My sewing machine caught on fire and now I feel pointless.

Tragedy has stuck my life in the form of fire a couple of days ago when I plugged my sewing machine in and was immediately met with the smell of smoke. This horrific and traumatizing event has left the two collars that I had currently been working has forced their completion to be put off for an indeterminate amount of time.
However, there is some good in this awful event. I think that lately I had been becoming a bit too comfortable with my routine in making silly collar making adventures, and well, less adventurous. I put sequins here and beads there, spending hours of my time doing the same thing over and over again. Yes, this was definitely good, allowing myself to learn some basics, find a good starting point and experiment, but I need to experiment more, and try new things.
Being sans sewing machine is letting me do just that. I am going to fail for sure, I have no clue what I'm doing, but I'm at a point in my life where I'm feeling like I've always tried to follow the rules, do what's acceptable, and right now I need to challenge that. I want to make something that is completely my own, weird, tangled and ugly. Awkward and imperfect.
I'm inspired and I want to create. Failure will only make me better in the future.
And maybe eventually I'll get a new sewing machine and start making real clothes.

Anyways, I am off on a short trip to Toronto for a couple days, so that should be fun.
In the meantime enjoy a mixture of various images I have saved to my desktop for a variety of reasons.

Blue.

Well, how's that life thing going everyone? Busy as hell? Right? 

The world has felt a bit cold to me lately, and no not just the weather. But thankfully most of the actual snow has now melted and it's been raining all afternoon. So blue seemed like a good and a beautiful colour. Things have been breaking a lot and falling apart. I really only have one month of actual school left, and it's making me see that the world is more vast than I could ever have thought before. 

So, blue. I don't really think of it as a sad colour, more thoughtful, free and dream-like. So, no, I'm not sad, just still figuring it all out. 

She spoke of places I had never been.

I'd like to return to these ideas I used to have of making fashion all about being weird, combining gross colour combinations and prints that nearly any fashion magazine would say is a definite "no-no". I want my outfits to be a subtle "fuck you" to society and the people who try to make everyone fit into a nice little box. I want red hair and fluorescent shirt and a skirt reminiscent of a flamingo. Shoes that look like fruit contrasted nicely with the dolphins and fish print on my dress. This spring and summer I want to make art and be art and adventure and try to find who I am. 

So many things are ending right now, and it all feels terrible and sad, and I'm not just talking about High School. I think so many of us feel this way all the time and right now I know that what I need is for this damn snow to go away for a while, the sun to shine and to wear clothes with humour. So many people don't realize this, but fashion can actually ridiculously funny. Slippers that look like banana peels. Prints so loud and gaudy that make it hard not to laugh. A sickeningly sweet all pink outfit that can't help make you smile. Clashing prints and awkward layering. Yes, fashion can be extremely serious and beautiful, even sad, which I love so so much. But I think so often we get too much of that side. Let's all just take a bit of a break. Be happy it's spring, wear something silly or sunny, something that makes you smile. Because trust me you will be a happier person for it. 

And on a completely different note: here is my grad dress! I'd love some opinions on accessories right now! I'm wearing this dress and jewelry similar to the ones on the right (except mine are not mint/white, they're clear rhinestones), but I'm trying to decide between the two pairs of shoes and a clutch. Any opinions?

Can We Live Without the Sunshine?

Feeling like I want an adventure. I don't want my youth to be wasted. I want to live and go places. I want to find beauty. I want to fall in love with the world. I want an adventure.
But no one else wants to leave their cozy little lives.
The world we live in is one where, ultimately, people play it safe. We seek stability. We aim to "settle down". Find a home to stay in. We search for comfort and trustworthy love.
Frankly, I'm scared of being too happy, or too comfortable with life. I don't want to be controlled by fear or sadness. I want to dress weird, create strange art, run around and scream. I want to go places that may be frightening to me, sing loudly even though I can't sing. Climb mountains and write books. I want to fall in love everywhere I go.

Silence.

