Several months ago I found this lovely T-Shirt dress (yes that is also the brand name) at St. Luke’s Thrift Shop in the West Village. They are located at 487 Hudson Street. It was on sale for half price and I really liked that it had a mid-1920’s look to it. The drop waist is an attractive twenties feature and I like the twist in the neckline. I was excited that I found myself another Anthropologie-type dress since I really like their website but can rarely afford to buy clothing from them new. Plus the whole idea of something further down the chain of production is great as far as I am concerned. This dress was the second t-shirt dress I found at St. Luke’s Thrift Shop last year. They generally have really good quality donations coming in on a regular basis, so I find the shop to be a great place to find a new outfit. Their shop is very small, which means they have a lot of sales to keep things moving quickly. The T-shirt dresses I bought were under $15 each! When items aren’t on sale expect them to be expensive for a thrift shop since it is the West Village. The quality of their clothing is really worth it though. If you want a real deal just wait for the sales, which is what I generally do!
I changed necklaces a few times for these shots. With a shift dress this simple it is all in the accessories to liven the look up. I didn’t have a super-long, heavier pearl necklace so in one photo I wore two pearl necklaces slightly different from one another, yet close enough in color. I look best in pale pink pearls as opposed to white. They match my skin tone best. I really like grey pearls though! I think they are super- elegant. The lariat necklace that is burgundy is one I made myself many years ago. It is supposed to portray my personality, in the colors and shapes that feel at home in my vision of myself. Of course I was somewhat limited in portraying all that by the shapes, in order to get the necklace to tie. However that was the basic concept behind the design. Lariat necklaces were big in the 1920’s. They were often very long, light and thin so they had the velocity to swing around when the ladies were doing the Charleston. If I had wanted to wear black accessories I could have worn the black Austrian crystal lariat necklace included in the photos for this post. The pearl necklace with white and blue beads I also made for myself years ago. I liked those bluish pearls that are around the center piece, which is an opal-colored teardrop.
The scarf I wore with the sweater is an old April Cornell scarf from when I worked at one of their shops years ago. My honey-brown sweater is from Uniqlo. The shiny beige shoes were from Target. I saved them since I really couldn’t wear them due to my bunion and hammertoe. Now finally I can wear them as long as I don’t walk too far. They don’t have the best support for my foot issues but they’d be fine to wear on occasion. I like that they have that 1920’s look with the little heel.
The flat shoes with four straps were a screaming deal I found at St. Luke’s Thrift Shop a couple of years ago for $25! They are John Fleuvog shoes and usually are very expensive. When I bought them they were practically new. They also have a 1920’s look with the four straps. I first saw shoes like these in the movie The Hours, in a scene where Virginia Woolf was at the train station. I wanted them that instant! It took a while but I finally found them! It took some patience to get them since the manager at the shop had separated the shoes because they were not part of a half-price sale. I kept calling and following up until finally the manager was available and took the other shoe out of hiding! Anyway John Fluevog shoes are wild, funny, zany and super-unique!! I am a big admirer of his shoe and boot designs.
Oh, I have a quick update on my right foot. Now I can run for ten minutes!! I couldn’t do that before my surgery! Those of you following the blog know I had surgery last September. I feel like Forest Gump when he kept shouting “I am running!”
Well I hope you enjoyed this post. I am sure some of you readers are also out looking for vintage or thrifted items and shopping further down the chain of mass production. If you haven’t started thrifting it might be a good goal to learn and discover how much fun it is. It is not only a great way to save some money on clothes but also a way to help out our planet at the same time. Every time you buy something vintage or thrifted it helps cut down on the energy involved in mass manufacturing. Plus I have also discovered that with thrifting it is not that difficult to find items that are made in the United States if you really look for them. This T-shirt dress was made in Los Angeles. If you would like to know more about the whole topic of the effect of mass production on our environment you could read my post about the book, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. Elizabeth Cline writes about her journeys traveling the world and learning about how much it costs our planet to be constantly buying mass-manufactured clothing. If you choose to read the book it really makes you think before you shop.
