Pee Wee

 

This morning I felt oddly inspired by my Pee Wee Herman button that I made at Santa Cruz (There was literally a button-making machine and a bunch of magazines to cut pictures out of. It was a blast...at least for me.

I decided to do a very whimsical nerdy kind of look, in honor of the show. I wish I had a Pterri the Pterodactyl button. Or maybe Pterri underwear...doesn't that sound just silly enough?

Peter Pan collared white shirt and jean vest are both secondhand from my work (vintage store downtown)
Super high waisted shorts from my mom's closet (she must have been just as wacky when she was my age)
Black high top converse
homemade Chippy Necklace
and homemade smiley face and Pee Wee buttons!

Fleas! Everywhere!

Every Saturday and Sunday morning, the local drive in movie theater (where my boyfriend, Jake and I are regulars) turns into a true grubby greasy flea market. I can't imagine anywhere else I'd rather be on a warm Sunday morning. It's literally the best...filled with trinkets, clothes, and collectibles of all kinds. I bought a few things this morning but this light blue cape is my favorite...

and the necklace is just my Chippy locket with a butterfly pin attached

Fashionably Derpin'

For those of you who love the Adult Swim show titled "Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!"

this post might be of interest to you...
if not, watch this and this

and in honor of "Chippy"
I went ahead and made myself a rad neklace

 

...aaaaand I had too much time to myself today and found a neat flashy scarf that I want to use as ears for a rainbow-galactic-animal costume of some sort.

New Toys!

Today I was having a rough day but when I came home from work my mom asked if i wanted to do a little thrifting with her so we went to a secondhand store nearby and I found a few true jems.

first of all, considering my dad and I are about to hook up the ol' record player in my room, I'm on the hunt for good records and I found this collection of bullfighting music and a "Best of" type Ray Charles recors for 75 cents a piece, SOLD to the young lady in the high-waisted pants!

After that I snatched up an old slip that I've been wearing as a dress the last couple days. It's much classier than Courtney Love's version of this trend and is made up of more material than Madonna's underwear outfit (hint, the red/cream dress on the front of the rack in the picture below) I'll be wearing it soon.


The University of California Santa Cruz is a pretty eccentric school, but perhaps one of the strangest aspects of this university is that one of the most sought after housing options for non-freshmen students are on campus trailer parks.
Basically a tight-knit community of hipsters and hippies living in a mixture of RV's and trailers painted with murals and wild flowers growing everywhere.
And guess what, world, I'm actually living there next year (and probably for years to come as well) My trailer is bought and ready for me to pitter patter down to Santa Cruz to paint it and fix it up a bit. The trailer has just about everything including 2 full beds! The only issue it doesn't exactly have a closet...which is a huge difficulty especially with someone with the level of obsessive compulsive clothes-hoarding that I seem to have.

Luckily, shortly after filling my basket with clothes and records, my mom and I stumbled upon one of those rolling clothes racks that stylists use.
SOLD

Something about this silly old clothes rack gives me a weird sense of power and inspiration. I feel like a stylist or costume designer or something. I've literally been playing dress up all day long! Oh the joys of no longer working full time M-F...

Coachella-Drama-O-Rama!

HOLY COACHELLA.

So it's been a couple weeks since I posted last...
I'' attempt to catch you up on exactly why,
YOU SEE
I arrived in beautiful Coachella Valley early afternoon and right away got in an argument with a friend
And then there was(nt) my boyfriend, who mysteriously disappeared all weekend. It's okay. I was hiding from him too. (we were nearing, and have since broken up)
After that I ended up feeling oddly independent, skipping my way through Coachella with monarch butterfly wings on my back and in an odd turn of events found myself crowd-surfing to the very front of the crowd during Crystal Castles performance
...and lost my purse in the process with my phone, money, ID (which I needed in order to fly back), and my shuttle pass back to the hotel
This pissed off my friend who then decided to dramatically strip me of my way back to Santa Cruz after Coachella as well as my place to stay for the weekend. After that she not only wasted her $400 dollar ticket and left the festival, but also took my luggage back with her(which meant I had no clothes, no toothbrush, no makeup...
and NONE of the outfits I blogged about having so carefully put together...

