Blog award, i.e. 7 things about me

I have received a few blog awards lately and have been remiss in posting about it! Most recently I received the Stylish Blogger Award from the wonderful Temperamental Broad, so thank you very much! ♥

Without further ado, here are seven completely random things you probably didn't know about me.

1. I'm left-handed. On my mom's side, so was my grandfather, and so is my uncle and my cousin. Four lefties in three generations. Pretty cool. I've always thought it was neat that I was left-handed. I love how lefties are always happy to discover another leftie. Last summer on a plane the guy next to me asked if I was left-handed. As I was asking him how he knew, it dawned on me: he saw my watch on my right wrist, not left.

2. My favorite time period outside the 1940s and 1950s is the middle ages in Western Europe, specifically the UK and Ireland. I love castles and chivalry and the legends of King Arthur. In fact, in my sleeve, the name of one of my favorite books, Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, appears on the back of my arm.

3. I have been knitting since Christmas 2005. Shortly before that, my mom re-learned to knit after over a decade of not knitting. I crocheted at the time (having taught myself from a booklet), but didn't think I could ever grasp knitting. It just seemed way too complicated. But I somewhat grudgingly let my mom teach me over a Christmas visit that year. These days, I don't think there's about anything I can't knit. It's just something I 'get'. (I definitely can't say the same about my sewing.)

4. I am a bit of a tomboy.

I like to think of myself as kind of a vintage tomboy. My vintage fashion sense leans towards the casual end of the spectrum. I adore style icons like Jean Harlow and Katherine Hepburn who unapologetically wore trousers and wore them exceptionally well. There are really no cocktail dresses or high heels in my repertoire. While I've been enjoying skirts and dresses more lately, I'm most comfortable in wedgies or flats, high-waisted jeans or trousers and a blouse. I swear like a truck driver, there's usually something a little messy about my hair even when done up in a great 40s 'do, and I can never keep up with my nail polish before it chips. On the other hand, you will never catch me without my nails painted red, and about the only time I'm not wearing red lipstick is when I'm at work or out hiking or camping. Go figure.

5. I hate coffee. You cannot trick me into having something coffee-flavored by calling it mocha. I don't like the smell, I don't like the taste. Coffee has touched my lips exactly three times in my life. Yuck. My version of coffee is black tea, like you'd have in the UK or Ireland. I learned to drink tea when I did study abroad in Ireland in college. When Mel and I went to Ireland last fall, I was absolutely ecstatic to have tea and cake at Bewley's Cafe in Dublin.

6. I have a dishwasher and don't use it. We've gotten to the point where about the only non-vintage kitchenware that we use regularly (outside of a few cooking utensils and some random mugs and pint glasses) is our Fiestaware plates. So while we were hand-washing the red Bakelite flatware and cooking utensils and our glasses, we'd always end up with all of our plates in the dishwasher and have to start fetching them back out again because there wasn't enough to fill the dishwasher before we'd need them again. So we really just don't use it any longer.

7. I know almost nothing about pop culture. I couldn't pick Lady Gaga out of a crowd, I really have no idea who Justin Beiber or Katy Perry are, and I don't watch Glee. In fact I haven't watched a network TV show in more than 10 years. But I can really geek out on the Discovery Channel, Science Channel, History Channel, Food Network and Travel Channel. We're watching Food Network as I type. :)

Now I'm supposed to give this award to 7 other deserving bloggers. But I've been getting to know so many awesome blogs! So I'm going to do this in a slightly different way. I'll post some great international blogs I've been enjoying, from non-native English speakers—six vintage-inspired ones and one great artist. If you haven't discovered them already, hope you enjoy them, too!

