• Gold Bow, in hair
• Necklace, Uncommon Objects, Austin, Texas (birthday present from Angeliska!)
• Gold & Navy brocade 1950s dress – Buffalo Exchange
• Black Fishnets
• Navy Socks
• Gold shoes, Vivienne Westwood for Melissa

Oh, rejoice! It’s a rare outfit sighting! Today’s ensemble was inspired by Snow White sitting on a brocade couch.

Rather than Austin City Limits, I spent the day seeing my favorite bands for free, including the radiant Agent Ribbons, pictured below. Natalie Ribbons and I also ran into Sonic Youth drinking wine at a bar, and we cheers’ed them!

Natalie uses a finger monocle to peruse the Pernod list. Gentlemen kept handing us roses throughout the night.
Laura (another ice cream maker in town) & I water down our cocktails.

I have a very small head (my mother always laughs at me) but it’s quite handy for fitting into tiny 1920s cloche hats, which are usually size 21 and smaller. The next time you’re at the beauty parlor, request for the back to be “stacked” and they’ll usually cut your hair shorter beginning at the occipital bone. Think Louise Brooks. It’s a very handy cut to have for making hats fit. There is your beauty tip for the day.

Most of my cloches are ill fitting at the moment because the back of my head is overgrown. I haven’t had my hair cut in a while because I haven’t any extra money – a ladies’ haircut in Austin is $50 in most places before tip! I feed myself on nearly $90 a month, so it doesn’t really make sense to spend food money on something that will grow back in 5 weeks. I can manage trimming the front and sides okay, but I can’t stack the back myself. I wish I could pay for just partial haircuts, because I would gladly pay $25 for just the back to be cut and the rest left alone. I have a special technique for cutting my hair that is probably not approved by most stylists. It involves dry cutting the ringlets and then twisting sections that I pincurl and thin them out.

Close up of kitten fabric! I borrowed this image from the Jitterbuggin Etsy shop. By the way, I own another blouse from this shop and I can’t say enough nice things about it. It’s all handmade in Portland, Oregon by the cutest girl, too!

This is my Mary Pickford face.

I love these stockings. I feel like a crazy cartoon spider when I wear them, because they elongate my (already) long legs. These 1940s shoes are quite cartoonish, as well. They are a size 10AAA, which means loooong and skinny, just perfect for my Ozarkian feet. This isn’t quite mentioned in polite society, but most girls birthed at the foothills of the Ozark Mountains are often born with large flippery feet so that they might become gifted in creek hoppin,’ peach tree climbin,’ and other activities that involve truncatin’ the g.
Oh, and they also remind me of this LOVELY photo of a Storyville Prostitute.

Since I obviously cannot get out of this 1930s chorus girl niche that I’ve grooved myself into, here are some more inspirational screen shots of the gals doing what they do:

Top Left: Screen cap of Dancing Lady (1933) with Joan Crawford in the center. My second favorite element of 1930s chorus girl movies is stopping the frame and photographing the rehearsal tap dancing outfits because they are so varied and interesting. Sometimes it’s a blouse and shorts, sometimes a onesie, sometimes a very short dress.
Bottom Left: Of course, in the final performance, the ladies all wear identical outfits. I like this little tuxedo suit number, it’s quite charming. This photo is from It’ll Take the Snap Out of Your Garters!, one of THE best vintage resources on the planet and run by one of my most favorite sassy ladies, Amy. Please pay her a visit if you’ve never seen her blog. You will be overwhelmed (in a good way).

Here’s my spin on a 1930s Chorus Girl outfit – I’m ready to dance!
I love this color of peach – and the garment has little floral embroidery and a rotting silk ribbon at the front.

I check this book out through interlibrary loan a few weeks ago and it has literally reshaped my techniques of pincurling. It is an invaluable resource for understanding curls and has the most ridiculous details of how to set them, how to brush them out, and how to sculpt them into different styles. Information about it here: Vintage Hairstyling on Amazon, but check your local library to check it out first.

Speaking of pincurls – everyone PLEASE check out the newest issue of Zelda, Bellewether and I are contributors to a full-color pincurl tutorial. It also features:

• COVER STORY : Like a Melody: Doris Eaton Travis (interview)
• A True Classic: Robert Osborne (interview),
• Marsha Hunt: On Golden Era Fashion (interview) ,
• Cocktails : Dead Men Tell No Tales, But Their Spirits Do!,
• Pincurling Tutorial,
• A Dress Shoe for the Man of Action (in 1922),
• Illustrations by Fyodor Pavlov, Lawrence Gullo, and Joslyn Zoe, Gelber & Manning,
• Vicky Butterfly : Vintage Burlesquer,
• Sage Advice : Mister Burton,
• Vintage City 101: Los Angeles, On the Town
• All of this for $7.50!! That’s less than a cocktail!

