I like everything I wear for my blog, but every once in a while an outfit will strike a special chord and make me feel extraordinary. Azul’s Abigail for Black Fashion Fair is such a dress. With all the bare skin, it was critical that it fit perfectly since I could not use alphas to block any of the bodice in the mesh top, not with such exposure on the side. As you can see, the fit was perfect and I got a lot of compliments on it when I wore it for my set this morning.
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I spent far too much getting this dress at The Arcade, but I console myself with knowing that the color-change HUD makes it several dresses in one. Besides, it has the prettiest color-change HUD in SL history.
Friday was the vernal equinox and it came with extras this year— a solar eclipse and a supermoon. Spring, however, came to Oregon long before the equinox. Already the daphnes and magnolias are in bloom. The air is rich with fragrance and spring’s showers paint everything a lush green. There is such an abundance of life in Oregon, all fed by the wonderful rain that if you live in Oregon, you must come to love.
The crazy thing about gardening in SL, I can have wisteria and magnolias at the same time as hibiscus and lavender, isn’t that amazing?
Art has many purposes; one is to make us think. If the greatness of art is measured by how much we think about it, Whiskey Monday is a great artist. It is difficult for a virtual artist like Whiskey Monday to get first life recognition for Second Life® art, but it is not impossible. I certainly think her work merits exposure in the broader world beyond our pixel borders.
Meanwhile, it is good to know that the powers that be in our world recognize her importance and have granted her LEA10 – one of the Linden Endowment for the Arts sims, to create art for the coming month. She’s working away and generously allows people to go there and use her builds in their photos.
Where I first saw this build, I thought of “Things Fall Apart”, the title of the book by China Achebe that a lot of us read in high school. By the way, if you have not read it, you should. I thought of coming undone, falling apart, coming apart at the seams; metaphors for the fragility of life. I do get the sense that Monday is tackling the big questions with her work.
Then I thought of creative destruction and Karl Marx’s quote, “All that is solid melts into air.” Marx believed the cycle of innovation, recession, then innovation, the boom and bust, would lead to the eventual collapse of capitalism. Free market fundamentalists love creative destruction believing it always leads to innovation that will always lead to more productivity and more wealth and so on. The computer destroyed the typewriter industry, factories closed and people were laid off. That is creative destruction. All that was solid about the typewriter industry has certainly melted into air. Even on a massive corporate scale, there is fragility.
I wonder about creative destruction at the personal level. Is there something freeing about coming undone? Can losing it spark personal innovation, re-creation and growth? Probably, for some people. But not for all. Even the strongest person has points of fragility.
Normally my answer would be “Hell to the No” but when I was shooting these pictures today, I figured it could not possible get worse and might get better. So when I saw there was a new update, I went for it. I have not been able to save a photo to disk since Monday and was saving raw shots directly from the SL viewer to Flickr. The photos for this post are raw, unedited pictures. They have not even been cropped. I know Flickr has a photo editor, but I don’t like it. Still, it turns out fine. I just like to play with a few little touch ups now and then. I am wearing a fun and adorable sailor sweater and flared skirt from MotiAme that I found at Kustom9 when I dropped by to throw money at Apple Fall, as one does. The sweater comes in gray, brown, blue, black, red and white. The skirt is in black, white and blue. They fit together well and have a lovely early fall feeling – for those days with brisk breezes, a bit of mist in the air and moments of sunshine. October in Oregon.
