REtroCYCLEd: 2012

Monday, March 5, 2012

I was so happy to see a photo of my chic grandmother, Emily, on my sister's blog. I'm stealing it to show you, but the original is here.

I love her elegance, her gracefulness without trying. She's not trying to woo you in this photo, she knows she's pretty and totally at peace with whatever comes her way. She's still beautiful and graceful, but something about seeing photos of her when she was younger just makes me feel a little unkempt (I doubt she was wearing leggings and sweatshirts after her kids were born, as I am right now) and inspired. I love that she's wearing lipstick, which she still does! [Side note: my other grandfather supposedly fell in love with my nana because she was the only one at the end of the party who still had her lipstick on, i.e. wasn't drinking too much or making out! I love that!]

I have a few other photos of her, and of my husband's grandparents, I hope to share them with you over time.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Vintage Fashion for Breastfeeding - A Tough Find

I have some really lovely vintage dresses in my closet, and a few more in my shop. But when I needed a dress for an event recently, nothing in my closet met my needs. Even though I'm back to my pre-pregnancy size, all of my vintage dresses are high-necked, which means bad for breastfeeding. So I looked online. I needed one with buttons or a wrap that was suitable for breastfeeding, but was flexible on just about everything else. I couldn't find anything anywhere! I looked all over Etsy and couldn't believe there wasn't one dress for me. Now, I'm a bit of an unusual(ly, shall we say, "gifted") size on top, so maybe I was expecting too much. But I was a bit disappointed - I figured I could find a fun wrap dress (and now I'm bumming that I gave away my stretchy blue disco wrap dress to my friend Ellyn a while back!) I also looked for handmade wrap dresses, but didn't find any in the under $40 category (which pretty much any dress needs to be right now, since it likely won't fit properly once I'm done breastfeeding.)

I ended up wearing a button down dress from Old Navy that I really like. It's not available any more but they seem to keep their wrap and button down dresses well stocked! I've included a couple of those below, along with a couple from Etsy that popped up. Even though I don't shop at ModCloth or JCrew, I checked them for this blog post, and didn't find anything newsworthy.