merry christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone!! Here is my little photo essay on my holiday experiences to live up all the fun pastimes of the season!

My Gramma Dorothy and I made this gingerbread house. We broke all the rules on the recipe for how to bake it...even though I had to bully gramma into doing it! Grampa John helped me hold everything in place while I icing-ed the pieces together; ever the carpenter, even in gingerbread! Thanks Grampa! We made the house for a gingerbread house competition and it won 1st place in the adult category and grand prize!

Then came back to New York and trimmed the tree with Jason, Mollie, Trevor, and Eric. Trevor helped me cut out all the doilies into different sizes to make snowflake ornaments. ...and then helped me wear the leftover donuts as bracelets...

Trevor made himself a doily earring.

Up go the snowflakes and glittered pinecones! This is our recession tree, we spent no money on ornaments. Pinecones were from last year, doilies are going to be part of our living room chandelier...

Ta DA!

Ginny Branch suggested a sledding day and then couldn't join! So sad. But Meggs, Haylie, Mollie and I went and thought fond thoughts of her.

My camera battery died so I've actually borrowed these photographs from Haylie. It was so wonderful to be in the park with all these people sledding and squealing and having such a blast! These are people I would normally just bustle right by on the sidewalk, but here we all were, rolling in the snow! Pretty magical what a bit of H2O can do.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

erica and chet

Halloo, world! So, I have just found that blogger doesn't drive me absolutely *bonkers* with refusing to upload my images if I resize everything to 72dpi first (ala Photoshop action tool). I've tried uploading this post multiple times with no success, and the same goes for many fallen posts of yore, and yore has been a looong time on this here blog. But! maybe I'm back in business; I have ideas for a really efficient Photoshop action tool that will make this easy peasy despite everything blogger.com does against me! Ha!

Here are photos of Erica and Chet's beauuuutiful wedding. Erica commissioned me to make her wedding dress, the specifications being that it needed to be flowy, empire waisted, and have lace that didn't have flowers on it, and bridal buttons. I'll have to admit figuring out a pretty system for bridal buttons on chiffon was kind of a challenge but I was happy with the results! I got the "renaissance" lace at Sposabella lace here in the garment disctric, and the rest of my odds and ends at Brooklyn Mercantile, easily one of my favorite stores ever. The lovely photographs are by Our Labor of Love, I think they did a wonderful job of capturing the wedding between these two young architects.

ginny's wedding

Recently my best friend and other half, Ginny Branch (now Ginnybranch Stelling!) just married her middle school sweet heart in undoubtedly one of the most beautiful weddings of all time. I wasn't going to post anything about it because it got so much coverage in the wedding world, but since Gramma has friends that read my blog that might not necessarily read all my friends' blogs, I had to make sure ya'll didn't miss this. Because it's too good to miss. I've got some of my snapshots of the event below, but the best thing is this video by our friend Josh Goleman, an amazing filmmaker and photographer who documented the whole thing. This was so much fun, and I loved how all of our friends really got into the theme. Not a modern one in sight! We really are blessed with wonderful, fun, inspiring people in our lives.

These are all of Ginny's outfits for the weekend. Dreeeamy!

...and this is my friend, the baby goat. we fell in love.

betseyville

Gramma Dorothy has requested that I post about my new wonderful job at Betsey because, as she reminded me, she's not the only one who reads my blog. ...which I do forget sometimes. So! I work at Betsey Johnson now, who has always been one of my all time favorite fashion designers. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Betsey, she is known for punky, wacky, vintage inspired clothing. If you look at styles that she created thirty years ago, and compare them to her most recent shows, you wouldn't really be able to tell a difference. I've put some images from style.com's archive of her most recent shows on here. I think that it's easy to see why I love her stuff. Also, she is a wonderful person. I abosulety adore her and her business partner, Chantal. They are both genuinely kind, exuberant, firm but fun businesswomen; they have quickly become my fashion idols for when I have my own business.

I fit into Betsey as one of the new "technical desginers." Which is a broad-reaching term here. What I actually do is keep the charts and boards that we refer to up to date. Every day things are changing--this is shortened; this is going to a different factory; this is going to have pink contrast trim; this style number is changing; this fabrication is changing--and everyone needs to know about it. Besides that, I sort of fill in everywhere. For instance, recently I have fixed the sewing machine, I made the collars smaller on some samples we got in, I sketched some garments we were missing sketches for, I trooped through the garment district to find rubber buttons (close to impossible!), and was consulted on the creation of an intranet line sheet publishing website (in which I made *very* clear that I am anything but a webmaster!).

This is Betsey and her granddaughter:

And this is some of her stuff:

cute lil' animation

lights in the sky

Boy, the Thais sure know how to throw a celebration. This is a really short clip on BBC but I think it is just a beautiful image (I also really love the chubby lady at the beginning holding on to the edge of the balloon--she is *so* excited!). I really love the idea of a group of people creating something beautiful to celebrate a seasonal change. I'm thinking some extravagant celebrations in Prospect Park to mark the next full moon might be fun...

from old books

What a wonderful resource I just stumbled on! I need to share it with all of you...

This website is fromoldbooks.org, and it is just full of free images, in a variety of file sizes. They get really large so that you can actually use them for projects! Liam is the kind man who buys old books, creates high quality scans, and puts them up on the internet for us! While you are on the site you will also see links to other sites that have free art, but most of it seems to be stock image photography. Anyways, you should check it out!

http://www.fromoldbooks.org/