Closet Orphans: An Update

For a while, I posted a lot about incorporating closet orphans into my everyday wardrobe. (In case you don't know what a 'closet orphan' is, it's an article of clothing that you love, but is really difficult to style. You had to have it, but it just sits in your closet, alone and sad.)

I haven't posted one in a while and I'm not sure why that is. It's not because I have fewer closet orphans, I probably have more. But somewhere along the way, I think I've finally started to get a grasp of my personal style. Things started to fall into place and my clothes are beginning to reflect who I am. That may not sound like much, but it really can be. Take it from the girl who everyone assumed was slutty in high school even though she really wasn't. It can be a huge pain when you don't have a grip on how to best represent yourself.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Here are five outfits where I've been able to incorporate five hard to style items in my closet.

- The Ruffled Blouse: I love this flesh-toned ruffle front blouse, but because it's got tiny, thin straps (this image is not the exact top), 1) It's not exactly work appropriate and 2) It's hard to wear a bra. However, with this great cardigan from Target and some skinny pants, it's suddenly safe for work!

- The Argyle Sweater. I love the colors in this sweater, but it always looked odd when paired with jeans. However, it really works with gray corduroy pants. I don't know why it makes all the difference, but it really does.

 

- The Easter Dress. While I love my Easter dress, I was having a hard time finding other excuses to wear it. Thankfully, my Stitch Fix blazer makes it almost professional. Because the blazer is so much more professional than just a cardigan, I can get away with wearing this to work.

- The Red Pants and the Amber Necklace. This outfit is a two for one. Do you know how hard it is to try and style red pants? I wish I'd given it more thought before I bought these ones. You can't see it in this picture, but the pants actually are covered in tiny orange polka dots. Fortunately, the polka dots are the exact color of the amber in my amber necklace, a closet orphan on its own. Keeping everything else very simple lets these two pieces work together.

- The Orange Top and the Blue Earrings. These two closet orphans combine to make two casual pieces a little more fancy for the weekend. Warm weather appropriate, yet still pretty cute. Perfect for about half dozen trips to Home Depot.

Stitch Fix Review

Have you heard of this new website called Stitch Fix? I guess websites like this are very trendy now.

Anyway, what you do is fill out a profile, full of questions about your personal style. Then, one of the Stitch Fix stylists picks out five pieces they think you would like. They pack them up, ship them to you, and you get to try on everything in the comfort of your own home. Whatever you don't want to keep, you put it in a shipping envelop, which is included and prepaid, and return it.

It's pretty cheap, too. The service only costs $20, but the money goes toward your purchase if you decide to keep something. If you keep everything, it's 25% off.

I'd read a bunch of reviews from other bloggers and it seemed like they had had good experiences. Since I'm in a bit of a style rut lately (the only labels in my closet are from Target or Old Navy), I decided to give it a whirl.

The profile process is long, but thorough. There's a place to link your Pinterest boards and other social media to better represent yourself. The part I found most helpful was the comment box at the end where you can explain things that aren't detailed in the other portions, like that I'm high waisted and work with my hands in a dirty lab most days. I was slightly concerned that the stylist would only send me big, chunky necklaces because my profile may have eliminated everything else.

I scheduled my first delivery and it showed up last Thursday. Isn't the packaging pretty?

In case the process gets confusing, it's literally written all over everything.

When I unwrapped the tissue paper, I actually squealed. My favorite (and the one I kept) was on top and I was instantly in love, but I'll describe that one last. My box consisted of four tops and a bracelet. Yay, no chunky necklaces!

The first piece was a black and white chevron blouse with 3/4 length sleeves. Since it was sheer, I never would have tried it on in a store. But once I tried it on, I really liked it. I still wasn't a fan of the big pearl buttons pinning up the sleeves, but if the bottom of the blouse were about an inch wider, I would have kept it. The material had no stretch to it and was stubborn over my hips. 

UPDATE (6/4/2013): This top is available at modcloth for $39.99.

 

The second blouse was a gorgeous turquoise color. The material felt so fancy as it was actual silk. However, that's all that could really be said about this blouse. It was low cut enough that it would have to be layered.

And I suppose it could have been helpful in hiding a pregnancy?

