Beatrix Potter

"I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense..."

A few people asked about my dogs in my last outfit post, but instead of talking about them I thought I would show you guys a slightly more unusual member of my family; my pet chicken, Beatrix Potter. She's named after the children's book writer because we had so many birds named after Beatrix Potter characters, including a chicken named Henny Penny and two ducks named Jemimah and Mr. Drake Puddleduck. So I decided to continue the tradition!

Beatrix Potter's books were my favorites growing up, and I visited her house in the Lake District a few times, and I really cannot think of a more beautiful place on earth. Her quote, above, shows a lovely way of living, and explains perfectly the way I try to live my life; by retaining a sense of wonder about the world, rather than getting lost in the cynicism that surrounds us.

Anyway, isn't Beatrix cool? She's ten years old which is kind of unheard of for a chicken, if they live to a natural old age they normally die when they are about four or five. So basically she's a total badass grandma. She likes playing pranks too, she steals salad off our plates if we eat outside, and she doesn't like my brother so she always flies into the house and poops on his bed! I find this hilarious but he doesn't really think it's that amusing. I'm going to miss Beatrix and my dogs when I go back to New York. Whenever I'm away from my animals, like when I'm travelling or when I was in college, I turn into a creepy dog stalker and want to pet every dog I see!

These boots are one of my favorite items of clothing. I got them in a flea market in Berlin. They are so 80s and I love it.

I tried to take some pictures with a sign because I thought it might be a fun business card idea, but I couldn't get them to take without the sign looking washed out. I wish I had the money to buy Photoshop.

Ankle Boots: Vintage; Tights: Target; Dress: Topshop; Headband: Hand Made

Do you have a favorite pet?

Cooking Adventures: Drunken Damsons with Chocolate

As promised, here is the first (of many hopefully!) baking post I have to share with you. We are pretty much up to our ears with plums at my house, so I thought I would start by making drunken Damsons. Drunken damsons normally come from Damson gin, but since we aren't currently making any of that I had to create my own.

The recipe, which is from the amazing Green and Black's Cookbook calls for:

8 plums, pits removed and cut in half

2 tablespoons water

2 oz sugar

4 tablespoons gin
Sorry, these are all British measurements, so you need a scale to weigh your ingredients with. Put the plums in a saucepan with the sugar and water, and poach them gently for ten minutes. Remove from heat, stir in gin, and leave to cool for 2 hours.

Hints: Since I love poached plums, and they can be a wonderful dessert by themselves or with ice cream, I tripled this recipe and put the leftovers in a mason jar to use later. The most important thing is not to add too much water, because the juices of the fruit come out by poaching anyway. Just use enough so that the sugar doesn't burn initially. My greatest advice is to taste, taste, taste. Fruit is tricky because it can sometimes be under ripe or sour for other reasons. Don't be afraid to add more sugar! My rule is if it doesn't taste good before you cook it, it won't taste good after.

Now for the best part, the chocolate:

3.5 oz sugar

8 medium eggs

18 oz dark chocolate (to save some money I used a bag of regular chocolate chips and then a bar and a half of good quality 80-100% chocolate)

9 oz unsalted Butter (that's 2 and 1/8th sticks)

Damsons

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Butter a 8in shallow pie dish or 8 ramekins.

Whisk together the eggs and sugar until pale and creamy. Melt the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl suspended over a saucepan of barely simmering water. Mix the chocolate mixture and the drained fruit into the egg and sugar mixture. Pour into the dish or divide between the ramekins ensuring that there is fruit in each one.

Bake for 12 minutes for the pie dish or 6 minutes for the ramekins, until firm to the touch, but still slightly wobbly. Leave to cool and serve with cream or ice cream.

Hints: Either this recipe lies, or my oven is a little off, or i didn't use a shallow enough dish. I ended up having to cook this for 40 mins before it was done. I would put the timer on for 12 mins and be vigilant about checking it after that. The oven is on pretty hot, so you don't want it to burn!

I reserved some of the plums so I could place them artfully on the top, I think it looks nicer that way.

This could easily serve 10 people, it is so rich!

Let me know if you have any questions about the recipe. Have you been cooking up anything delicious?

Floral-tastic

This was the most annoying shoot! My tripod broke and two of the legs kept awkwardly slipping. I guess that's what I get for using my Dad's 30 year old tripod. It's kind of funny, the tripod has teeth marks on the bottom from a lion that got a little angry when my dad was photographing it in Africa. I love that it has a story. Hopefully I'm taking good enough photos to live up to it!

The lighting was also really weird and I kept on jumping around trying to get the shadows off my face. Then I almost fell down the hill. I brought my dog with me, and he just sat there looking at me like I was nuts.