I wrote a speech for english class last semester about being quiet. It turned out to probably be one of my favorite things that I've ever written. Since then, I've been thinking a lot about the necessity of many things we say. Do I really need to exclaim myself when I believe something is beautiful? Or is it best to silently let it speak for itself. Our need in society to state the obvious, to continue to say meaningless but ever-present words about nothing is interesting and questionable.
Do we really need to keep in constant communication? Are we not capable of silently appreciating things? Do the bags under my eyes not let you know that I am tired? Does the feeling of cold really make you have the urge to let everyone else in the world know?
Can we just take a moment once a while for silence and beauty. Can we just recognize and understand things without shouting to the heavens?

There are times we live for somebody else.

I've seen a lot of people lately talking about how they really "hate fashion". And I definitely understand where that comes from. How the world is so focused on trends and looking "right". We read and try to write reviews of collections, condemn collections and criticize models. We buy magazines full of ads that tell us we are terrible human beings for not looking a certain way. We spend, we buy, we wear, we collect closets full of pieces of fabric, only to find out in the end that these things do not bring us love or lasting happiness.

That is, if you only look at the most superficial and common aspects of fashion.
I myself do hate these parts that are often associated with fashion. In the end, however, what I think fashion really is about it the clothing. Not the advertising, the buying and selling, not the approval of others. And when I put this out of my mind and I completely forget about these things, when I scroll through blogs and happen across a picture of an old CDG or McQueen collection, I see beauty and wonder and in these moments I fully love fashion and everything about it. I love its ability to create something weird and beautiful, extreme and simple and have it become part of a person and I love the fact that such beautiful manmade things exist, and that we can wear them.

However, this is not what I see often at all. I see so much negativity in the fashion world. Like I said before, reviews, magazines, blogs, picking out all the bad things and things that particular writer didn't like. I see people who dedicate so much time to hating certain models, who if we can just take a moment to remember, are not actually emotionless robots, but people. I see so often people devote time to hating all the things that they don't exactly like, to the point where it's more trendy in the (internet) fashion world to dislike certain designers/collections/models than actually liking certain types of clothing. I've seen countless arguments with explosions of anger because two people have different taste in clothing.

I'm not just talking about people who like fashion either. People are constantly mocking those who choose to wear uggs, or leggings as pants and so on. And I would just like to say that no one is a better person because of the clothes they were. I love clothing, but just because I dress "fashionably" does not make me a good or bad person. Just because a person doesn't happen to care about how they look, or wears something that you find weird or ugly, doesn't make them incarnations of the devil. "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"(Hamlet).

I'm not saying everyone is like this, there are a good many people who are not like this. But this negative attitude is common to a frightening degree in the world that I live in.
Can I just ask for you, any one who happens to read this, just to be nice. Be good people. Stop hating. Please.

The Road Goes Ever On and On.

Well it's Friday, and while I may have not spent an entire five days at school due to the fact that there are about a million cats stuck in my throat and trying to scratch their way out, causing me to sound like a surprisingly accurate Gollum. Thus, since I already sound like a character from The Lord of the Rings, and since I'm at home sick and have watched far more TV than I can handle (who knew one could get tired of TV?), I've abandoned my reading of Inferno and Huck Finn to re-read one of the greatest stories ever to exist. Now, I know that not all of you are all into the whole fantasy world of orcs and elves and mountains of doom, but you must, (if you're actually even mildly interested in anything on this blog), see some value in the beauty of middle earth. Whether it be from the movies, the books, or even some of the better designed book covers.
I have always been completely in love with strange and wonderful worlds, I don't want to get really in very deep on this subject right now, but lately I've been even more fascinated with this world, and the stories we know of it, than usual.
So, if you please, a Middle Earth inspired medley of photographs to satisfy a pathetic nerdy teenager suffering from a cold.

The road goes ever on and on 
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone, 
And I must follow, if I can, 
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And wither then? I cannot say. 

And of course because she is one of the best characters ever, and it is international women's day: Eowyn!