The third blouse was a sheer, long-sleeved high contrast black and white top. Again, something I would have never tried on in a store (1. I don't like to be forced to layer things. 2. This would have been a magnet for broken machine dirt) In spite of that, I may have considered keeping it if it had fit me in the arms. It ended up being about two inches short of my armpits.

The only non-top was a gold chunky hinged bangle. It. was. gorgeous. I really loved it. The problem? It was $40. That's probably not bad if you wear bracelets all the time and have a job where you aren't using your hands all the time. I just couldn't justify keeping it, but it did remind me to break out my $2 Forever 21 bangles more often.

The last piece, as I mentioned before, was squeal-worthy. It's a deep indigo, 3/4 length jersey blazer. Reasons why I love it: 1. The color goes with almost everything in my closet allowing me to add it just about any outfit. 2. It's classy enough that I could wear it over a dress to a fancy party, but the material is casual enough that I could wear it to just about anything, especially work where I hate to be overdressed. 3. The 3/4 length sleeves keep them from getting dirty at work if it's a fix machines type of day. 4. It's washer and dryer safe (The biggest complaint I read online of Stitch Fix was sending moms "Dry Clean Only" stuff. Who has time for dry clean only?)

I love it and it's the one thing I kept from my box. Inspired by the bangle, I paired it with a bunch of my cheap bangles and a gold necklace and wore it to trivia that night (btw, we led the whole night and just missed first by one point after the last round. Shucks)

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Overall, I'd call the experience a win. I actually even signed up for another one next month. Here are some of my other random thoughts on it:

• I signed up to have mine delivered on a Friday, but they showed up on a Thursday. Next time, I'll do it early in the week because the three-day return limit scared the bejesus out of me. If you don't have it in the mail by the third day, they will charge you for everything. Since it was delivered at the end of the week, my third day was Sunday, when there is no mail. Scary for procrastinators like myself.
• It's a little unnerving when you have a box full of really nice clothes that you know you have to return and the cats just NEED to smell everything. Trying to keep two little cats out a cardboard box is just like torture to them.

• I feel like this service would be best when you have a special occasion coming up, like a vacation or a wedding. You can designate that when you schedule your shipment. At least for me, these pieces were fancy enough that I don't know how often I'd feel comfortable wearing some of them.
• That being said, I like that it forced my wardrobe to be fancier. You can specify how much you want to spend per piece, but from the reviews I've read, most pieces are between $50-$100, no matter what you designate. The blazer I kept was $78, which is a lot more than I would normally spend, but the $20 stylist fee reduced it to $58. However, the quality is definitely there. I've tried on similar pieces from Target and it's just no comparison. I need to be reminded that sometimes you get what you pay for. 

Hopefully, I won't need any sort of update in the near future about how I screwed everything up and ended up accidentally purchasing a $200 box of stuff  that doesn't fit. Overall, though, I was very happy with Stitch Fix.

UPDATE: Here's a more critical review of my second box...

*This post was not sponsored by Stitch Fix. I just wanted to share my experience. However, if they do want to sponsor another post, I wouldn't say no...*

One of the Greatest Days Ever!

In case you've been living under a rock, there are two things you should know:

1. I really love "Jurassic Park". Have you not noticed that one of my blogs labels is so titled?
2. Jurassic Park was just re-released in 3D!

In order to truly appreciate it, we drove up to Phoenix to watch it IMAX 3D.

Yes, I wore my Jurassic Park shirt and a pair of dinosaur socks.

I don't care how many times you've seen it (and for me, that's nearly a million times), it is incredible in that format. Even though I knew exactly what was going to happen, it was still suspensful and awesome. Just awesome. I highly recommend it.

We'll see how many times I see it in theaters. Hopefully once a weekend. Don't tell Dan...

Project House Update: Fireplace Thoughts

We've learned the hard way that things can go sideways quickly if you don't spend enough time sleeping and thinking on an idea. Maybe it's because we're lazy, but the ideas we've loved the most have been the ones that we've waited weeks or months to act on.

That being said, the front room fireplace needs to be tackled quickly. I'm just tired of looking at it. In hopes of minimizing the amount of time we just sit around, letting the ideas sink in, we got all kinds of engineering and nerdy on it.