It has been so wonderful being home, I have been seeing old friends, cooking up a storm, and going for beautiful walks. Isn't this necklace amazing? I got it from Arkay, which has tons of fun stuff. Check it out if you're in San Francisco!

Sandals: UO; Dress: F21; Earrings: Handmade; Charm Bracelet: Vintage

Four Simple Goals

The lovely Elsie, of A Beautiful Mess posted this fun idea on her blog. You can find the instructions here, but the general idea is that you pick four simple, life fulfilling goals, and document the time you spend working on them.

4 Simple Goals:

Document my cooking adventures. Anyone who knows me in “real” life knows that I am somewhat of a cooking nut. Well let’s be honest here, it’s really more about the baking. Anything sweet and homemade and I am totally on board. I want to show you guys how I make jam and ice cream, and some of my favourite recipes.

Take more outfit photos. This is one thing I really put off a lot, which is so funny, because it’s the reason why I started this blog. I have to find a way to make it a better experience. I often find that the editing and posting my outfit photos on so many other sites besides my blog take the joy out of it a little bit.

Paint my room. I am moving out to go to New York, but my room has been pretty much the same since I was in 8^th grade! My parent’s house is always my base when I come back from my travels and am searching for my next destination, so it would be lovely to have a good creative space waiting for me. It would also be nice for my parent’s guests, who might not appreciate the peace signs and high school pictures adorning my room!

Strive to be happy. I think this job hunt and move are going to be pretty stressful, and I want to make sure that happiness is my first priority. Whether it be taking a break to go for a walk, exploring, doing yoga, or spending time with friends, I want to make a conscious effort not to let myself get too wound up in sorting out the boring parts of my life.

I already started on the strive to be happy one with these pictures. They were all taken during my travels last year, and reminiscing about that never fails to put a smile on my face!

Is anyone else doing this? Send me links to your posts. I want to hear all about it!

Farewell to Maude

Here it is: the sign that the road trip is officially over. We sold Maude the Mercedes yesterday, and I had to take some pictures with her to say goodbye. It was a little sad, she was the third lady on our road trip, and source of endless fun. She is most definitely the best car I've ever had and I'll miss her fancy features. Normally I would be a good blogger and black out the license plate, but she has a brand new one now so I don't need to worry about that.









Loafers: Thrifted, Skirt: Thrifted, Lion Belt: Vintage, Shirt: H&M

I kind of like how over exposed these ones are, it gives you an idea of how sweltering the sun was (at 6:00 at night...New Jersey, what is your deal?).





And what would a farewell be without the requisite side view mirror pic?



I bought this skirt at a Goodwill in New Jersey, and I'm having a little quandary about it. The best bit of the skirt is the bottom, which has large peacocks printed all the way around it. However, the skirt is mid calf length, and I don't really think I'm ballsy enough to embrace that style, especially since all it makes me think of is the outfits my mother and all of her friends used to wear in the mid 90s...they were big fans of Laura Ashley. And mom jeans. But that's another story. Perhaps I should just embrace my inner 90s, because according to the New York Times the Elaine Benes style is back, and let's face it, I do love Seinfeld. Anyway, I pinned up the skirt because I love it short, but I couldn't bring myself to cut off the bottom. Any ideas?

I am back in California, after some slightly rash decision making (aka I decided on Thursday I wanted to go home and was back at 9am on Friday morning; thank you air miles!) I have arrived safe and sound and ready to eat delicious farmer's market food, hang out in some weather that is far from the obscenely hot NYC heat, and see my friends and family.

What is your favorite part of visiting home?

Music Monday - The Wassaic Project

This is a fairly massive post, but I just can't help it because The Wassaic Project was too awesome for words.

Wassaic is a beautiful litte town in New York, and the festival is run once a year by The Wassaic Project, an artist community that is based out of Luther Barn and Maxon Mills, which are beautiful unused farm buildings. This festival was nothing like the other ones I've been to recently; it is very small (I guessed that there were maybe 1,000 people there throughout the weekend, but at each performance there were between 50-200 people) and therefore had a great sense of community. I loved recognizing people as they moved from gallery to stage to campfire, and it was wonderful having all of the artists in our midst.

I went with my friend Peter and we had a great time trying to point out our favorite "urban woodsman" specimen. Has anyone heard about this? Apparently it's a new sub-classification of hipster. I think it's hilarious! Plus, I guess I secretly have a soft spot for urban woodsmen because I once dated a guy who my friends called "the arrogant lumberjack" because of his love for flannel, his beard, and complicated sentence structure.

