Friday, August 31, 2012

Crash and Burn 4-day Labor Day Sale!



The amazing Crash and Burn Apparel is running a massive four day long Labor Day sale, starting today and running through until September third! You can score a discount of 25% off the entire site by using promo code CBLABOR at checkout. Add onto that free shipping on all orders over $100. Awesome, right?

I don't think that I need to persuade you to shop there any more than I already have, but just in case you need some more temptation, here's some of my fave picks from their shop! (Click the images to do directly to their pages!)














I sooo wish I could go blow up my bank account on their site (especially since Kathryn's birthday is coming up soon and she needs gifts!) but I am all tapped out until next Friday! So go, buy some clothes for me! No, I don't mean buy them and send them to me. Unless...you'd be down with that. That would be pretty rad of you. Don't give me that look, I am so kidding! ...Kinda.

GO GO GO!

Thursday, August 30, 2012

94; Malleus Maleficarum











Stained glass dress: c/o Romwe Vest: Romwe Creepers: Demonia (eBay) Choker: Cobra Shop Fishnets: Hot Topic Bracelets: miscelaneous Necklace and earrings: c/o Vanessa Mooney





Kathryn and I agreed that I look like the protagonist anti-hero from a late 90s vampire movie with Catholic symbolism/undertones/basically "Constantine" but more "Matrix." (Wait, isn't Keanu Reeves in both of those movies? WEIRD.) When you put a leather vest-trenchcoat with a stained glass church window dress, I guess that just happens.

So I was graciously gifted this by Romwe -- y'all know who they are! -- and what the deal is, is that they let me pick what I want to be sent. I have no idea what is up with this dress but I had to have it. This dress just glows with colour, between the firey red and electric turquoise. It's so intense and eyecatching! I also had a pair of leggings sent to me, and you'll be seeing those next. They're insane. They're carrying quite a few of these awesome print-screened items, and they're really amazing!




 And now you can tell how short I am in comparison to how short the dress is on this model, and how long it is on me. Weeping.


The heart-breakingly beautiful jewelry was given to me by the lovely people at Vanessa Mooney. I was on my way home from a butt-bustingly exhausting ride home from the Cape, I'd been up since 3am and had been moving non-stop, when I saw their email telling me they wanted to send me jewelry. I opened the .pdf on my iPhone and freaked out. "NO FREAKING WAY," I thought. This is just half of what they sent me, and Instagram buddies probably saw the photo with the other two necklaces that came in the package. I am wearing everything constantly, in fact I think I first wore this necklace specifically to go out to McDonald's for a snack. #memories

I can't fathom their jewelry. Come Christmas, I'll probably beg and whine for people to buy me more of their stuff. And to be honest, I'll be buying some myself.




VM, don't ever stop being perfect, okay?



Sooo I might be changing the name of this blog in the near future. I get bored with the same name after too long. Our names on the internet are our identities, and as you can clearly see, mine is pretty fluid.

I'm going to give it a few weeks, mull it over, do some more reasearch, and all that. I won't change it on you guys overnight -- don't want you checking your dashboards and thinking "who the hell is that? When did I start following them?" Nah, you'll know when it's coming...I hope.


Title reference -- yeah, not quite the obvious!

Friday, August 24, 2012

93; A PSA on Small Businesses











Dress: The Dead Zone, Hyannis ☯ Belt: Tunnel Vision ☯ Boots: Aldo Shoes ☯ Seashell choker: Moon Dragon Designs Chain and bead bib: Target Earrings: DIY Elephant necklace: Etsy vintage





Someone asked me on my post before last if the seashell choker was of my creation...it is not, but the lady who made it lives in town and I linked to her website up there. She makes great stuff, and does custom orders, so I urge you to check her shop out! I'm actually wearing a large sized anklet that I added a tiny bit of extra chain to.

90% of this ensemble has been outfitted by small business products! This is why I love to support small businesses -- they offer unique products, amazing customer service, and you know your money is going to deserving, hard-working people. But you know what I have discovered? That some small businesses are just as money-hungry and two-faced as big retail corporations, especially in tourist/vacation areas. I urge you to read the daunting text wall below, only so that you can better understand what I have recently been through.

I am typically very excited to visit Hyannis at the Cape on the summers that I am able to go, and what I am eager to do most of all is shop. There are some wonderful stores where hippie/bohemian clothes can be found, India Clothing being one of my key favourites. For two summers we drove by one shop, The Dead Zone, but we never managed to actually stop by. Last month I was very happy when I was out with Kathryn and her sister and we finally made a point to check it out on our last day on the coast. Lookin at all of their clothes, jewelry, and wall tapestries, I was already enchanted into taking some stuff home, and when they told me how they do rewards cards -- every ten dollars spent deserves a stamp, and after ten stamps, you get a discount -- I was all over that.

The Dead Zone is where I purchased this dress. Well, I meant to purchase it, and a few other items, but it turned out that my debit card was declined. It was a few days before pay day and I hadn't kept the keenest eye on my balance. Kathryn was buying some stuff for her and her sister, and was kind enough to put my stuff on her card and told me I could pay her back on payday. Awesome.

So the lady rang the order up, which came out to over a hundred dollars. Kathryn and I looked at each other expectantly. This meant we could get a fully stamped discount card to bring back later in the summer, or perhaps next summer, to get a discount on our next purchase! Everything worked out for the best!

Until the lady pulled out two separate cards, and stamped six stamps on one, and five on the other, and handed them to each of us. Since, you know, sixty dollars of the order was my stuff that Kathryn had just paid for.