I guess I should start at the beginning. Long before we painted the room, we knew what we wanted on the front of the fireplace. We fell in love with these dark blue gray tiny stones that formed this easy-to-bend tiles.

Because the fireplace is curved, these tiny stones would easily flex over the surface without too much work on our behalf. No grout, no problem.

We also agreed on covering the mantle with wood. We never agree on anything, let alone two things in a row! With those details, I mocked up the worst picture in the history. Seriously, you click that link at your own risk.

Dan got the modeling bug in him and decided to make one that was not only a little more accurate, but a little prettier, too (how is that even possible?) It's hard to match the colors and textures, but project the tiny tiles in the picture above onto his rendering below.

His model allowed us to play around with how we would build the mantle. It's easier said than done when you're designing for a curved mantle. Originally, Dan just wanted to cover the top and front of the mantle with thin sheets of wood. However, with the model, I was able to convince him that we should also wrap under the mantle. It would allow for more mounting points for the complicated wrapping of the front of the mantle. Also, Dan pointed out, it could be used to create some subtle detail, as if it were molding, to class up the fireplace a bit more.

The only real thing left to determine? The base of the fireplace. We really didn't want to use the tiny tiles as the flat surface because who would want to sit or step on those bumpy things? Two things we needed to determine: 1) The color of the base and 2) The way we would cover it.

From the original terrible mocked up image, you can see we were thinking of matching the color to the color of the tiny tiles. However, upon further review, we were afraid it would be much too dark of a fireplace. To break up the darkness of the bands of tile (on the fireplace and wrapping around the base of the hearth), we agreed a light white stone would work well in the room. Perhaps with some veins in the same color as the tiny tiles.

We went to Home Depot on a fact-finding mission. Dan really wanted to get a piece of stone counter top for one solid piece. We found a color we really liked called "Ripe Cotton" and then we started to do the math. The problem of the curved surface reared its head again. Because they would probably charge us for the rectangular piece that we would need to then cut to fit, it would be over $700 just for the one piece of stone.

Yeah, so we went over to tile instead. At under $10 a square foot, compared to $50 for the counter top, we could easily do tile for under $200. It was a pretty quick decision to switch to tile. This, however, lead to another decision: 3) how to lay out the tile. With small subway tile, large subway tile, and square tiles in a similar marble tile to the counter top, there were a lot of options.

We purchased samples of the squares and the small subway tiles and went home to try some stuff out. There was much debating over it. We even took a break, went to dinner at Village Inn, and continued to sketch ideas over breakfast for dinner.

After some deliberation, we agreed that a traditional subway tile pattern worked well because it mimics the same pattern of the tiny tile on the curved front surface. With the size of the fireplace and the tiles, it would look something like this:

Dan was convinced that an edge border was necessary to make it look finished, so he mocked that up, too.

And he was right. It does look much better with a border. By the end of the weekend, we've made some tough decisions: light white marble subway tile with a border for the base with a detailed wood mantle. We ordered the tiny tiles and they have come in, so once we pull the trigger on the subway tile (and buy a tile saw), we can get down to business!

{Sidenote: Part of the reason I'm going into soooo much detail on our decision making for our fireplace is because we couldn't find any details on designing for a cylindrical corner fireplace. If this helps someone else trying to style a similar curved fireplace, I'll call it a win.}

Happy Easter!

This is what happens when your parents don't have any grand kids yet. You get to be 26 years old and still have Easter egg hunts. Yes, with grocery bags, except for my sister. Favoritism...

Not that I'm complaining, but it does make it hard to feel like an adult. Let's be real, though, when do I ever really feel like an adult?

It was a lovely Easter. My mom cooked a roast and invited my grandparents over. Mashed potatoes and a roll for me. And once they left, the family tradition of bloody video games.

I was sitting on the couch, writing my post for tomorrow, and my grandma asked me what I was doing. Since she's not very technologically literate, I told her I was basically writing in my journal on the computer.

She said, "Write down that your old, beautiful grandma came over. Don't leave out the beautiful part."

And she is. Hilarious and beautiful.

Project House Update: Front Room Part II

So when we last left the front room, it looked something like this:

The room was painted except for one corner due to those pesky termites. After first setting up an appointment to find out that, yes, we did in fact have termites and then waiting several more weeks for them to send someone to our house to actually treat them, the termites were gone. Well, kind of. The treatment may take up to six months to thoroughly kill them all, but I wasn't going to wait that long to finish painting.