BUT
I'm a positive kind of gal

And this ticket wasn't easy to obtain
so what did I do?
I found myself some friends (new and old) who offered for me to stay with them in their campsite

With a little help from my friends, found myself a ride back to Santa Cruz (with a pit-stop to pick up my luggage)
and even with no posessions but the clothes (and monarch butterfly wings) on my back,
I still Coachella-ed



After the drama was over I had a wonderful time at Coachella. It all happened for a reason, so despite that drama I would have only changed one thing about the weekend,
not having an opportunity to take pictures with exception to the few I took on my phone before losing my purse (I didn't have my camera or phone)
BUT my friend Fish was nice enough to take some pictures with his disposables...









CLICK FOR LARGER

Overall my absolute favorite acts were Ratatat, Gogol Bordello, The Strokes and Arcade Fire. Crystal Castles was also great but I think I might only think that because I had such an adrenaline rush from crowd surfing. Sleigh Bells sucked (sorry) Jenny and Johnny was absolutely lovely as always, Cold war Kids, Oddfuture, A-track, Damien Marley, Animal Collective, the Black Keys, Cold War Kids and Yelle were all awesome too.

Overall a great experience. I will definitely go again when I happen to have the right money at the right time.

So It's Almost Coachella...

My ticket arrived. Plane tickets purchased. Shuttle to airport on it's way. Hotel arranged.

Check out this cool kind-of-comic-book-wristwatch-esque high tech wristband.

Apparently you're not allowed within 1 mile radius of the event without it
click here if you were planning on sneaking in and want more info on this terrible news for you

And then came packing and outfit planning...
My approach for this was pretty simple, stripes and oranges. I was largely inspired by the project I'm doing in my intro to design class (more info on a later date) and so you'll see a nice orange-y peach-y light blue-y stripe-y combination of whimsical outfits and accessories

 These sunglasses are a new find ($10 at Urban)

The actual clothing itself is mostly thrifted (with the orange and black polka dot shirt as an exception since it was a christmas gift from Urban)

This little pouch satchel is super cool and was a 50 cent find at a local thrift store. Chill Bro. I'm all for getting rid of loose change. Not to mention it is a super cool fold out zipper filled unique satchel. Perfect for Coachella both in it's useful design and it's dessert-like stitching.

 And this Necklace is sort of an Ellen original, I guess, because I took some old broken jewelry and this gold feather from a shirt that I gave away long ago and used pliers to hook them all together. You like?

 

 And this is a decievingly large satchel from a chain secondhand store calle Crossroads (look up a location near you! Buy and Sell! really though. no one pays me to say this I'm just a fan of the place.) The bag itself looks like a small satchel but it works like a clown car in that you can fit just about anything in this bag. It's really quite amusing and perfect for long festival days.

 Sunglasses!
(from left to right: Urban/Forever21/Forever21/Dollar Tree(I'm serious. check out a dollar store near you for some trendy sunglasses)

 and shoes. This was the hardest part as most of my shoes are falling apart right now and I'm sure I'll come back wearing thread and cardboard on my feet so kiss these nice kicks goodbye...

 and finally, hats. I may or may not bring the straw one. Probably not because someone stepped on it the other day and now it is falling apart straw by straw :[

And now all I have to do is sit and kill time until 6:00 for the shuttle to arrive to take my good friend Melody and I to the airport so we can finally depart for the greatest weekend of our lives.

. . .waiting. . .

...


I can't do this.
D:

Coming Soon

• Lots of new thrifted finds!
• homemade pink shorts!
  
• homemade 420 dress!!! (yeah, I said it)
  
• Inside my Intro To Design Project!
  
• Santa Cruz Street Fashion!
  
• SF Street Fashion!!!
  