These framed pictures and household pieces are a few of the thrifted art items I have in my apartment. I am sure many folks have found wonderful art through scrounging around thrift shops or garage sales. I enjoy finding pieces that stir up some sort of memory I treasure. For me one of these pieces conjures up memories of going to the farmers market in Germany as a child. I always enjoyed going there, and waiting for my mother to buy vegetables and whatever else she needed for our household. At that time we lived in the center of town, not far from the opera house, the ice-skating rink and the cemetery where we took long walks. I also used to run off by myself sometimes (it was safe in Germany then for me to be alone) and go quietly spy on the sculpture artist who had a small cabin workshop at the cemetery. Don’t ask why I always hid from him. Perhaps I should have gone and talked to him, told him I liked watching him work. I was only about eight at the time. Anyway that whole area is a space I like to remember and this picture reminds me of it.
The smaller picture reminds me of the area up near the Met museum where there are street vendors selling art and books. This picture’s surroundings aren’t as full and hectic as NY but all the same that is what it reminds me of. I also think it looks very European, which I always like. There is something about the coloring in the picture that I find comforting. It isn’t raining, but the balance hangs between a possibly rainy day and the possibility of the sun coming out brighter. It evokes emotion, I like that. My mother was just talking to me about how grey Germany could be at times when we lived there. Perhaps that is what I am remembering when I see it.
I thrifted the small black hand-painted tray, as well as the small hand-painted plate that I have hanging on the wall. The plate has writing on it that says it is Royal Adams Titian Ware made in England. It also says The Wynbrook, established in 1857. Its cheerful colors have lightened up my room for years and I really enjoy seeing them. Both of these pieces have a lovely, European look and they are delicate little antiques that I treasure.
The Gauguin type painting I found in the street and immediately picked up and carted home years ago. It must have been some college student’s class project and they didn’t want it anymore. I think it is great and I really enjoy it hanging in my living room.
The sculpture I made from fallen wood and little tree cones and moss. These pieces of nature’s fallen parts all came from where my cats that I had years ago are buried. I wanted to take something from nature to remember them by. They are buried deep in the forest up in the mountains in Colorado. I will miss them forever, so this is my memory piece to have near me.
My daughter Emily has been creating a lot of photos of “Trashed Art.” She is making use of the natural environment and opening her vision to the possibilities. These three photos are from her latest collection of photos called “Trashed.”
It all comes down to “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” The trash in the street is only trash as long as you intend to see it only that way. There is something wonderful to the concept of waba-sabi. In the book Waba-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, the waba-sabi state of mind is described as “acceptance of the inevitable. Waba-sabi is an aesthetic appreciation of the evanescence of life. The luxuriant tree of summer is now only branches under a winter sky. All that remains of a splendid mansion is a crumbled foundation overgrown with weeds and moss. Waba-sabi images force us to contemplate our own mortality, and they evoke an existential loneliness and tender sadness. They also stir a mingled bittersweet comfort, since we know all existence shares the same fate.” (1) Emily has embraced waba-sabi in her photographs. That is a great thing since not everything is as it seems originally. Looking deeper is often a gift.
Emily Owens’s Trashed Art
Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren pg. 54
New York City is a huge city with a lot of frenetic energy. That is all the more reason to find and enjoy the lovely gardens that are spread throughout the city. My personal favorite is the Gardens at St. Luke in the Fields, which is at 487 Hudson Street in the West Village. Recently I found an East Village garden that is now another favorite in the lower Manhattan area. Nothing makes one care more about our planet and recycling than a good dose of nature. It is actually possible to sit in a tucked away corner of this garden and “get away from it all.” It is a beautiful place for meditation, or resting ones weary feet.
The Liz Christy Garden is Located at Houston Street between Bowery and Second Avenue. The term ”bowerie” is Dutch for farm. Many years ago, during the 17th century a large farm was at the site of the current Liz Christy Community Garden. At the time it was owned by “the last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam,” Peter Stuyvesant.(1)” What remained of the farm was in shambles during the 1970’s.
