Wishing it were spring!

So when I pulled this outfit together, I think I was thinking more “Paris in the spring” (not that I've been to Paris...) than “Boston in the dead of winter”. Unfortunately, I had to deal with the second one…Winter is not my favorite season, by a long shot. But it’s definitely something I have to encounter for the next two months at least. I can’t wait until it starts getting warm enough to go out without a heavy jacket and multiple pairs of tights! So of course I ended up wearing a sweatshirt over this for most of the day, as the lab was kind of cold. I think I ought to keep an eye open for some nice cardigans next time I go thrifting...



I’m trying the slip under a skirt thing again, this time less because of the length of the skirt and more to add an extra layer and some detail. Also, this skirt has pockets, which I love. It’s a favorite in my summer/fall wardrobe, but a bit thin for winter. The necklace is probably my favorite for sentimental reasons…my first gift from the boyfriend, as a holiday present. He’s got good taste in jewelry, luckily for me!





But yes. Looks like it’ll be a busy week. I had a number of meetings today, a rehearsal, and a good amount of time spent writing code. There’s going to be a fair amount of repetition of that for the rest of the week. Only two and a half weeks till this performance…wow! I have a fair amount of gesture recognition technology that I have to get actually working...much of the code I wrote today was more about getting the software ready to use in a performance scenario, rather than about fine-tuning the gesture recognition stuff so that it works reliably. (I am entertained by the fact that everyone else is completely sure I'll pull this all off; I'm the only one with doubts!)

Catchup from Friday

So, as I may or may not have mentioned, I joined Chictopia at the beginning of the week when I started doing these outfit posts. It's already been quite interesting. I wore this on Friday, inspired by the colors of an outfit I saw on Chictopia (from accessorypirate). I wanted to try my own outfit with navy blue and black…I took the easy route, a bit, as the dress has both colors in the pattern already. But it also gave me a reason to wear these navy heels for the first time… I happened to be walking through the campus center a few months ago and saw a couple of pairs of shoes in a box labeled “free.” So of course I took the ones in my size (especially as they were still new with tags!). However, as they’re a pretty high heel, I hadn’t gotten around to wearing them yet. I really liked them for the first part of the day, until my coworkers and I went to lunch at one of the Indian buffet places a good 15-20 minute walk from the lab. Then the fact that the shoes were not broken in yet started to get to my feet. I need to figure out how to wear new heels without them rubbing the sides of my feet too badly (though it's better in the winter when at least I have tights on...)





Another part of this outfit I like is the necklace, which is self-made from a modified vintage brooch (which had chipped paint and therefore got a new color with nail polish) and a chain my grandmother gave me. This is a trick I've been doing recently, pinning a brooch to a chain to serve as a pendant.



I wore this on Friday to work, for a demo of my research, and to class. I was planning on going to see a play after work, or potentially go meet up with some friends, but was so tired I decided just to head home. It was a long, busy week! And, actually, it's been a kind of busy weekend...though I did a fair amount more resting and reading blog posts and going thrift shopping with my mother than I probably ought to have given the amount of work that I have to do on this thesis performance before the end of the month. Which is a lot! Finishing the costume design, getting the gesture recognition software to work better, designing and programming sound and visuals and lights to be controlled by the gestures and qualities of movement (some of that is done, but there's still a lot to go), finishing the choreography and rehearsing as much as possible with the gesture sensor systems...yeah. A fair amount of work for three weeks. On the plus side, after that I'll primarily just have to write the thesis.

And back to Monday, soon, and the regularly scheduled work/class/meeting/rehearsal week!

So, it's Thursday already...

Getting near the end of the week! (Does anyone have great plans for the weekend? I have a fair amount of thesis-related work to do…) It feels like this week has been going really fast, though. I think that's because I have a thesis-related performance at the end of the month, so I know this month is going to pass FAR faster than I want it to! I still have quite a bit of design/coding work to do.