We were furious. It didn't matter that sixty dollars worth of the order was what I would have bought -- Kathryn was the one that shelled out over a hundred dollars to cover my declined card and the fact that her sister didn't have any money for the dress she wanted. That's a single order made by one customer. They didn't hand her sister a card with two stamps on it because Kathryn was paying for her dress! And honestly, the dress I bought and am wearing here was bought with the idea of sharing it with Kathryn -- I also bought a wall tapestry for our shared room, so neither product was 100% for me alone.

So they made a big deal about this discount card only to split it up between the customer paying, and a person that wasn't paying, preventing us from actually aquiring this discount which would have ensured our return. I understand the idea, that the manager probably wants us to come back and spend more money before we are able to get some freebies out of them, but honestly? I'm not going back there on my next trip, because that's a skeezy practice. It doesn't matter how many girls walked into the store and picked stuff out. If one of them is covering the cost, it's that one person's bill.


I have become rather irked by the business practices in some of the places in Hyannis... The evening before this mishap, one restaurant had an alarmingly aggressive reaction when we three shared a couple of orders of food, instead of ordering three main (and highly expensive) entrées, and the waiter (who we were 90% sure was also the owner) gave us cold glares and would barely tell us the time of day. Last summer I found a booth selling Native American jewelry, and upon inquiring over the price of a broken choker, the man said he would sell it to me discounted and "would throw on a charm to it as well." When he was finished and I handed him the fifteen dollars I had been told the necklace would be, he told me it would be an extra nine dollars for the charm he had attached onto it, and was taken aback when I had told him how he lead me to believe it would be free. I begrudgingly hashed out the extra near ten dollars for the small bone-carved feather pendant, only because I had just bought a pair of earrings from him an hour prior and they matched this specific charm.

The saddest part is, there is no real way of knowing if you'll be caught in these expensive, headache-inducing traps by small business owners until you've already been lured in by the quaint charm and friendly smiles. It's not even entirely a question of "you live and learn," there are no real cues you can pick up early on in the exchange that are red-light indicators that this person is just waiting to wring some extra cash out of you. You just have go to in blindly, and see what the experience in that one situation ends up being. When you find a place that is reliable, wonderful; become a repeat customer and support their cause. When you find places like these, that twist the rules and deceive you, or treat you terribly because you're working with a frugal allowance and choose the more money conscious route for dinner and somehow offend them because they're a small business so obviously they need the money so how dare you not abide by that, however...the best you can do is walk out of that building more aware, and I suppose all you can do is make sure that other future patrons aren't manipulated the same way you had just been.

Business owners would not survive without their customers, and when they treat their customers poorly, they aren't deserving of their time or support.


Ugh, I have so many other notes about this outfit...like how I wore this for a very special holiday -- Naag Panchami (which explains the bindi business) -- or how I was wearing this when, for the first time ever, I caught someone in public pointing and laughing behind their hand at what I was wearing. I feel as though this post is long enough as it is, so if you have questions, as always, hit me up on Formspring.

Friday, August 17, 2012

92; Addicted to Love








And then BAM SCENERY CHANGE.




sweater: Old Navy ☯ bustier and purse: Hot Topic ☯ jeans: thrifted DIY ☯ Docs: eBay ☯ tattoo choker: the Cobra Shop ☯ leather choker: Spencer's ☯ Native American malachite earrings: flea market ☯ belt: Etsy • biker shorts: DIY






I think I seriously rock overgrown roots. My hair always looks the best when I've let my roots come in, and I mean like, two months of rootage here. Especially with this outfit, where I look like a sixteen year old girl trying so hard to be hardcore, but all she has is her ex-biker mom's older clothes and a slim-picking thrift store downtown. Is that...oddly specific? I love stories okay.

I can't even describe how old these photos are. I have one other outfit set taken back in late July for Naag Panchami on the backburner, as well. It's been a blur of work, exhaustion, and sleep. Wasted most of my summer on working and being pretty brain dead. A select few of you people might recall this Formspring video answer I made where I explain how Kathryn and I met through the geekiest of means, IE. a roleplay group online? Yeah I might've gotten back into that business, and that's taken up some free time as well. I think I've written novel-lengths of text in the past three months, holy crap. Old hobbies die hard, man.

So I ceased proper functioning and Kathryn got a breakthrough at her job ($$$ if you catch my drift), so I suddenly didn't have this pressure to make as much money as possible for our necessities, and we decided I'm gonna cut back on work a little and return back to my hobbies. BLOGGING INCLUDED. SPECIFICALLY BLOGGING. I'd like to say that in my time not blogging I've still been looking fab but not really, not at all. I haven't even had the energy to dress nicely just because. It's been depressing!

And I've been lost without my beautiful blogger babes to fawn over and chat with, I can't even describe. I need to like, trade cell phone numbers for texting times. I am like, miles left behind in the dust and I am floored that my blog reader count hasn't dropped. You people are fucking perfect beings, okay? I love all of ya. No, seriously.

I have some other outfit ideas lined up, some collaborations to show you, and before you know it, fall will be here and this will become The New England Winter Clothing Marathon until May 2013 AREN'T YOU STOKED. (Because I certainly am not.) And I hope to volunteer at Boston Fashion Week at the end of September, so...!


--WOW KATHRYN JUST REMINDED ME what the fuck ever happened to Soulmates?! I can not wait until I have more hours in a day to live, this is going to be mindblowing.