In 1973, local resident Liz Christy took an interest in the plot of land. She and the Green Guerillas, a community of gardening activists went to NYC’s Housing and Preservation and Development office to inquire about using the lot. Volunteers gathered to haul out debris, and installed a fence. In April of 1974, “NYC’s Housing and Preservation and Development approved the site for rental as “Bowery Houston Community Farm and Garden” for $1 a month (2).” Work began towards planting raised beds, adding of donated topsoil, and planting of vegetables, trees and flowers.
By the garden’s second year it won its “first Mollie Parnis Dress Up Your Neighborhood Award (3).” New York residents throughout the five boroughs were inspired to start similar gardens. In 1986 the Garden was named after its founder, Liz Christy. Massive renovations have been going on throughout the neighborhood for many years. In 1990, the Cooper Square Committee, “pledged to preserve the garden in its entirety (4).” In 2002, in a more recent agreement, the NYS Attorney General also agreed to preservation of the Liz Christy Garden.
The garden is open to the public year round. The hours are:
Saturday- Noon to 4Pm (All year)
Sunday-Noon to 4pm (May to Sept.)
Tues. and Thursday- 6pm to dusk (May to Sept.)
There is a donation box in the garden for donations towards tools and supplies to further the maintenance of the garden. There is also a website for the garden if you wish to find out more about it: http://www.lizchristygarden.us/
I hope you enjoyed this post and hopefully I can make it to another garden or two while the weather is warm to share more photos of lovely New York City gardens. I have always been a big fan of gardens and am a member of two gardens within the Brooklyn Land Trust. Years ago I visited Adam Purple’s Garden of Eden many times, actually on a regular basis when he had it on Rivington Street, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I remember Adam Purple from when I was a young adolescent walking with my family in Central Park years ago. He would bike ride to the park to collect horse manure for his garden. Adam always wore purple, thus his name Adam Purple. He raised vegetables and herbs in a garden outside of his apartment building after the building was condemned and abandoned. He distributed the fruits of his labor to the surrounding neighbors, and even me when I visited. He stayed living there and continued his garden until the city finally closed it down many years later, in 1986. I was one of the people who wanted to stop the bulldozer. Adam said the tree in the center was “sucking up too much water” and that eventually the tree would kill the garden anyway, so he seemed to have accepted that the garden had run its course. About his garden he said “It’s the Athenian oath.” “The Athenian oath. The duty and responsibility of every citizen to leave the scene a little better than when they got there, to improve things (5).” The city never could get him to leave his home though and eventually a new building was built there. He was guaranteed his home since he had been there so many years already. The world needs more people like Adam Purple and Liz Christy who nurture and tend to the soil, making beauty out of chaos and rubble.
There is the constant vein of fashion in this blog. I love recycling and my main goal here is still to inspire others to upcycle, wear vintage or thrifted items whenever possible. I have always enjoyed fashion; I find it inspiring. As a child, after my parents took me to the opera numerous times, I drew little drawings of women in those hoops skirts that wear so popular from the 1590’s through the mid-19th century. I especially liked the older ones, from the 1700’s, with the low plunging neck lines and super full skirts. I drew hundreds of them, designing them as I went along. I felt as if maybe I’d been born into the wrong era, things old and antique inspired me. I never thought about the fact that I was designing, I just did it. When I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology to show my portfolio I waited for four hours for the head of illustration. The head of design saw me out in the hallway all that time. He eventually asked me into his office and urged me to study design. It is a long story but I always regretted that I just didn’t wait longer for the head of illustration. Design is great, but I remained so devoted to art and illustration. I just never was able to go back to school for art after I became a single parent. Parenthood became my whole life for so long. My daughter has always been the best thing that ever happened to me, so for her life I am forever grateful. For the brief time that I did study fashion design, I remember how we always had to create a design and find twenty five ways to do it. The best way to get to the point that one can see something twenty five different ways is to be inspired. That leads us to art.