Maxon Mills is probably one of the most excellent arts spaces I have ever been in. Because it is an old mill it is incredibly tall, so we ended up climbing dizzying amounts of stairs, but I think because of that we all got to know each other a little bit better...I mean, what's more of an ice breaker than rubbing up against someone in a tiny staircase? Most of the rooms that came off the stairs had tons of windows, and the soft natural light was a beautiful addition to the surreal feeling the art installations created.

I loved every bit of what we saw, but these were my three favorites:

Jonathan Bogarin, "Was it Evening or Afternoon"

Ben Cuevas, "Transcending the Material"

Henry Klimowicz's amazing cardboard installation was in the highest level of the mill, and it was like being in some kind of martian fairy cardboard cocoon. I wanted to stay there for hours.

During the day the music was on the Maxon Mills porch, and there was poetry in between sets. The poetry was a wonderful idea, because there is nothing worse than waiting through setups and sound checks for ages. Of the daytime sets Hannah Cohen's beachy vocals and Sebastian Blanck's amazing guitar skills were the standouts.

In the evening the party moved up to the Luther Barn, where the stage was set up at the bottom of a hill, complete with whimsical lights and the beautiful tiled roof of the barn as a backdrop.

Spirit Family Reunion started off with a sweet folk performance, and She Keep Bees followed with some hilarious moments and Jessica Larrabee's wailing siren of a voice. My personal favorite of the night were Pearl and the Beard. Each of them is such a strong vocalist, and their raging harmonies and the addition of a kazoo and various other interesting percussion instruments to their trio of guitar, drums, and cello made every song more exciting than the last. I swear, the cellist must have to replace her bow after every performance, she has so much energy!

What really made this festival wonderful was the free pancake breakfast on Sunday morning. I mean really, what more could you want?

My favorite questions from the weekend:

What kind of fairy are you?

and

How did you manage to Beadazzle your face?

Flower Headband: Homemade, Dress: Thrifted, Sandals: Gap

I finally put up a followers button and got a twitter. I feel like I have officially inaugurated myself into the blogosphere!

Also...I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get rid of underlines on links. Anyone know?

Daisy Days

Well dear readers, I have some exciting news to report. I am moving to New York! I am so excited to experience a new city. I can’t wait to explore and find my favourite parks, bookstores and cafes. Having lots of bloggers around is going to be so much fun too.

I have been searching for a job in New York for a little while now, but no luck yet. It has been a little soul destroying! I was kind of hoping for something cool and awesome but I think at this point I will probably settle for an admin job. That’s ok because I am constantly moving around so hopefully next year I’ll move onto a different city or adventure and find myself doing something exciting. Is anyone else on the job hunt too? I need someone to commiserate with!

It feels good to do an outfit post again, although I am still without resources because I haven’t been able to go back to California yet and pick up my clothes. I am hoping to make it back there in time to catch a little of the peach harvest...my family told me they are having a bumper crop this year. I’m looking forward to making lots of delicious peach jam.

This purse is a recent purchase, mostly because I need one that looks presentable at interviews. I got it very discounted but even then, it was a bit of a stretch price wise! It is so beautiful though and the leather is like buttah. I was on a long train ride with a friend and she pointed out that I had absentmindedly been stroking my purse the whole time. It is that soft!

Sandals: Gap, Skirt: Thrifted, Shirt: H&M, Scarf: Vintage, Purse: Abro

The Last of the Epic Road Trip

Well...this is the last post of the epic road trip. I'm pretty sad it's over. We are selling Maude the Mercedes this week. It's going to be a sad day...she was like the third lady on our road trip!

This last set of pictures is from Michigan. Elise and I met up with the lovely Andrea of Blonde Bedhead in Lansing. She took us to a fun breakfast place, Mama Bear’s which we loved because of the local food and delicious pancakes. She told us to check out the university which was great advice. We had fun running through the wooded campus and even went in to the library and looked up old dissertations from the 60s. Ok...I admit it, I'm a huge library dork. I guess that's what you get from being a total bookaholic. (Which sounds way more badass than bookworm, obviously.)

I bought this outfit at the Urban Outfitters in Toronto after having the overwhelming urge to burn my tiny amount of clothes that I brought with me because I have worn the same thing Every. Single. Day.

After Lansing we went for a swim in beautiful Lake Michigan and checked out the town of Three Oaks, which was having a small music festival. I found a rare copy of Diane di Prima's Kerhonkson Journal at a bookstore there and nearly died with happiness. The town is very progressive and I found the contrast between the richly decorated storefronts and the decaying buildings striking. Elise got a bit sick of me taking pictures of all of the ivy and brick that we passed!

Elise was really excited about the piggy meat inside the butcher.

I was more excited about the piggies outside.

We had some amazing flatbread pizza from a travelling brick oven.

One of the aforementioned ivy shots.