• Vid mitt skrivbord
• Betty Lou got a new...
• Vintageportalen.se
• The Freelancer's Fashion Blog
• The Big Mama Introspection
• Miss Margarita
• Une jeune fille bien

Non sequiturs: Pasta sauce and business casual

I was initially planning to post today about the wonderful, amazing dinner that I cooked for us last night. For the first time, I made my mom's Italian pasta sauce recipe, which is probably very close to my grandma's recipe, which in turn is probably similar to my great grandmother's recipe. So if not in exact ingredients or steps, it's a sauce that's been passed down at least four generations. My great-grandmother died when I was very, very little, and I don't remember much about her except that she was an elderly woman who didn't speak English very well and who wore a lot of black. But the one distinct memory I do have is having a soft-boiled egg eating contest with her. So perhaps it's fitting that this amazing sauce has had-boiled eggs in it. (If you've never had pasta sauce with hard-boiled eggs, you don't know what you're missing. Really.)

Anyway, it took a year and two sessions watching my mom make The Sauce to have a recipe I could work with. Actually, that should read: a recipe that I didn't accidentally lose for a year. That's right. At Christmas a couple of years ago I watched my mom make the sauce, writing down meticulous notes. Which I promptly lost when I got home. Last year, I made her do it again, writing down more meticulous notes. Which I then put into Google Docs for safe keeping. Of course, as soon as I got home I found the original notes. Which is actually fantastic, because they weren't exactly the same and now I really have a good idea about the variations my mom does when she makes her sauce. In an ironic twist, today I was telling her about making the sauce and she requested a copy of the recipe I wrote down. Because I had left her a copy last year. And she lost it.

Oh wait, apparently I did just post about the dinner. But on to what I now really want to post about: a rant about work clothes.

I hate office wear. I hate business casual. I even hate the term. Yuck. I mainly wear a plain crew-neck t-shirt, a cardigan, and boring slacks. Nothing vintage, or retro, with the exception of an occasional vintage cardi. I've never really felt I could find a way to incorporate that into my work life. For four main reasons: 1) I have a lot of tattoos that need to be covered up. No dresses or skirts, no sleeves shorter than a hand-width above my wrist, no button down shirts unless they have a really high second button. 2) I've always felt it would be a little funny wearing vintage clothes in such a boring business casual environment. Probably because I've never been able to do it. 3) Being limited to pants, I must admit that I don't find high-waisted vintage or retro pants particularly comfy to sit in for 8 hours at my desk. 4) It gets really hot and muggy in Chicago in the summer, so I end up sticking with thin store-bought cotton cardigans, since all of my handknit and vintage cardis are wool or acrylic. And both those fibers make me want to pull my skin off when it's 90 degrees and humid in July.

With the new year, I thought it might be nice if I at least stepped up my wardrobe a bit. I bought a few nicer pair of slacks, a couple of new cardigans, a couple of button downs. Ordered online. I got most of it today, tried it on, and wanted to throw it all out the window. Perfectly nice, serviceable clothes, but I felt like a complete idiot in them. I hated the lower rise on the pants, the button down looked manly and weird, and every combo I tried I hated. I felt fake and weird and yuck!

So now I am completely down on work clothes, and I have no idea what to do next. I may just have to suck it up like office workers decades before my time and deal with sitting for hours in somewhat uncomfortable clothing (yes high-waisted pants, I'm looking at you). I may just have to button my shirts up all the way, even though I don't generally do that. But apparently I did on New Year's Eve at our friends' party, and that worked, right?

As for cardigans when it starts to get warmer... okay, that one I'm still stumped about.

I also think this all means I need to sew some lighter weight shirts to wear to work, since of course if I'm sewing it, I can put the buttonholes anywhere I please. But finding fabric may be a tough job for me. It would need to be light enough to work under a cardigan without being too stiff in sleeves (so it would fit smoothly under a cardi), or too stiff in general. I'm thinking some kind of cotton or cotton blend that's lighter than quilter's cotton. I have some adorable voile that I think wouldn't be too sheer enough to show tattoos with a cami underneath and paired with a cardigan, but I'm still a little scared to sew with it (mostly because I have no idea how you do facings when your fabric is sheer).

So... I think I need to stop being a lazy vintage enthusiast when it comes to the workplace. I can tell it's going to take some serious work, though!