I have been doing more posts about art. I think art is very important for the reason that it feeds us, throughout our joys and struggles in life we need to return to what inspires us, what makes us feel alive. It makes me happy to share the art of others who have inspired me, touched my life in some way through their work. When I feel lost or weary, or worn down by life I can always return to their work, it inspires me and helps me to grow as a person on my own journey. I would also like to do some post about people who are doing art with recycled items. I am still working on that part.
I have never liked boredom. I enjoy keeping busy. If I am totally frazzled I will veg out and watch a movie. If I am relaxed, and want to relax further reading is a great vehicle to more relaxation. Years ago I realized that every time I sat down to read for twenty minutes I felt a difference in my nervous system. Everything seemed to calm down. Meditation helps also, to clear my mind, relax my body, and center my life from the chaos of things I can’t control. When I was a child I saw that my grandparents were raised with that notion that “idle hands are the work of the devil.” My parents tried to shield me from those extremes of thought- but the desire to create with my hands, do crafts and embrace creativity come partially from that old vein of thought. So I appreciate it from a certain standpoint and let go of the rest. Both my grandmothers loved sewing, both my grandfathers loved woodwork, one did carvings; and one went on to become a master carpenter and engineer in the Navy. One of my grandmothers attended a craft high school in the mountains of Georgia. Their love for creativity was passed down through the years and I am forever grateful.
I have been learning things about upcycling clothing. Seeing that I can have an idea, and then when I cut the fabric I can suddenly decide to change my mind, go a different route. It mirrors my life at times. Those times when we are at pivotal points in life and not sure what is going on, which way to go. The upcycling inspires me even further when I see how flexible I can suddenly become with it. The same is true with life, how things can seem so stagnant for a while, then suddenly a new flood gate opens, a new opportunity arises, things change. Just like some wind that has blown in from a different direction and everything suddenly shifts, quivers, and lands differently.
I thought I’d do a separate post called “The Morning Muse” but somehow I think they can go together , this blog birthday, and my what I refer to as my “Morning Muse.” I have been talking about this the last few months with a few people, here or there, and several people told me they appreciated me telling them how I became inspired to honor these moments the last year and a half. It just sort of slowly evolved into a habit. I felt as if I was getting up in the morning, only focusing on my stretches and leg exercises (I have arthritis and foot pain so this is a daily challenge I have to work with) then getting ready to go to work. So often I found that I was too tired or frazzled after a long work day, commuting to do anything creative at the end of the day. This had been happening so many times through the last few years I felt sad about it. I needed a change- so I started my “Morning Muse” routine. What that means is that even if it is only five to fifteen minutes I start something creative. Or if I have something in the process that isn’t completed I will devote five to fifteen minutes to it. I have noticed that this daily effort to focus on that muse has assisted me, in that I know, I have something unfinished waiting for me. I want to go back to it; I want to finish it. The mere act of starting it propels me further little by little. I definitely feel that going to Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2013 caught my creativity on fire. I still haven’t been able to do everything I was inspired to do; the city just threw fuel on my fire and changed my life. It was an amazing experience, to go to a place that I felt looks the most like my personality of any place I have ever been. I also think this “Morning Muse” routine could be helpful to people who aren’t necessarily creative as well. It is about doing something that focuses on who you are, what makes you tick. It doesn’t have to be something creative. It could just be doing something you find special that lightens your heart and makes your day better.
Music helps me to center myself and get into the place I want to be for the creativity to flow. For years I embraced silence- hour upon hour of silence. I still enjoy silence, I have found it to be incredibly healing, but I am so happy that I let the music flow back into my life more often. It not only helps me to get to that place where there is more inspiration, it helps to keep it flowing, growing and feeding the creative fire. There are a bunch of musicians I like who have helped my creative process. The past several months I like listening to a lot of Jack Hardy, who was a folk singer in the folk scene I used to hang out on in the West Village. I always liked his songs, but now they help my creativity return to that time when I felt that I was at my most creative, when I was young and it was as if my mind was on fire. I am older now, much more calm and centered. I enjoy that there is a bridge to carry me to that old inspiration and time though. I find it ignites my soul, keep me in touch with the soft spots, where there is plenty of room for more growth, more freedom of expression.
