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Just a little treasure that I picked up in Austin at Parts & Labour. They carry wonderful locally made things. It’s very, very hard to choose just one or two items to take home, but if you blow your budget at least you can feel good about supporting local artists! Click the photo to go to the artist’s site.
I just love them!
That’s most of ‘em. The warmer ones are stowed away until cool weather returns. They’re my uniform most weekdays — cardigan, camisole, trousers, jewelry. I look polished but I’m super-comfortable and I didn’t even have to iron or tuck anything in. Nobody really knows how lazy I truly am just by looking at me. I also carry one whenever I’m wearing a sundress or sleeveless shirt, since I’m always cold. I prefer 3/4-length sleeves, which work most of the year in Houston if you’re an office-dweller like me. I have a soft spot for a good cashmere sweater, but I think the most versatile fabric for everyday wear is an acrylic blend, which is easy to care for and still looks good after countless washes. My current favorite source for the perfect cardigan is Express. Mine are probably the most frequently worn items in my wardrobe, but they still look nearly new. Like my Lolë dress, one item that’s been getting a lot of wear lately is this buckled cuff that I picked up from Editors’ Closet:
It looks black, but it’s a very dark purple. It’s by Seattle designer Tara Sauvage. She’s been around awhile, designing accessories for other companies, but now she has her own line. Rocco e Dante is named after her two pugs, who help with the inspiration and modeling. Her bracelets are fun, with the tough-girl, rock ‘n’ roll styling that I’m a sucker for — I had a hard time choosing between this and the zipper cuff. Maybe next time her line comes to Editors’ Closet I’ll pick up the other! I think I have worn this dress almost every weekend since the weather got warm enough:
This is the first piece of clothing I’ve bought from Lolë, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. It wears like a t-shirt, but it has some nice little details like the collar and the tiny zippered pocket at the waist. You could easily fit a chapstick, a small cell phone, or your ID and some cash in there. It dries pretty quickly, so it’s been no problem to decide the night before that I want it for the next day and throw it in the washer. I wish I had it in every color, but my other dresses might get jealous. Maybe one or two more couldn’t hurt… We all know that we should be wearing sunscreen. But what if almost everything you thought you knew about sunscreen was wrong? The Environmental Working Group is a non-profit group of science and policy experts who review scientific literature and do some in-house work for the benefit of public health and the environment. Their 2010 Sunscreen Guide took a look at 500 beach and sport sunscreens and recommended a mere eight percent of them. The offenses:
What does the FDA have to say about all this? Not much; they’ve been working on sunscreen regulations for over 30 years and still haven’t finalized any. Well, what about the Skin Cancer Foundation seal of approval? It’s available for any SPF 15+ product, with a $10K donation. So what should you look for? Forget the SPF 50+ sunblocks, for starters. According to BASF research, you’re not going to get better UVA protection than SPF 20, and you may not get any if you simply trust the claims on the front of bottle. So apply liberally and often. Really, you need to reapply it! I’m certainly guilty of not reapplying as much as I should. It just seems like so much work when I come back from a vigorous swim and sand gravity sets in. Your best bet for broad-spectrum protection is a mineral sunblock — something containing zinc or titanium. Mexoryl and avobenzone get EWG’s go-ahead, as well. The hard part is that you’re not going to find a lot of these at the drugstore. Again, you can’t go by the claims on the bottle — you need to read the ingredients. Either shop online or make a list of the good ingredients and bad ingredients and bring it with you. You could also check EWG’s ratings and write down a few brands. I found a small array of mineral sunblocks at my local Whole Foods. Some of them were imported and were outrageously expensive. I decided to try one by Goddess Garden, which was one of the better values per ounce:
I tested it on Saturday, as we were supposed to go to Galveston Island for the day. We never got there, but I did wear the sunblock all day while we did errands around town. My first impression was that it is a lot thinner than the chemical sunscreens that I’m used to, but getting it absorbed still takes some work. To my eye, there was still a faint whitish cast to my skin for a little while after it was absorbed, but that is probably to be expected with titanium, which helps give some paints their opacity. I wouldn’t call it greasy, but it does have a little bit of the typical, heavy sunscreen feel when it first goes on. This particular sunscreen has a light, pleasant lavender smell which dissipates fairly quickly. That’s all well and good for the beach, but I’m not sure it’s a product I want to use on my face on a daily basis. EWG does have ratings for moisturizers and makeup with SPF, which I’m going to have to check out. I’ve been using this product for a pretty long time and love it:
Excuse the scuffed and dirty appearance of my bottle — it travels in my gym bag every day. It does double-duty for me as a primer and a sunscreen, but to my disappointment the ingredient list contains both retinyl palmitate and oxybenzone — they even tell you right on the front that it contains vitamin A! I’m not too concerned for now because I work in an office and am not exposed to much sunlight, but I suppose I won’t be wearing it to the beach and will have to do some shopping once I finish the bottle. With my big vacation for the year fast approaching, I did a little shopping. If you recall, I was in the mood for a stack of gold bangles. These were exactly what I had in mind, but the $100 price tag was not working for me:
I haven’t resolved the gold flip-flops issue. It seems like all the pairs I like the most have terrible reviews on Zappos. My sister says Havaianas are worth the price, but I’m still thinking. I used to have rubber flip-flops in a rainbow of colors, but hours of Stacy & Clinton convinced me it was time to start wearing real shoes when I’m not at the beach, and I got rid of almost all of them — so now I wear leather flip-flops around town all summer, instead. I like to tell myself they’re slightly more respectable. :) I can never decide whether it’s more fun to send a care package or receive one, but someone important to me was in the hospital recently so I put together a little pick-me-up for her:
The hardest part was to stop shopping! What would be a must-have if you received a care package? Tops on my list would probably be Swedish Fish, followed by a book of crosswords or sudoku. I can’t help but love octopuses. Octopi. Whichever you prefer. It’s hard not to be fascinated by such a strange, smart, tough creature, and it seems a lot of people are fans (check out some of Miss Monster’s popular tentacle stuff!). Here are a few little octopus baubles that have caught my eye:
Finally, one I’ve admired for four or five years: Yep, I’m a sucker for octopuses. When my sister and I get a really good deal on something, we like to tease our husbands about how much money we saved them. Sort of like when you get such a good coupon that you’d be losing money if you didn’t buy something with it. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Mark and I recently planned our big vacation for the year — we are going to Hawaii for a week and a half! I am so excited that I quickly commenced with the fantasy-shopping of swimsuits and such, and came across something at Bluefly that I actually needed — a pretty new cover-up, at an irresistible price:
Next up, I need the perfect beach playlist for my ipod. Any suggestions? I love nail polish, but I can’t be trusted not to mess up painted fingernails immediately, which is why I usually just do my toes — I don’t write or cook with them (aren’t you glad to know you can safely accept a dinner invitation from me?) and nobody gets close enough to notice a dent or a smudge. Or sheet imprints. How do I always get sheet imprints on my nails, hours after I’ve painted them? For the last year I’ve used a quick-dry oil on the occasions that I wanted to paint my fingernails, and it worked pretty well, but I still had to sit around with my hands in the air for a while afterward to keep from denting the polish. Plus my topcoat kept getting destroyed by my daily sunblock, which really makes all the effort seem pointless. When I ran out of the quick-dry oil, I decided to try a quick-dry topcoat that I found at the grocery store:
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