Since the corner wasn't that large, we flew through finishing painting.

Yes, I paint in my pajamas

With walls clean and fresh, the light fixtures went back up and the single ceiling recessed light was painted to match. More importantly, we could move all the furniture back from the entryway and dining room.

When we were moving furniture back in, we went through it to get rid of the stuff we just didn't feel like holding onto anymore. That's what happens when you're college students/newlyweds, you get every piece of furniture that someone else is moved past. Did we really want to hold onto the dated entertainment center I inherited from my college roommate's former roommate? A trailer full of stuff to GoodWill later, the room is pretty, but sparse.

Dan's not a big fan of the sconces, which came with the room, but I kind of like them now. They're a little too bright, but nothing some etching cream couldn't fix, right?

This room still needs A LOT of work. And we'll get there. We pulled all the old trim off to paint and new trim will need to go up at some point, probably after we redo the floors.

On the schedule sooner is to redo the fireplace. With the small stone tiles on the curved front, a solid piece as the bottom step, and a dark wood mantle, it could look something like this (and yes, I used Paint, but I love Paint, so shut up!):

Oh my god. This is the worst picture in the history of the internet. I showed it to my husband and I don't think I've heard him laugh that hard ever. Yes, it's terrible, but it's beautiful in my head.

Please trust me.

This is just awful...

I don't know why this makes me so happy...

...but every time I'm sad, I watch this gif. Seriously, it's bookmarked on my computer. I love it that much.

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Project House Update: Prepping and Polishing

Since the few nice weeks of Arizona weather are about to start, it means our lives are going to get really freakin' busy. Part of that craziness? Houseguests!

My aunt and cousin flew down to spend some quality time with our grandparents and our house seems to always be Base Camp.

Before they arrived, the guest room still needed some more work. Last we left it, it had been freshly painted and the ceiling fan upgraded, but the list of to-do's was full and long. While we didn't get it all done, we got enough done to make the room feel more home-y.

• Hang curtain rod, curtains, and new blind blades. When we painted, we lowered the blinds so that there would be enough room for curtains, it was now just a matter of pulling the trigger. After switching out the old beige slats for crisp white ones, I began my epic search for curtains. Because it's the guest room, I was more comfortable with the idea of some big, bold curtains. Also, this room will be the future nursery, so I didn't want the curtains to be too girly, which is apparently a big problem with the percentage of floral, flowery curtains. I kept finding curtains I loved, but because they need to cover 96 inch sliding doors, only a handful were long enough. I thought about making my own, but fabric is expensive, especially enough for giants curtains. After a bit of research, I came up with a plan I believe is genius. Do you know what is 96 inches long? Bed sheets. Twin and full bed sheets are 96 inches long. So I found some sheets that tied in the yellow in the bedspread and the gray in the walls from Target. 

• We bought a curtain rod from Home Depot and the clip-style curtain hooks and hung up those sheets, er, I mean curtains. {Sidenote: if you plan on hanging curtains over a sliding glass door with blinds, you may need to space the curtain rod out farther from the wall than the brackets allow. Dan routed out some wooden spacers and painted them the color of the wall to make up for the difference.}

• I'm hoping that with time, they will hang a bit more gracefully and look more like curtains. I am concerned that the pattern is too small for the scale, but for $40 and some extra sheets and pillow shams, if I end up hating it at some point, it won't be the end of the world to change it. 
• Finish turquoise night stand. Even though the end table has been turquoise for months, it was getting a bit beat up without a good layer of sealer. After three coats of sealer and letting it sit outside for 48 hours to cure, it came back inside and returned to it's place next to the bed. With its little turquoise lamp. I love lamp...

• Hang some art. In spite of the fact that we've had two years to fix Dan's giant world map picture, it still sits broken and unable to hang above the bed like I wanted. However, I did manage to doll up the walls a bit. In addition to the ticket box, I purchased this really cute print from One King's Lane. It features a hot air balloon and the quote "Not all that wander are lost" and the teal background goes great with the turquoise accents of the room. The bird print is actually four bird flash cards that I got from my mother-in-law for Christmas, hand matted in some craft paper in a half-off frame from Target. (Upon further review, this photo is terrible and I'll come back and add a better shot of my art when I have the chance.)