I am sharing this song of Jack Hardy’s “The Tailor” since I always loved how he expresses an opinion about clothing, fashion, disguising one’s self, the emptiness in something like competitiveness; the real nakedness that is always underneath and so evident despite everything people do to cover up their insecurities. At the end of the post I have also written out the lyrics to his song since I always have loved his lyrics, they are like poetry. Jack passed away on March 11, 2011. A bunch of his songs are available to hear on YouTube.
I also want to express how having this blog has been helping me not be quite so shy; I am one of those people who are initially shy. The only time this wasn’t a challenge was when I was in retail or wholesale sales, since the whole approach was different under those circumstances. Once I get comfortable I am fine, but there has always been this element of shyness underneath. The mere act of creating posts, taking pictures of myself for posts, and then finding readers has been helping me get over hurdles emotionally. I still am shy, but it is not the same now. The whole confidence factor is more solid. It really helps to express myself this way and to find that others are enjoying my process as well. In one of my earliest post I wrote about not being allowed to express my thoughts much as a child. My biological father was rather controlling. I also wrote in that post about how I found clothing to be my first easy way to express rebellion. It is important for me to have a voice, as it is for all of us. I have attached a picture I found in magazine years ago. I have been wild about that phrase “I send a voice, let me be free” ever since I saw this picture.
And so my blog is having its first birthday. It has been rewarding, challenging and a lot of work. I finally feel like I am finding ways to create more frequent posts, and for them to not all be so time consuming. I came up with a different plan of cycles of posts. Some of them involve lots of research and hours of figuring out how to write what I want to write. Others are not so complicated. I plan to alternate these in such a way that only once or twice a month am I doing hours of research, so that the other times I can focus on creating the photos, loading them and all the technical things one deals with while having a blog. I also have a facebook page, you are welcome to like it if you wish. The URL is :https://www.facebook.com/rewindreduceandrecycle. There are times I share different things on there since it is not the blog.
I really admire people who manage to have a zero waste lifestyle. Lauren Singer, from Trash is For Tossers is an example. (http://www.trashisfortossers.com/) I would like to work towards that goal myself eventually, but for right now I realize “Easy does it.” I am a person who really enjoys recycling things, finding ways to cut down on packaged items and I am doing a lot already. As time goes by I am able to do more and more, so I also aim to share these with you. All of us have choices and our choices do have an effect on our planet, the more conscious we become of them the more we can do.
I appreciate those of you who have been logging on regularly and reading the posts. Also, thanks to several of you who have shared the various blog posts with others. My mother and daughter have been very supportive, and that has been wonderful. I hope you enjoyed this post and are having a great time outdoors this summer!
Lyrics to The Tailor
By Jack Hardy:
“The king’s guards man’s greedy, he’s underpaid he knows
Tailor sew me a cloak of indigo, that will disguise me well for the highway’s game
No one will suspect evil and the king’s cross are the same
I will pay you dearly with half of what I claim
No said the tailor, the tailor said no
A cloak will not hide what your own eyes see
A cloak will not change what is hidden underneath
Just as mind does not confine the idea of what I am
I am not a tailor, I am a man
The king’s queen is hungry for the pleasures adultery knows
Tailor sew me a cloak of scarlet, that will disguise me well for courting on the sly, that will make the fever transparent to the night’s eye
I will pay you dearly with favors and with sighs
No said the tailor, the tailor said no,
A cloak will not hide what your own eyes sees, a cloak will not change what is hidden underneath,
Just as mind does not confine what I am, I am not a tailor, I am a man
The king he is frightened with shadows behind his back
Tailor sew me a cloak of sable, that will disguise me well from the daggers of my foes, that will keep me far above those that are below
I will pay you dearly if you fail on the gallows
No said the tailor, the tailor said no
A cloak will not hide what your own eyes see
A cloak will not change what is hidden underneath
Just as mind does not confide the idea of what I am, I am not a tailor, I am a man.”