  
  

oh yeah and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(4 days until departure)

Classy Classes

Well I'm in my intro to networking class (fitting, no?) and the professor basically just told us that the rest of the material for the day is meant as a "nice break from lecture" and that we can feel free to network on our laptops, ipads and mobile devices until the required quiz on bit rates and binary hexat the end of the period. Meanwhile she keeps showing us crappy Youtube fan vids with terrible graphics and unbearably nerdy math music(please... don't even make me explain)

But I'm lucky because for no reason at all I decided to actually bring my laptop to class even though I don't usually do that because it intimidates me and my laptop's battery life is too short.
But luckily I decided to bring it with me and I happened to find an outlet in the very back of the lecture hall so now I'm blogging.
I realized that a good deal of my school work pertains to my blog and I thought I'd just share a little bit more about myself by talking a bit about some cool classes I took/am taking this year,

1. FILM Transmedia Storytelling
   
   Street name: Star Wars Class
   
   Term: Fall quarter '10
   
   Professor: Cool blonde nerd. wore glasses like these and dresses that looked like Jedi capes. Likes Buffy and is a huge Trekkie. Slight lisp. Very sarcastic.
   
   Level of Difficulty: Medium
   
   Why it was great: Not only was Professor Scott a lot of fun to listen to and really intelligent, but the class itself was both challenging and interesting (and in no way time consuming.) and I learned a thing or two about Transmedia storytelling (the telling of stories across multiple mediums such as Star Wars, The Matrix, Heroes etc.)
   We mainly focused on Star Wars as the main example, exploring a variety different of mediums that the story is featured in such as the original films, books, cartoons, video games, talking toys, comic books, even holiday specials! It was a lot of fun and such a unique class.
   And I mean...Star Wars rules, man.
   
2. Intro To Networking
   
   Term: Current (Spring '11) ...actually I'm IN this class right now...HAH.
   
   Professor: Another Geeky  woman. Very smart. Knows all of the new gadgets. Uses (almost too much) nerd humor. Knows more about Facebook than I do but doesn't have an account.
   
   Level of Difficulty: Medium/Easy
   
   Why It's great: I'm learning about useful internet stuff that I can use like how to connect a router and how to write html and count in binary
   
3. Intro To Design
   
   Term: Current (Spring '11)
   
   Professor: Attractive Blond-ish man with facial hair and Swagger with a capital "S." Possibly gay. Borderline scary but he knows what he's talking about so It's okay.
   
   Why It's great: Well...I think I'll leave the answer to this for future posts to come. The class is wonderful. Exactly what I hoped for so I expect to be posting about it soon.

Bublitschki

Lately I've had gypsies on my mind,
which isn't totally out of the norm for me considering:

a) I'm a big Gogol Bordello fan (COACHELLA '11 WAHOO!!!)

and  

b)I love me some longs skirts, big earrings and dark florals

But today I was feeling a little bit more in love with the mysterious free-spritited, wanderers of yesteryear

 
Some inspiration...

 
You can see why I couldn't help but get all Esmeralda-ed out and head for the road

Some daily outfit pictures...

Scarf: Mom's closet (possibly thrifted)
Skirt: Sister's old clothes
Shirt: hand knitted Vinatge (from Mars in Berkeley, CA)
Earrings: Vintage (see above)
Purse: Mom's old stuff
Hair Color: OH you noticed??? (Loreal hair color) My lovely sister dyed it for me :]












*notice the new earrings; 1/2 of the only goodies I came back with from the vintage expo last week.

they have a lot of versitility to them, surprisingly enough. Gypsy one day, Twiggy the next.











Click to find out what Bublitschki means!

"Naturally Whimsical"

Welp, the photo shoot I was tossing and turning over finally happened and I'm soo happy with the outcome.

These photo's were shot by Photographer Richard James
He shot them all with film only, no digital

I must admit, I was a bit nervous at first (seeing as I've only ever had close friends, family and past/current boyfriends ever take pictures of me) but after just a short while I got more comfortable. I found myself feeling more natural with a camera focused on me at all times, and it didn't hurt that Richard was so sweet and supportive, he even called me "naturally whimsical" and said I have a striking face which was quite flattering. I've never thought of myself as necessarily striking before so I was beyond flattered.

Photographer: Richard James
Stylist: (me!) Ellen Howes
Location: San Francisco, California (near/around the Union Square area)

 

Richard's compliments and reassurance that I was doing a good job + a killer pair of heels I never got to wear to Senior Ball = total and complete confidence.

Big thanks again to Richard James, you were so great to finally meet and your talent and charisma made me feel comfortable and confident. I'm lucky to have met such a great new friend and I am very excited to work with you more in the future!