Two Hats: The Same, But Different

  

These two hats - both recently knitted, finished, and photographed - illustrate a split in my recent style of dress. On one hand, you have the über-feminine retro princess; on the other, you have the goofy, neon, punk-pop badass. Like an obnoxious baby of equal parts Megan Draper and Avril Lavigne.

Lately, I like to think that I channel both of these things to some degree. It's a part of being a human with a particular identity that I hadn't thought about much before now: that any given day, you might feel more one thing than the other; that it's okay to claim each as your own, and yet also express them differently (or not at all!) depending on how you feel at that moment.

Sometimes as I designer I put this pressure on myself to be one definable thing all the time - so that I might be more easily recognizable, maybe? - but at the end of the day, I enjoy the breathing room of not choosing. Some days I want to look soft and approachable, to wear pink and high heels and smile all the time. Some days I want to look like a neon sign that looks cool but also like it might fall on your head if you walk underneath it (but mostly in a friendly way?)

Is it possible to be strong and awesome and no-bullshit but also approachable and fun and nice? 'Cause gosh, I want to be that.

Oh well. Here's some hats.

Sweet Pea Cairn - more details on Ravelry here.

Magic Creek - more details on Ravelry here.

Happy Thursday, friends!

(I promise I will never be a neon sign that falls on your head. I was just kidding. Please don't run away.)

<3

Cory

WIP: Magic Lupine

 

In between my secret projects, I've been knitting on a third Lupine shawl, this time in a coveted skein of Tosh Merino Light in the colorway Magic. Lately, I've been exploring more of the sparkly, Lisa-Frank-tastic style of my '90s youth, which means splatter-dyes and neon and everything funky - which has been fun, and also sort of complicated in weird ways.

I was a pretty serious kid, and even though I did have a sticker book to rival the best of them - I had sparkly, fuzzy, and scratch-n-sniff stickers, organized by type and motif in a Lisa Frank dolphin sticker book, thankyouverymuch - I didn't ever feel like I was cool enough to really participate in trends or fashion in general, so in a small way, I'm attempting to reclaim that experience a bit. (Okay, the current '90s throwback nostalgia is helping too!) It wasn't until I started going to fashion school that I admitted that I even cared about fashion, since my experience of it had been so fraught with feelings of exclusion and inadequacy - some of which was handed to me through media portrayals of beauty and worthiness, and some of which came from an internal sense of perfectionism and self-criticism. Either way, fashion was a very negative thing to me for much of my life, and I'm still sorting through a lot of my beliefs about and experiences of it.

So in my daily making & fashion life lately, I've been trying to explore and challenge those things that we all hear and internalize in childhood, which are reinforced over and over again throughout our lives: you have to be pretty to pull off short hair; being skinnier is always better; women can't have body hair, because it's gross; your hips look big in that dress, and nobody wants that, right? And what I'm finding is that I'm not just enjoying the opportunity to play with fashion and beauty that has felt off-limits to me in the past, I'm also finding that a lot of it feels authentic in ways I didn't expect, which is pretty fucking cool.

 

 In other news, Monsieur Squishy is still on a twice-daily dose of rattie antibiotics, but remains more or less his cranky self. He has become somewhat more personable during his convalescence, but I think his true opinion of us has changed only slightly: Lumberjack and I are still his annoying humans, but now we are his annoying humans who also give him tasty yogurt twice a day.

Good boy, I guess?

Happy Wednesday, friends!

<3

Cory