So, the outfit! I had two demos of my work at the lab today (one for a visiting professor, one for a company thinking of sponsoring the lab), so wanted to dress up a little bit. I wore this for demos/work/rehearsal.



This outfit includes something I’ve done quite a bit recently, which is wearing a white ruffled skirt under a dress or skirt that’s a little shorter than is comfortable (or than is warm!) for a bit more length and some interesting detail. I especially like it with a skirt or dress that’s fitted a bit more like a pencil skirt, because then the ruffles gather quite a bit at the bottom. On the other hand, I’m still debating what I think about the extra layers.



The necklace I got at a fair near my undergrad school. The man selling it tried to convince me it was real amber, but I knew better than that. Still probably paid a bit more than I should have, though. But I wear it on a regular basis, so…



The belt was one of my dollar-a-pound finds last weekend.

So, I'm a bit surprised I've kept this up for a few days already. It's interesting to see my mind working...outfits that seemed cute all day when I was wearing them suddenly feel a little frumpy when I go to post them here (and on Chictopia). I need to remember this is for the fun of it and for developing/improving my style, not for judging it right now. (Or for judging my body. No need for me to do that right now...though it's interesting that I look heavier to myself in pictures than in the mirror.)

Snowy day!

I woke up this morning to snowy skies (so much for "forty percent chance of snow"), so this outfit seemed appropriate. My favorite black turtleneck plus a plaid wool skirt that I thrifted a few weeks ago and since have worn quite a few times. It's actually nearish floor-length (though you can't quite tell from the pictures), so I'd originally gotten it with the intention to hem it to just above the knee. However, that may have to wait for this spring or probably next fall...right now it does quite well as a warm long winter skirt! (Also, it's quite a nice skirt, and nicely lined, so I'd have to be very careful with the hem. Maybe I can find another brown plaid skirt to make my shorter skirt?)



I started out this outfit with a bright blue belt over the turtleneck to help define the waist. However, it ended up being a bit too uncomfortable (little too tight of a belt) and not the best color for this palette. If I had a brown belt, that might be better.



The necklace is something that I had gotten for free off the campus-wide mailing list for things people are trying to get rid of. It seemed a bit much of a statement piece for me, but it's worth trying when it's free! However, I didn't wear it for a number of months...so here it is making its first public appearance.

Anyway. Spent much of my day in class (first day of classes today!) and meetings. Technically, I'm not supposed to take classes due to this being a thesis semester, but I'll be a listener (non-graded student who doesn't have to do assignments) on a pretty cool class on new textiles. Most of the class meetings are labs where we make things during class anyway, so I hopefully will get a lot out of it without being a full student in the class. And my rehearsal went quite well this evening, even if I didn't have any technology in it today. (perhaps especially because I didn't have any technology in it today!) We made a lot of progress on defining the arc and story for this particular duet, which was quite satisfying. Always a challenge to figure out how to add the technology in such a way that it is necessary and beneficial for the story, when I can tell a story in a satisfying way using just the movement and words...

An attempt at mixing patterns...

Today's outfit was centered around the polka-dot top and leopard-print belt combination. I'd been wanting to try this for a while, and finally got up the nerve to wear the belt out in public. (One might notice that I don't wear leopard/animal prints often.) I just wore it to the lab and rehearsal, though.



I have to figure out a good way of taking pictures so it's not the end of the day and dark (though I'm still at the lab) and requiring me to either find a place I can put the camera on a timer or convince coworker friends to take a couple of snapshots. At home, all of the appropriate height surfaces I could leave a camera on are in front of messy shelves or other things that don't make good photo backdrops. Maybe I should get a cheap tripod at some point? I can't wait until it's spring and I could take some of these outside without freezing to death!



I've been wearing this necklace a lot lately. It's one of the handful of things that have so far come out of my getting a bunch of old jewelry on Ebay and trying to reconstruct pieces into new jewelry creations.