Rusty knows he's not supposed to be in this room...

• Hide the bed frame. This one wasn't on the original list, but since I knew we weren't anywhere close to upgrading the headboard, I had to do something to pretty up the bed. Seeing the castors had to end. So I just picked up this cheap bed skirt from Target, figuring a bed skirt is a bed skirt, right? Wrong. Cheap bed skirts look cheap. This one is basically see-through. It's good enough for now, but I plan on spending some more for a better one in the future. (Oops! I forgot to take pictures! Since the room is currently occupado, I'll add some later!)
• Displaying toiletries. Are you like me and when you see something absolutely adorable in the dollar section of Target you have to have it, no matter how ridiculous it is. For example, a tiny, clear plastic bathtub? I refused to leave without it even though I had no idea what to do with it. It sat on our kitchen counter for days until I finally had inspiration. You know how everyone hoards those tiny soaps and shampoos from hotels and no one ever does anything with them? Well, I filled up the tiny tub with toiletries and displayed it in the guest room bathroom, like a hotel.

So, we still need to makeover the headboard, refinish the half-moon end table, fix the world map and hang it, and do something with the pink loveseat. In spite of the work still to be done, the room is definitely a room now, not just a dry wall box with a bunch of hand-me-down furniture. A room with a bunch of hand-me-down furniture.

The Cotton Anniversary

Last week, Dan and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary, which is apparently the "cotton" anniversary. Who knew?

Anyway, our wedding anniversary is actually pretty inconvenient since it falls almost two weeks after Valentine's Day. It's the last holiday our holiday season, which lasts for a grueling five months. It goes a little something like this, starting in the middle of October:

1. Father-in-law's birthday
2. Father's birthday
3. Halloween
4. Dan's birthday
5. Thanksgiving
6. Mother-in-law's birthday
7. Dating anniversary (which we don't really celebrate anymore)
8. Grandpa's birthday
9. Grandma's birthday
10. Christmas
11. New Year's 
12. Sister's birthday
13. My birthday
14. Valentine's Day
15. Wedding anniversary

That's a lot of presents to buy and card's to fill out.

On our actual anniversary, which fell in the middle of the week, we went out for a nice Italian dinner. As a more official date night, we celebrated over the weekend by going to this really great Mexican fusion restaurant (mmmm spicy mac and cheese) and seeing star demonstration at the planetarium.

I love that the star projector looks like a giant cootie from the game "Cooties"

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See? It's a cootie! "Don't spill the beans! Don't break the ice! Ants in your pants and Cooties!"

Every year, we debate whether or not we're doing presents for Valentine's or our anniversary. It really doesn't make since to do them for both, but there's always a miscommunication and it spirals and we both end up scrambling at the last minute and doing both.

This year, Dan gave me two necklaces (one for each occasion) from etsy. I gave him a pair of Valentine's boxers, my little tradition. For our anniversary, I got him some sort of saw (it was on his amazon wish-list) and I made him a Food Passport. It's a little notebook that has 50 restaurants listed that we haven't tried yet. I included their location in town, estimated time to drive there, what type of food they serve, and how much it roughly costs ($, $$, or $$$). My favorite part is that I attached a book of star stickers so he can rate them as we go to them.

It wouldn't have taken so long to make if I'd known how hard it is to find a small notebook without ruled lines. It took me three days to find one and I eventually broke down and overnighted this one from amazon.

It'll be nice to have some weekends now where we won't be celebrating something and we can get back to working on the house. Speaking of which, expect some update posts soon! (Nothing major, but progress is progress, right?)

The Trivia Trifecta

First things first. We won trivia again last week. According to the scoring, we were down by two points going into the last rounds, but we only missed one point on the movie round and only two points on the random trivia round allowing us to win by three points!

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Secondly, Dan won the bonus question, adding another shot glass to his collection! I have no idea why he collects shot glasses since he doesn't drink, but it was a fitting win for him.

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Lastly, our team name from the week before was declared one of the best team names of the week in the national trivia blog. I was very proud for coming up with the name "I like blizzards better when they taste like mint chocolate chip" in honor of our little blizzard.