Cape Florida

I'm working on a school project and I used some pictures that I took at Cape Florida about a year ago and edited them to use for a website I have to make so I thought I would share the pictures. Cape Florida is one of my favorite places in Miami and every time I visit I love it more and more. It's on Key Biscayne and if you know the right people(Natan or other museum workers!) you can go to the top of the lighthouse!

These pictures are from when I went there with Natan for an end of the year party that the physics department at his school was giving.

Since Natan used to give tours at the park he gave an impromptu tour for his classmates.

I mostly just took pictures since I've been on the tour a few times now :)

I'm pretty happy with the program I was using for editing, it's called pixlr and it's a free online tool for photo editing. I plan to use it more often.

I also have pictures to share of a dress I made with some of the fabric from my score. Hopefully I'll have those up soon!

Fabric Score!

Last week I went to my local JoAnn fabrics and discovered they were having a blowout sale because they are moving to a new location. All the fabric was 75% but you had to buy the bolt (which I didn't mind!) So I picked up two bolts and about 2 yards of a linen fabric all for about $20!!! Before the discount was taken off the total came to $80 something.


I'm planing to make a maxi dress with the jersey knit bright pink fabric. I have been looking around for a maxi dress but being 6'1 it's pretty hard to find one long enough. My mom used to make her own clothes because she couldn't find clothes for tall girls and it seems that not much has changed for me.

The stripped linen fabric I'm thinking of making a cute sundress out of, although I'm trying to decide if I should make separates instead of a dress to get more wears out of it.

I'm not sure about the other fabric, it's more of an upholstery fabric and right now I don't have anything that needs recovering but it was too nice to pass up. I love the old Florida feel of the blue with the palm trees and the greens and pink.

Dusty loves the fabric too!

Mono

I normally hate things that are too matchy-matchy. My favorite thing is really to wear a ridiculous combination of patterns and colors but when I was getting dressed this morning this outfit really appealed to me. I think it's because I was going to the museum to volunteer and I feel like I can't dress too outlandish when I go there so I try to find more respectable outfits. Of course I had to add in my leopard belt for some pattern mixing.

Skirt- Target (on clearance!) Shirt-JCrew (clearance again!!) and shoes are from Target


Tomorrow I'm waking up early and heading to Gainesville and to the Ichetucknee River!

Miami River

Today I went on a boat tour of the Miami River with the family. It was sort of an early Father's Day trip and it was a perfect a day for boat ride (the rain clouds are coming in now but this morning was beautiful and sunny).
Me and my sister before the tour started, I always like to take pictures of me on boats to have proof that I did because I get really sick on boats but somehow I still force myself to do it. This trip wasn't so bad but I did have boat nightmares when I took a nap this afternoon (yea boat nightmares, I didn't even know such a thing existed but in my dream a serious of terrible and ridiculous things kept happening to me on a boat and I got nauseous even in my dream).

My parents.



We started off at Bayfront Park and went up the mouth of the river west past 36th st and then back to the Bay. I feel that this tour is a good all encompassing tour of Miami because you get to see the really nice parts by the bay with the fancy restaurants and the nice condos


and then you see some really seedy areas along the river.


Last time they did this tour, which was earlier this year, they saw a drug bust on the river! Nothing so exciting happened today but we did go under at least 7 bridges.





The river is a "working" river so there are fisherman who catch stone crabs and lobster and lots of shipyards and freighters that ship things like mattresses and trucks to Haiti and the Caribbean and central America.


All these crate yards reminded me of Dexter.

There are also recycling plants where the ship off scrap metal to China.


It was a really great morning and I learned a lot about Miami. The tour was given by Dr. George through the history museum and he really is the best. This was the last tour of the season but I'm looking forward to when they start again in September, I want to take my mom on the bike tour of Coral Gables.

Movie Monday

The past week I've seen quite a few movies. I love to watch TV but so often I will only watch shows and not choose the movies from my Netflix queue, I have some weird aversion to watching movies at home by myself. Fortunately though a cool new movie theater just opened a few blocks from my house, it's a small one screen place and so they generally only show a movie for one weekend which I actually kind of like because it motivates me to go see them.

image from the website for the movie
Last weekend I went to see the documentary Bill Cunningham New York about New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham (obviously). It was really great and I highly recommend it, even if you aren't interested in fashion and style he is still a really fascinating person. At eighty something years old he still rides his bike around New York city to take pictures of street style and the movie really goes into how the idea of photographing normal fashionable people wasn't something that was really done before him. One of my favorite things he says in the movie is that fashion is just the armor that people need to get through life. Sometimes it seems really self-involved and silly to take pictures of outfits all the time and post them online and to spend so much time shopping and thinking about clothes but I think it really does help to get through the day. Someone once asked about my clothes and why I dress up a lot and I told her that because I'm so tall people I stick out all the time and people are going to look at me so I might as well look cute. It took my awhile to realize that because for many years I just wanted to blend in and tried to wear clothes that wouldn't make me stick out (although I usually failed because even what I picked out as being normal generally wasn't). I promise I don't always think of it in such a high school angst way, normally I just wear what makes me happy! So my other favorite thing is that he never takes pictures of people for negative reasons (like a do/don't thing) and he actually left one of his jobs because they used his pictures in a magazine spread to make fun of women wearing the clothes. I always find it mean to look at those pictures in magazines and sometimes I actually like those outfits better. In summary go see it! Or at least check out the website which has lots of great slideshows.

