creative life from another direction.

Oh and in case you’re wondering where Brit Boy would have fitted within this west coast life path…well I fully believe that we would’ve still connected. I figure if we found each other 4,000 miles apart, then there’s not that much of a leap to find each other in California somehow. The Universe had it all mapped out I believe ;-) Brit Boy believes this too.

I’m gonna bend the rules again and just give this one out to everyone who wants to have this award and contemplate this question or not :-) So please take it and have fun with it…until next time!

Happy Birthday Sesame Street

I want to say Happy Birthday to Sesame Street today!!!! :-) Today marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street premiering on our television screens.


Photo credit: Richard Termine/Sesame Workshop


I, like many others who grew up in the 70s, have fond memories of Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, Ernie & Bert, Grover, The Count, and all of the other great characters who live on that wonderful street. I used to want to live there so much when I was in elementary school :-) But getting to visit them each day in TV land was great too. That show opened up a great deal of my imagination and taught me so much. I remember songs from that show to this day, and when I hear them and hum along, I get the same happiness that I had as a kid. What would I and so many others have done without Sesame Street? :)

The beauty of this show is that I enjoyed it when I was a kid and then my nieces and nephews enjoyed it and then it just goes on and on over the years. It has stood the test of time for my family and countless other families and I’m so glad that it’s still around. It is a part of the cultural DNA now :-)

So here’s to Sesame Street and what it has brought to all of us kids and kids-at-heart! May it go on and on :-)

Style Icons and Creativity

This past weekend was good. It started for me on Friday afternoon. Brit Boy only worked half a day, so we had a “date” and went to the movies that afternoon. We went to see the new Sex and the City movie. I had told him that I was fine with going to see it alone if he didn’t want to go. And it wasn’t a case of me dragging him to see it, he was glad to go and see it with me, because many times when I am watching reruns of the show, he is there laughing with me. So he was interested to see how the movie would be. So off we went. I was expecting it to be me and my Brit Boy and all women, but actually there were two guys in there other than Brit Boy. I only say all of this about the male and female thing because I read and heard so much about this “just” being a “chick flick”, which so annoys me. Why is it that a movie with women in the lead roles always has to be marginalized? Anyway,enough politics. (smile) The fashions were great and it was a nice escape. Brit Boy and I both enjoyed it and the popcorn was good too. (smile)

On Saturday, I went to have acupuncture. I haven’t gone in a few weeks since I have been feeling fine and also I have to be frugal. Karen and Ta were there as usual and they were in good spirits. I asked Karen if everyone in her family was fine back in China since the catastrophic earthquake there. I hadn’t seen these ladies since it happened. Karen assured me that all was fine with her family and Ta’s. I was so glad to hear that. As a human being, the suffering there is so hard to watch, and on a personal note, I am just glad to know that Karen and Ta's families are okay.

Sunday was a quiet day for us. Brit Boy studied and I read and did some other things around the house.

When I woke up this morning, I heard the news about the death of the designer Yves Saint Laurent. It was sad news. In my teens and 20s, I was very much into fashion and had aspirations to be a designer myself or at least work in the fashion industry. I loved sketching designs and sewing and dreaming of a creative life. When I graduated from high school, I got accepted to study at an art school that was based in the US and then gave the option of studying in London for a time. But I didn’t attend and went ahead to regular college. I was talked out of going to art school by a well-meaning relation who thought that perhaps something more traditional was better to study and being so young, I took their advice. Incidentally, it wasn’t my mother. (smile) But it is all water under the bridge now and that was a long time ago. It is now just a footnote for me and I have moved on and discovered other loves now and I am happy with my choices. (smile) From time to time though, when things from the fashion world come across my attention, I always have a millisecond of thinking “what if?”. I used to have dreams of having a creative career and creating beauty in the world and getting to travel. Well, the reason that I don’t mourn the “what ifs” anymore is because I figure that I am still alive and there is plenty that I can do to be creative in my life and do good things in the world. I do creative work now, so that is a big part of what I wanted all along. I do what I can to bring creativity to my writing, gardening, painting, cooking and other things, and it is hilarious to me that I was going to come to London to study so many years ago, and now I live only a train’s ride away. So I got there in the end. (laugh) I have also traveled in my life, and I plan to do much more, so that dream has come true too. (smile) As I said, I am still here, so who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Yves Saint Laurent was one of my favourite designers when I was growing up. I loved the elegance of his work. And I have heard on the news reports today that he was one of the first designers to use black models on the runway and I said bravo to that. You’ve gotta love a person who makes their own rules and in doing so, does the right thing. (smile) I applaud the work he did and I simply say...well done and rest in peace.