My Best Blogging Moments in Art and Fashion

Via blog editorship, I've certainly enjoyed life to a much fuller extent than I would as a random bystander. Blogging is the impetus navigating a continual search for creativity and subject matter for intriguing posts. At the end of this post, you'll find a few links to some of my favorite blogging moments. 

For six years I've maintained Art Fashion Creation and Toile La La, but you'll also find posts at the Wordpress blog dressesandhats. Too, you may remember the blog Better Shell Fitness, to which I contributed fitness reviews.  At these blogs, you'll also find reviews for fashion shows/exhibits, museums, travel, books, and music - all written in my nom de plume - Toile La La. The name Toile La La (pronounced twahl-lah-lah) originated from experiments in half-scale sewing and I kept it as a pen name because I enjoy the pronunciation.

Blogging is good motivation for exploring my own creative capacity.  During six blogging years, in addition to stitching those first half-scale design toiles, my art/fashion adventures include:

• millinery
• a hand-bound (coptic-stitched ) book and a more condensed zine titled 80s Fashion Design Book 1: Drawn
• the recent exhibit 2D to 3D: Artist Room Studies
• fashion fiction, quick fiction, and interior fiction 
• fashion collage and stitched collage
• mail art and stitched wordsmithing
• the F/W 2014 Romantic Souls fashion show
• the S/S 2015 Spontaneous Now fashion show and video
• the Advance A/H  F/W 15/16 L'Oeil Creatif a L'Avance fashion show

All told, it is my greatest pleasure to converse with other creatives. I feel I must almost glow with fascination during an interview - as my senses are so fully engaged. The following links lead you to my interviews with a variety of women - artists/designers/writers - all, women who inspire me with a particular eye, intelligence, written voice, or humor.

• Patricia Gaye Tapp of Little Augury and Ottoline Divine
• Karen Winslow, artist and former illustrator of sewing patterns
• Kathleen Sawyer, the back of the boat collage artist

Time Travel Suit

time travel suit for Beistegui's rooftop terrace

Intricacies of time travel mastered, Number One, and name on the guest list, Number Two, wouldn't I shine shine shine in this ensemble - suddenly appearing in 1930s Paris.  To see and feel Charles de Beistegui's Champs Elysees rooftop experience - deemed a hodgepodge of "modernism, mechanism, and surrealism" by the great Beaton. My ascent up the white spiral staircase all sparkle and flash,with one press of a button I'd activate the rolling glass wall to access the terrace. Then, on a carpet of grass beneath a ceiling of sky, I would dance dance dance, reflecting and refracting the lights and traffic below - reflected and refracted by the many mirrored surfaces past, present, and futuristic - ooh la la!

If you like the idea of futuristic 1930s, here's one of my earlier posts.
If you like a bit of fiction spotlighting imaginative decor, here's an illustrated quick fiction. 

note: image (clipped, altered and filed in my journal) from Purple Fashion S/S 2016, p.256. Pants - Loewe, skirt - Olympia Le-Tan, top - Marni. Photographer - Casper Sejersen, Stylist - Camille Bidault-Waddington, Model - Heather Kemesky.