Hello, NYC! It’s always a lot of fun to see this town when spring is starting to blossom,
and the weather is just at the right temperature to wear all my knit sweaters and tweed jackets, minus the rain and snow that would not mix well with Chanel RTW! So in today’s entry, let’s enjoy the city for all its colors and for being such a great backdrop for some fashion shots:
As you may remember, that’s the 12A dream jacket I recently swooned over.
I love the flap bag that you see in these photos, but after a few days of running around the city, I now realize that if I ever become a NY girl, I would have to rely on a much bigger bag for daily use. Without a car, New Yorkers do have to schlep everything in their bags… especially because you never know when you might be in the mood to pick up a pizza for an impromptu picnic in the park 
:
Is it really mid-April already? As you can tell from my recent silence on this blog, I am still in serious need of 48-hour days. Does anyone know where I can order one of those online?
Anyway, the 4/18 Club 2013 meeting took place again this year in NYC. The third member of our club (my cousin S) was not in town so we got Lil A’s brother, Mr. T, to stand in. He is, after all, 15 months now and can hold his own in our rowdy club!
This year we did not have a rigid agenda like last year. Instead we had an open table discussion about fashion…
including a few outfit changes until Madame President threw up her hands and said “no más:”
So we turned to the topic of abstract art…
and really weird art. Yes, that’s our series of 10 Play Doh Doras. I’d pump them out and Lil A would be in charge of quality control; she’d examine each Dora and tell me if it was good enough to make the cut or not!
Then we had some excellent Dosas from a South Indian restaurant during our meeting break. For some reason I ended up giving Madame President a piggyback ride all the way back to her place after lunch. Yes, while wearing my Chanel coat and bag. That’s just how Lil A rolls. Even her carry people have to look sharp while serving her.
But at least I was amply rewarded with snuggles from this little guy:
So anyway, I’ll take these squeezes over the 48-hour days as a birthday present any time!
More pictures from the City in the next entry
The first three months of 2013 have turned out to be quite a grizzly bear at work, which is both a blessing and a curse. Good for business and bad for stress. To de-stress, I stick to my one hour of workout each day. Recently I’ve moved from dance-related routines back to more physical drills that involve punching and kicking. Unfortunately I think I went too far last weekend and aggravated a muscle strain. So today looking not so fashionable in my foam cervical collar I’m trying to cheer myself up with a sartorial entry. I digress, but I have to say I feel quite Elizabethan in that collar…how the heck did women get anything done back in those days while wearing such an insufferable collar?
Anyway, I should preface today’s post with an admission that I’ve been trying very hard to not wander into boutiques as a way to unwind from a protracted negotiation round. Or browse (and by browsing I mean clicking on “buy”) online when trying to stay awake during long, boring conference calls at ungodly hours. Wait, did I just say that out loud?
But sometimes, something comes along that’s so outside of your comfort zone yet resonates with you in an almost animalistic way, you just have to give in. Case in point, an early bday pressie from moi to myself:
It’s the bright pink sueded caviar mini flap. I know, do I look like Barbie to you? If you know me, you would shout no. Heck, no. I’m way on the other spectrum of Barbie. Anti-Barbie even. But what can I say, sometimes the purse gods do things just to laugh at me.
BTW, just to show that everything really is relative, here’s a pic of the shocking pink bag next to something that makes it look so much more subdued–it is paired with a magenta chiffon Marchesa dress that I got for Lil A for our next April 18 Club meeting:
Hmmm, no, it’s still a pretty bright pink bag .
So next time you see me, I’ll be toting this little number, completely out of my comfort zone but sporting a grin. Sometimes you do just have to laugh at fashion and live a little.
Last shot? This is the most clever I’ve seen Chanel in cutting holes in the protective felt pieces:
Tags: Birkin, Chanel, JCrew, Marchesa, mini flap, sueded caviar, YSL tribtoo
About a year ago I blogged about a photo book I’d made with Mixbook.com. It was a collection of photos I’d taken over the years to celebrate and commemorate my grand amour with CHANEL.
Shortly after that, I saw another too-good-to-be-true offer from Picaboo.com. And wouldn’t you know it, I also waited till a week before that voucher expired before embarking on building my Larkie At Large coffee book. Which also happened to coincide with the highly stressful week of the move. So while packing I would take a minute here, an hour there to sort through literally thousands of photos from my travels and shopping excursions to put this book together. Definitely not the extra layer of stress I needed but now that the book is in my hands, I’m quite tickled by it.
So here are a few excerpts from the photobook diaries…
These two photos are the front and back covers of my book. The pics were taken from a bell tower in Bruges and the view of the city below was taken by zooming my camera from between the squares of the window screen that you see me standing behind:
I love using landscape photos as the background–it adds a virtual third dimension to the story you’re telling with the photos in the foreground. I don’t have to tell you what an emotional rush it is from all the memories that come flooding back from each photograph, even the partially covered ones. It’s like a sensory secret you share with your mind and heart!
On this particular page that’s paying tribute to my Birkin (ahh, I still swoon just thinking the two words my Birkin), the background is a high-def shot of the Clemence leather of the bag itself:
A few more pages related to the fashion side of this blog–one is of all the close up shots of buttons and what nots that so endear me to Chanel,
another 2 pages of shots of runway looks as interpreted by yours truly through lucky shopping finds–the background is a pic of one of my all time favorite Chanel items–tweeded jeans,
and another just representing the color red…the background is a closeup shot of the tweed of one of my Chanel coats:
One of my favorite pages though is a compilation of my recent trip to Washington, DC. It has everything I love about that place: the art of history and the history of art. I love the mosaic Chuck Close portrait of President Clinton…
But out of the 70+ pages, I think the most vivid one is of the photos I took in Sapa, Vietnam. They evoke sights, sounds and smells in my head though I know it’s just my sight that gets to relive these moments over and over:
Some day I hope to “publish” a second Larkie At Large book that, on each page, I can build a theme made up of seven photos, one from each continent. That would mean I need to set foot on Antarctica (like soon) and make up for lost time in South America. I think I just challenged myself to something!
Final advice? Spring for the $29.95 upgrade to have the pages lay completely flat. Worth every penny.
So I’ve fallen off the face of the blogosphere in recent weeks, but that’s because I’m moving. Between the purging and packing and just general freaking out, I’ve barely had time to sleep much less write.
But a funny thing happened in the midst of all that stress yesterday so I thought I’d feature a few of my favorites from my Chanel hat collection.
I love hats, especially black tweedy ones. I know, they all look alike to you, but would you say that about your kids? Even if you had, erm, ten kids or more? Yeah, didn’t think so.
I remember the occasion on which I bought each of my hats, sometimes even with clarity the moments of wearing them.
But there was one that I loved in particular. A buttery suede shearling floppy hat that fit me perfectly. It was this one:
And one day it disappeared. I turned my house upside down looking for it. Did that every 6 months or so in the last few years. Blamed the loss on my carelessness, TSA people at airport security, housekeeping, everyone and no one but myself. I mourned it and bought more hats to fill the void. I moped and it was pathetic.
Then yesterday, in clearing out the very top shelf of my closet, I opened a seemingly empty humongous hat box, thinking I’d just throw it away since it was taking up space for no reason all this time. And guess what was hiding in it, under mounds of tissue paper?
So I did a happy dance and immediately stopped grumbling about how much work it was to move. I’ll stop whining about the uncertainty of going to a new place. In my heart I know I’m always happy with change. And home is where the hat is.
Tags: Chanel, floppy hat, shearling