Yesterday I saw Vidal Sassoon: How One Man Changed the World with a Pair of Scissors. I had heard about this movie like a month ago and was really excited to see it but I was disapointed in it. It's funny because both this movie and the Bill Cunningham movie are about 80 somethings who changed a lot about how people think of fashion and appearance but this movie was really heavy handed with how great Vidal is. I love his haircuts and I really thought the movie was going to touch more on how his styles really changed the way women did their hair because before it all about hair-dos and going to the saloon to get your hair teased and set and it would stay that way for a week and then you would go back to the saloon. But with his cuts they were about wash and wear and you didn't have to go back to the saloon as much and you didn't need to spend so much time on your hair. I would really be interested in learning more about the feminism of fashion but unfortunately this movie didn't get into that. Also one thing that really bothered me was the people in the movie talk about how he was influential all over the world, especially in Asia, but they never show his influence or really how he changed the world exactly (I mean it's right there in the title). If you're interested I would recommend the interview Vidal Sassoon gave with Terry Gross on Fresh Air (listen to it here), it gets into the interesting parts without all the hype and there is a slideshow of the famous cuts.

And just now I watched a movie about Robert Moog the inventor of the synthesizer, it was just Moog. It was okay, I probably enjoyed the soundtrack more then the movie. I wanted it to go more into the history of the Moog and electronic music but it was just like a look back with Moog and people he knew. There were some interesting parts and it's pretty short (a little over an hour) so it's still worth watching.

Blueberry picking

I went to Lake Placid this past weekend to visit my sister. On Sunday we went to one of my favorite places in Lake Placid, Henscratch Farms and went blueberry picking!



It was so much fun, but a lot of work because so many people had been picking before us so we really had to search for the ripe ones.


Mmmm but it was worth it they were so delicious that we kept eating them as we picked.


There are chickens running all around the farm and they follow you in the blueberry patch waiting for you to drop some!


We also got some strawberries.

My fruit picking outfit! I got this shirt from my friend Amy in one of our clothing swaps and I can tell I will be wearing it a lot this summer. In fact this was the second time I wore it over the weekend.

And I got a sweet bike at a garage sale up there for only $20!

It's still in Lake Placid until my sister can bring it down to me but I can't wait to ride it.

Topped with lace

Once again I have fallen behind on my blogging...school, work, tv, blah blah blah. This is last week of the semester and I'm so ready for a break. In the mean time I have been working on several projects and I have some things lined up for this summer that I'm really excited to work on and I will definitely be sharing things on my blog.

Two weeks I went shopping with my mom and I bought this new hat and new shoes. The hat is slightly silly and I don't think I'll be wearing much in the hot Florida summer but I love it! And it was on clearance at Marshalls for $15, pretty sweet.


I also got these new Sperry Topsiders which I'm also loving and have been wearing non-stop since I bought them. I have a pair of regular brown leather Sperrys and they are one of the most comfortable shoes that I own but I've been wearing them camping and sailing and on all my other out-door activities so I wanted another pair for everyday life.

Red is my constant companion.



I bought this lace top at a thrift store over a year ago and I had only wore over a bathing suit at some point but lately I've been throwing it on over almost everything. It has become a staple in my pre-summer wardrobe. (South Florida's seasons are different) I also wore it last week out to dinner with Natan and a friend. I had spent the entire day inside working on a project for school and so I was more then excited just to get out the house.

While we were walking around Coral Gables we saw this graffiti.

Pretty awesome.

Two for one

Today turned out to be a really great day when I thought it was going to be a pretty annoying and bad day. I had to go to a work project at our new site which is opening soon and we were supposed to be there all day doing clean-up stuff but we only had to stay an hour! So I had the whole day to do fun and exciting things instead of being out in the hot sun scrubbing railings. First Natan and I went to this market by our house, it's in an empty lot and people just have tents where they sell anything from hats to vegetables to watches to delicious grilled cheese sandwiches.

Day outfit:
Red is my constant shadow!


And he gets sad if I don't hug him enough.


I just bought these shorts at Forever 21 and I have decided that I really love their shorts, they fit me really well and they are super cute.

After shopping we came home and I helped Natan write questions for the South Florida History Challenge, which is tomorrow. It's basically like a Jeopardy game at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida but only with questions about South Florida. Natan has been writing the questions for the past five years and I like helping him because it puts to use all the years I've spent criticizing Jeopardy questions. Believe me if there is anything nerdy then being a part of a history challenge it's definitely writing the questions for one. I'm excited because even though he's been doing this for five years I have never been able to go to a challenge because I've always had to work. So this year I'll finally get to go and my parents are coming too!

To thank me for helping him Natan took me out to one of my favorite restaurants, it's called California Bistro and they have a menu of mexican and italian dishes and they make pretty much everything there, including the squid ink pasta which is normally what I get.

Dinner outfit:
I told you Red was my little shadow!


Pockets!


I got this dress at a thrift store a few months ago. I used to wear it with this awesome gold belt I had but the belt got ruined and I had to throw it out but I like this black feather belt with it too.

So that was my fun Miami filled day, hope everyone else is having a fun weekend!