Check out my sweet Zazzle products!

So last night I decided I needed business cards. As I am moving ever closer to my graduation date, it seemed like a smart thing to do. The more business cards I hand out now, the more people who will potentially call me for costume design work once I am out of school.

I eventually decided on this amazing site Zazzle.com, and made myself some pretty kick ass business cards, if I do say so myself. And not only did I custom design my own business card, but you can customize all kinds of items. There is even the option of posting your designs on their website to sell, and you get a cut in the royalties of every item you design! I told you: kick ass. So below is my first posted design item, which is available to be further customized or ordered as is. And not only would you get to wear this amazing tie when you order it, but $3 of the $29.95 you'll pay for the tie goes to me! So please support a starving college student. Buy my tie.

Bird Tiebynationoflove
Get this custom tie at Zazzle

Or you can check out all of my products in the gallery below. Enjoy!

OMG SHOES

So I am obsessed with etsy.com. I literally use my spare/bored time to just browse around and drool over the many things I wish I could buy but am unfortunately lacking in the monetary funds necessary to accommodate this desire. The most recent item(s) for which I wish I had a spare $225 lying around are these very fierce and very fabulous shoes by ndeur Graphic Concept.

These shoes are so hot I can hardly stand it. And the ones pictured above are only a tiny selection of what this guy has to offer (and I'm sure he could paint anything, really). The artist hand paints every pair (way cool, props dude), and even though they are too pricey for my budget, each pair is a one of a kind, hand made item; so worth it, I think (if you are lucky enough to be able to afford them).

Really Shabby Chic

I don't what it is about distressed items - clothing, furniture, art, whatever - that I find so ridiculously sexy. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love IKEA as much as the next college student looking to furnish their overly-priced apartment, but my favorite part of decorating is adding in little touches of vintage, damaged, distressed - whatever you want to call it - chic. Take this picture I found on Etsy (which I have been meaning to purchase, actually).

When I first saw this picture I seriously just started at it for like five minutes. There is something incredible beautiful about the image that's hard to ignore. And to top it all off, the piece is entitled Waiting for Love; now I'll admit this took me a couple seconds to get, but it's perfect isn't it? These old, beat up, broken down and dusty chairs are waiting for love, to get fixed up. Aren't we all...

And then there is this photograph by an artist named David Hamilton that my mom had folded up in her hope chest for as long as I can remember, called Les Baigneuses. My mom said it was "from her hippie days", which made me want it even more, but I figured that since it was in her hope chest that she held it so dear to her heart she would never entrust it to me. So after doing my fair share of Google-ing, I not only found that there is no online version of this photo, but that it is ridiculously expensive to even purchase prints of this guy's work, like 200 pounds expensive! So what do I do? I ask my mom for the photo, which she was of course happy to hand over so I could display it in my living room. Anyways, I think what I like the most about it is that it's kind of beat up. As I said my mom had it folded up and stuffed in a chest for 25 years, so a little wear and tear was bound to happen. But the fact that you can see the fold lines, and there are a couple of tears in the paper only add to its charm. And now that I have this, it has become one of my most favorite possessions. I just hope my mom doesn't decide she wants it back any time soon.

The other highly prized item in my apartment is my headboard. I bought it on craigslist for $300, and then reupholstered it because it came with this frightening purple polyester fabric
, so now it looks way better than it did before and it looks like I spent way more than the $350 (including upholstery fabric from Michael Levine's) that I spent on it.

On a side note: craigslist is an amazing place to find almost anything you want, and there is always stuff, even furniture, being given away for free. My whole apartment practically is furnished through craigslist finds (ranging in price from free-$80). You just have to invest the time for actually finding the golden items. So in the case of my headboard, I was checking craigslist multiple times everyday until I found what I was looking for. But seriously, if you want to find some fabulously chic piece of crap look on craigslist and you too can turn it into something beautiful.

The First Post: and might I say you all look so FIERCE!

Hello beautiful people, beautiful world! I would like to share with you the way that I see things in the world around me. So we’ll start here, with my new favorite word: FIERCE. As I am sure more than one of whoever happens to read this first post is at least slightly familiar with, this is a reference to Christian Siriano’s constant use of the word throughout Project Runway Season 4. So now, after my complete love of Christian’s personality (even if he is a little bitch sometimes - but that’s why we love him, right?), I have successfully - and quite unintentionally - added “fierce” to my everyday colloquial language. I am so obsessed with this word that I am considering getting it tattooed on my arm (see profile pic at left). But we’ll get into me desperately wanting a tattoo later. So for now I will leave you with this: FIERCE really is quite an ingenious word to use in the way that Christian does. It’s sassy, empowering, and oh so addictive. I only wish I had thought of it first. But I will just have to content myself with emblazoning Christian into Pop Culture by stealing and propagating the usage of this fabulously fierce terminology. Peace.