My hair is set to make the curls above by backwards curling them and pinned at the scalp so that they strand strait up. When they are combed out they make big corkscrew curls that boing into shape and stay that way for a few days (with resetting at night). Upon talking about flapper ‘fros, Nika recommended washing my hair with BIG from Lush because it has salt and citrus in it, so I tried out my salt face scrub instead (because I already owned it) and it turned out so well! It’s very fluffy and clean feeling, even four days later! I think when I run out of the scrub I’ll just make a paste of sea salt and citrus along with my normal combination of Apple Cider Vinegar and baking soda. Yes, I like to cook with my hair.

Top Left: The gals from “Gold Diggers of 1937″
Bottom Left:Chorus girls from “The Singing Kid”
Top Right:From “Dancing Lady” (1933)

I really debated on if I should post this outfit or not, since it’s not my normal 1930s style, but since it is technically 1970s, I guess it’s okay.
Plus, I don’t want any of you to think I’m a vintage snob/purist, although I do get put into the “Authentic Vintage” category by other vintage blogs
I have wanted a Sex Pistols shirt since I was 14!!!! I look for them on ebay every once in a while but they are always $75.
I know it’s not my normal style, and that it’s not very punk to shop at Urban Outfitters… but here I am in a t shirt!
When I sing karaoke, I always choose Sex Pistols songs or Outkast. Now you know all of my dirty secrets.
Here is my yellow eyeshadow. It’s by Makeup Forever and I like to bust it out for special yellow occasions.
Johnny Rotten is an adorable old bastard.
He falls into my ideal of suit wearing/crust punk gentleman.
I know I’m not supposed to say that the Sex Pistols are cute, but I will.

Here are some awesome Sex Pistols Songs:

• No Feelings – my favorite Sex Pistols song
• (I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone – Sex Pistols covering the Monkeys
• A Ukulele cover of “No Feelings”
• An acapella version of “Anarchy in the UK”

My curl is looking specifically geometric this morning.
This is the face of staying up dancing until 3 am at Azz Everywhere.
I nearly passed up this blouse when I first tried it on… because although I do like novelty prints, I feel kind of corny when I wear them. This blouse is so darling, and it matches my avocado-colored shoes in an uncanny way. Speaking of novelty prints, I have one dress with perfume bottle print and one with rooster print that I wear on heavy rotation. Other prints I have include:

• Renaissance men and women holding pitchforks
• Kittens lapping creme from tea cups
• Patio furniture and flower pots
• Smiling clovers

As fitting, I ate a whole tub of guacamole from Torchy’s for my breakfast and lunch. I love bein’ fat with some avocados and coconuts! Oh, and the best news to happen this month is that my corner co-op grocery started carrying Daiya cheese so now I can have cheeze sprinkles on everything. I <3 cheese as a garnish and it’s so wonderful to have it back in my life (in facsimile) on pizzas, chilis and toast.
This outfit reminds me of Mrs. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus series:

I think I’ve subconsciously adopted Mrs. Frizzle’s attitude toward teaching in my own teaching philosophies. Of course, I won’t have a flying talking school bus, but I know how to make history more alive. Last week I worked on a lesson plan that involved listening to Woody Guthrie and Rudy Vallee tunes from the Great Depression and defending their importance for a new (fictional) CD box set put out by the Smithsonian Museum.

Today is the day after 5 hours of tattoo work on my phonograph lady… I was a little disoriented this morning and didn’t realize that the tights aren’t quite the right shade!

Today was so pretty outside! I sat on my porch for a few hours and glued photographs into an album. At sunset, I went on a long bikeride over the bridge to eat Blueberry Oven Cakes at Bouldin Creek and recount my Parisian adventures to a friend.

I bought this dress on ebay with the original intention of cutting out the pattern and using the shape as a projection screen as part of my MFA thesis. It’s difficult to capture on film, but this fabric is absolutely luminous and glossy – it burns with so many colors! However, the projection idea proved too obtuse, and luckily, was scrapped. The dress remained, quiet, in my closet.
The first strange thing I noticed about this dress was that the piping around the pockets and sleeves is the sweetest color of periwinkle. But, I’ve never ever even thought to pair periwinkle with orange, but I think it looks quite lovely. I also like how the breast pockets look like folded envelopes! One thing I wish I could change about the dress is the length. It has a full zipper, like that of a house dress, fancy as though this fabric may be. It was probably a glorified dressing gown. We just got these paper flowers in at my work. I had a fun time today moving them from my hair to my blazer and back again. I got them in almost every color so brace yourselves to see some in the next few posts.
My remix shoes are still pleasing me with every time I wear them! These got a little beat up in the back when I rode on my bicycle.
Now my favorite! The sleeves! These are the kind of poofy sleeves I draw on all of my cartoon girls:

I think in this image I was literally chanting “Puffy sleeve! Puffy sleeve!” in a muppet voice.

The first time I wore the dress, Halloween, 2007:
I was posing as a living mannequin inside and outside of Decades Vintage Clothing in downtown Portland. I started out in the window, but I am too tall for most people walking by to notice. When people made eye contact with me, I winked at them! When I posed outside, two men pulled on my fingers to see if I was real. I held a dish of candy and whispered Enjoy when people took a piece. One woman yelled the loudest I’ve ever heard in real life. Her friends laughed at her. Two business men tipped me.