Might this start being a "style" blog?

Thanks to Wardrobe Refashion, I've started to follow a wide range of blogs...first just sewing/craft blogs, but now actually fashion/style blogs (particularly vintage-inspired style blogs). It's been very interesting and inspiring to see so many people putting their own style experiments on blogs and describing their process...sharing their outfits and lives with a larger community.

So, I guess I'm interested in joining that movement. Or, at the very least, in documenting my attempts to pay more attention to how I dress. I've become very aware, being at a technologically-focused graduate school, that there's not too much attention being paid to "style." Paradoxically, that is making me want to be even more conscious of my own clothing choices...especially because the number of female grad students isn't too high, and I suppose I want to stand out a bit as a woman (girl?) in the program. I suspect this is a major reason why my personal style has been heading in a particularly vintage-inspired/feminine/dressy direction.

And with that...the first outfit post! It's not a particularly special outfit, but today I started finally taking pictures. This is what I wore to work today (and to a rehearsal for a dance piece I'm currently choreographing...choreographers can get away with a skirt at rehearsal, sometimes!) The main piece is a black BCBG Generations dress that I got from my favorite dollar-a-pound store yesterday and couldn't wait to add in. It's layered over a black long-sleeve shirt, an old slip (also from yesterday's thrifting run), and tights.



I threw this together last night, put it in my gym bag in the morning, then changed at the gym to find that the skirt on the dress was a good four inches shorter than I remembered it being. Luckily I'd packed the slip as well...so I ended up with a decorative slip detail. (I've been getting very interested in slips lately, perhaps because of the lingerie-inspired looks that have been hitting the runways all over this season?) So...I'm not sure I was terribly comfortable with the hemline here. With the tights, it's perfectly decent, but I'm still playing with what I'm comfortable wearing to the lab.



And a close-up of the shoes. These did get comments from a lab-mate.

So, we'll see how often these posts happen. I'd like to try to record some fun outfits at least a couple of times a week...

Updating

Hmm, did I say "more regular posting"? Perhaps I underestimated how busy I might be as I start working on my master's thesis. I'm doing the thesis about how to make it easier to use gestures and movement to control various media in performance. See, lots of performance artists have "gestures" trigger sound effects, shape video projections, or affect music; however, the actual code for these systems generally looks at really low-level things about movement, like "What's the voltage value on the bend sensor for the left elbow?" rather than something potentially more meaningful like "How much is the arm extended?" As an example (and this is something I did for my Sponsor Week project this year), if I gave someone a glove and said, "When you wear this glove, the system can recognize if you're flicking your hand, how hard you flick your hand, if you're squeezing, how tightly you're squeezing, if you're waving, if you're tilting your hand to the side, if you're shaking your hand back and forth... so how do you want those gestures to control sound or visuals?" they'll immediately be thinking of very different interactions than if I gave them a glove and said, "This glove has a bend sensor on the index finger and an accelerometer on the back of the hand. How do you want to control sound or visuals?" So in order to really experiment intuitively in rehearsal/performance with using gestures, I think you have to have a higher-level representation of gesture and movement qualities.

On the less techno-babble side of things, most recent refashion/construction: Halloween costume for the boyfriend, who wanted to be an elf (Lord of the Rings style). We'd made the long hooded cloak from a pattern last year, and this year added a quick elf tunic (refashioned from a green sheet), collared shirt (a reject of my brother's), a belt (really just a long strip of felt), and some pants from the dollar-a-pound clothing store. Didn't have the time to make or find a bow and arrows, unfortunately. (I went as a 1920's flapper, which pretty much meant: red velvet dress that I had gotten on sale for $9 a couple of years ago, a $2 red feather for my hair, stockings, and the character shoes I've had for a good number of years.)

So. Hopefully more jewelry refashioning soon. Also, I have a couple of easy (I hope) 1960's dress patterns that are waiting for a free evening and some stash fabric...