Happy Valentines Day, lovelies. The other morning I felt very romantic indeed, and put on a headband I made a few months ago, and pranced around my house.

New Spaces

I've been slowly getting settled into my new apartment, putting off decorating as I wait for some space prints and map inserts to arrive in the mail. This is what I have done thus far in my bedroom. I'm enjoying adding the smaller details daily; a dress hanging here, or putting up a photograph there.

I found this perfect metal shelf in late August, and had been saving it until I moved, so happy to finally put it to use.

I spotted this shelf in our new backyard, which at the moment is an enormous pile of wood, doors and old windows. I have to stop myself from scavenging it daily. 

I found this dress at the Queensville Antique Mall, while visiting my parents. It's in need of a few minor alterations, but was too beautiful to resist for only $10. I can see many spring days lounging on our rooftop patio in this.

Mafalda Silva

Some lovely photos I stumbled upon this morning, by Mafalda Silva. 

Isis

This lovely locket will be mine as of tomorrow, after staring at it for weeks at Robber. Today I used it in an outfit post that you can see here. Besides its charming shape, I'm in love with the fact that it's a locket, and can't wait to put all sorts of trinkets inside. I'm thinking twigs, leaves or pressed flowers to start.

playing

The Mom Project

These are the finished images and layout of a photo shoot I co-produced and styled for Issue 13 of WORN.  The idea was to style people based on an image of their mother, and I couldn't be more pleased with the results. All of the models were so fantastic (not just saying that because they are all my adorable friends-including my mom pictured below) and I can't thank them enough!

Also, I posted some photos last week of a shoot that was done for my article, and thought I would share the finished piece too! Sorry if the text is super small, but if you want to read it you can order it online! (shameless plug sorry)

found

In early September I found this camera at a yard sale for 50 cents, and bought it right away. Regardless of whether it worked properly, I figured it would be at home with the other lost objects that gather across my apartment. A month and a roll of film later, and I've found out the camera actually takes quite lovely photos indeed. The only part that doesn't work is the counter dial, so I was constantly wondering how many photos I had left. I think I was either too cautious or impatient, because when I got my film developed it turned out I had only taken ten photos. Below are my favourites.

a hole in the wall on Dundas.

inspiration wall at WORN Fashion Journal.

some lovely Wornettes (who will probably kill me for putting this up).

a garden down the street.

a bodiless flower and headless woman.

redress

Selects by the lovely Arden for my article in issue 13 of Worn, taken way back in June. 

I've been wanting to share these forever, but forced myself to wait until the issue was released.

(hint hint, go get yourself a copy.) 

love minus zero

listening to this and trying not to miss summers past.

breathing

some recent writings.

Casie held onto a quote from the only book she had read since meeting Adam. “Youth can handle its failures; it can wake from its botched love experiments wound-licked by its own survival mechanism--that there would be something else around the next corner. The survival mechanism of those who have lost youth: laziness, habit, the fear of falling down.” She read this a few hours after getting off the phone with him. Lying on the futon that her mother made up in the guest bedroom, the left side of her body being swallowed by the trench that marked the center of the bed, these words struck her as being particularly relevant to their relationship. Adam was thirty-nine, and had been in three long term relationships from his youth onward. When talking to Casie, he frequently referred to these women by numbers; the six year, the twelve year and finally the four year. As he spoke, these digits pierced through to the pit of Casie’s stomach like a switchblade, removed themselves, and then hung above her, watching as she squirmed and bled out atop his wine-stained bedsheets. She knew two of his past girlfriends by first name, and his insistence on referring to them as the culmination of their years together seemed malicious and spiteful. In the damp sheets that caught every bead of sweat and secretion through their summer, these numbers served as a validation of his experience over hers. 

Casie had thought she was in love on numerous occasions, took it back on several others, and said it out loud once. At twenty-four, she had a string of brief encounters, each still surging through her veins in bursts of blue and green, none of which had outlasted her current relationship with Adam, which had somehow managed to barrel it’s way through to the start of a new season. Leaves left their branches sporadically, as the heat of the summer lurked in the moist creases behind their knees, and in the armpit he once kissed. If Casie were completely honest, she would admit that they had only made it to September, and everything that followed was drunken and sentimental fumbling, two bodies digging into one another as life and new lovers tugged at their feet. Hanging up her phone on the morning before Thanksgiving however, she chose denial. Their bodies hadn’t touched in nearly a week and a half-when he kneeled between her legs and gripped tightly around her waist, ears listening to the sound of her heavy breaths and brown curls catching the beginnings of tears, her lips pressing his forehead. As they said another goodbye that morning, and he once again left their fate to her, she again never felt so close. 

He had begun using the word polyamorous, which Casie thought to be a cheap trick used by his rational components; condensing all fears, doubts and lust into an easily definable word was like coming to a duel unarmed. To her, it read as forfeit. For Adam, who woke up alone that Sunday morning, the putrid mix of soaked in alcohol and two days with out showering hovering above him, it was survival. Casie hadn’t minded this smell of hash and liquor that settled into Adam’s skin regularly, and had a fondness for the scent’s own leap to her as they fucked away their hangovers.

tumbling

image by hugh lippe via hobo magazine

It was in September of her twenty-forth year that January set out on an acquisition. The gains of her journey were immaterial, nothing like the pockets of gold protagonists before her had sought after. The precedence by which she judged everything else hung like a heavy smoke for minutes, only to camouflage itself into our lungs and feet. She coughed this up in the shower, and tickled it with her toes at the end of his bed. She marked her life with routine. She charted the sporadic within the mundane, creating great loops and tunnels through which her daily thoughts weaved. In her twenty-third year, around late November,  January woke in the early hours of a Monday to the sound of his woe. This continued into late December, where by the sun’s early dimming she would already lie in anticipation, waiting to describe again the route to her doorstep to his drunken fingers. Some Mondays his phantom cries echoed through her dreams. On one such night, she answered his call, and dreamt of herself falling back to sleep. While she slept, he arrived, and removed her door from it’s hinges. He walked through the dimly lit living room and kitchen (illuminated by the light she left on for him every seventh day in the front room), and with a quick thump to his head on her door frame, entered her bedroom. When she awoke in her dream, he told January that he had taken the hinges off her door, and she saw it leaning against the cinderblock wall. When she awoke in the morning, his vanished figure told her he had never been there, and the door she left unlocked had blown open. The December breeze had frosted the soles of her feet. 

Lightning People

Lightning People: NYC Lore on Nowness.com.

I can't wait to read this.

stonewash

I haven't had a nightmare in months.

woods

photos borrowed from The Dying Swans. 

I want us to look like this.

transience

After seeing photographs from this magazine online, I couldn't stop myself from running out and buying it the very next day. Everything about Hobo is so incredibly lovely. Its imagery, words, font and layout are the reason I have been carrying it by my side since purchasing it. Here are some of my favourite pages (though it was difficult narrowing it down to a few).