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Collabor88’s theme for the month is Miami Electric – featuring the electric tropical colors that bring to mind that sunny city. I have never been to Miami, so all I know about it is from the media. Those aerial shots in CSI Miami make it look like an architectural center of excellence – beautiful and pristine. Real Housewives made it seem less than perfect,let’s say but, of course, the strongest influence on my impression of Miami is the infamous Florida man. Let’s just say Florida man probably does not shop at Collabor88. Continue reading
Lately I have been having more trouble shooting on location than usual, but I really wanted to get off my platform, so I hopped over to Sky Neist Point and found this little beach and took a few snaps. I was dressed for wandering with this lovely linen dress with embroidery from Gizza. The jacket is attached to the dress and has a HUD giving three color options for the jacket. The dress comes in six options, this Boho style in pink, blue or creme, gingham and a floral print. Continue reading
When your television reception varies depending on the cloud cover, you tend not to get addicted to watching any particular program since you never know what channels you will receive at any given time. We lived too far from town for cable and did not have a satellite dish, so we did not watch a lot of television. Instead we played a lot of games, including dominoes. It was not the family favorite; that was whist. We also really liked canasta, cribbage, and Scrabble® . But Dominoes had its rotation in the games we played during those bitterly cold winter evenings. I have a game ready in my living room anytime you want to play.
My outfit is playful today, a flirty little top with a print of license plants from Osito that I bought at Fashion For Life last week and a bi-color leather skirt from NYU for Fameshed this month. This skirt comes in all sorts of colors and I was hard-ressed to choose one.
Have you been to Fashion For Life yet? If not, you only have four more days. There’s more than 150 stores across 10 beautifully designed sims. There’s no lag, so you can enjoy skateboarding in the skate park at FFL Perambulate or strolling on the sand at FFL Meander or enjoying a space bar worthy of Han Solo on FFL Promenade. For these pictures, I visited FFL Journey which explores steampunk stream transit with everything from steam cars to a steam hearse.
My jacket is from FBD Design one of the Champions sponsoring the sims these year. FBD is rebranding to Mooh! so in the future look for it under that name. I love the mix of punk and baroque elements in one jacket. It’s fun, funky and oh-so-fashionable.
Deep within my heart
Lies a melody,
A song of old San Antone,
Where in dreams I live
With a memory,
Beneath the stars all alone.
When I put on the Auffaellige Rosen dress from Schoën I immediately think of my great-aunt. She sang the background vocals to that song with Tex Ritter at the Grand Ol’ Opry and it was one of many songs I enjoyed listening to her sing. She was what is commonly called “a pistol” – a woman who lived life to the fullest from the day she was born to the day she died and that was a long time. Born in the 19th century she lived to enjoy the 21st century’s arrival and promise. From horse and buggy to manned space flight in her life time. She buried three husbands during that lifetime – oddly enough while they all had different names, their names were homophones. So while she changed the spelling, she never changed the pronunciation. She was 92 when she married her 3rd husband, a youngster in his 80s. Continue reading
I probably would not be organizing Fashion For Life if it were not for Squinternet. It was in an effort to get funds for her treatment and nursing that I organized Love Donna Flora which probably is why folks looking for an organizer this year thought of me. A lot of the time when I am working on this and feeling frustrated, I think of her and take a deep breath and carry on. She would want me to because she loved Fashion For Life.
OK, Squint loved Fashion. She went to the runway shows and participated in the events because she loved them. But Fashion For Life was special to her – even more so when she got cancer. She also loved Second Life finding support and sustenance through her hard times. She charged a small group of her friends with the task of taking care of her store, keeping it open and keeping her alive in this pixel world.
Monica Outlander is one of Squinternet’s dearest friends. In an act of extraordinary generosity, she put aside her own work during Squint’s final month and acted as her hands so some of those wonderfully imaginative designs that were tucked inside Squint’s lively brain could be realized in out world. For Fashion For Life, she has created new exclusive versions and will release them only at Fashion For Life – at 100% donation. She will also reprise her gown for Love Donna Flora – an exclusive that will only be at Fashion For Life.
But in preparing for Fashion For Life a treasure was found. Monica suggested that some of Squint’s recent jewelry be sold at 100% donation at Fashion For Life. While searching for the folders to pack into the vendors, more copies were found with different colors of stones – not quite finished but all the prims and textures were complete. A little bit of effort to finish them up and three new, previously unreleased jewelry sets were finished. All the prims and textures are from Squinternet, the only assistance was placing some textures on the few prims that had not been completed.
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