Meet my Judy

This is Judy, and she's a 'Judy', a term for a dressmaker's body form. I bought her new, years ago, at The Bombay Company on sale. I used to dress her up in one of my special vintage coats, but I found the coat just got too dusty. Plus it's nice to change things up every once in a while. Now Judy is an accessories junkie.

I just love these belts. I haven't had the chance to wear any of them yet as they're 'new' to me. The retro gold one used to be owned by dear Minnie, the lady I have told you about in recent posts.

The others came from my man's Mum in England, an accessories maven in her own right. I just love all the jeweled dangling bits. So boho chic!

The scarf, Perry Ellis, was thrifted for a couple bucks (you can't quite see but it has a bunch of birdies on it). The heavy duty necklace - vintage Nina Ricci, I'm told, by jewellery designer Rita Tesolin, who added these cute stone hearts to it - is so heavy it cuts little designs in the back of my neck, but I love it anyway. The shorter chunky colourful necklace is circa 1980s (Lucite?).

This wee pink purse is so darling - it was a B-day gift from my sis that she picked up in the market in Aix en Provence. It's from Italy, but hey, now I have the best of France and Italy! I'm not really a little bag person but it did prove useful while holidaying in England and also for weekend jaunt-abouts.

The thrifted version of the above purse: a tiny purse handmade in the Philippines, which I've had for so long I can't quite recall how much I paid for it - but I know it was under $5 as I have a certain 'thrift threshold' rule I enact when I find beautiful things that don't wholly fit into my life, and this was one of them. I don't wear it much, but when I do I pair it with a pink dress and feel incredibly chic.

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Peonies & punch at Nathalie-Roze & Co. 5th anniversary do

Yesterday I popped into Nathalie-Roze & Co for its 5th B-day bash. Owned by Nathalie-Roze Fischer, the Leslieville, Toronto indie boutique features accessories and clothing by local artists. There's also this darling canopied and gated-in terrace where they have events and sell what I hear is the best ice-cream in town.

Nathalie-Roze and crew had the place all decked out yesterday for the festivities. These fragrant pink peonies, reposing beside N-R's famous mango and rose-water punch, remind me of growing up.

Back to the shop, a gorg green-walled eco-sanctuary of lovely hand-crafed jewellery displayed on teacup saucers and cool indie fashion labels. At the after-hours do last night, the change rooms and shop environs overflowed with hipster young women in their 30s (ok, some of us weren't 30!).

You know I'm a jewellery nut. This designer found a way to break and sand down teacups and fashion the bits into beautiful pendants.

And this one - a spoon! How brilliant!

Of course, my pics aren't doing justice to the breadth of what's in store - it was just too hard to get decent snaps of the clothing. Trust me when I say everything is recycled, upcycled or refashioned into a new stylish life.

Hair barrettes and head pieces of old ties! Do you know how many old ties I see when thrift shopping that are made of the best fabrics and patterns?

The lady of the evening wouldn't let me snap a pic of her, for shame, so I will wish a Happy Anniversary to the floating and very peony-like paper puff balls - Happy 5th!

You can find the shop at 1015 Queen St. E in Leslieville, Toronto. Look out for N-R's roster of events on her FB page or Twitter - pretty sure there's a clothing swap coming up.

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Made in Morocco dress, Goodwill

I've been wanting to show you this amazing cotton-rayon dress found at Goodwill for $6.99 a few months ago. The label is Soussan Designs Le Monde International and it was made in Morocco. It's so elegant; I just love it. 

It's a heavy dress to wear. As you can see, it has an uber full skirt times two layers.

I'm wearing it with gold-tone BCBG sandals (thrifted for $4.99) and a Made in Canada necklace pendant by Raphael from the 1970s.

I can even flip the top layer over my shoulders and change the look of the dress - how cool is that?

The really amazing thing: there was a white one in the exact same style right beside it on the rack in Goodwill! So dear readers, I bought two gorg dresses for $6.99 each! Must be a bronzed babe when I wear the white one or else I'll look like a dead fish ... self-tanner here I come! (P.S. I love wearing pink these days, especially after reading it makes you look younger -- in the pink, you know??).

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Minnie's purse

You may remember the story of Minnie, the lady I wrote about who passed away recently. Well, her dear friend contacted me before I went on vacation, asking me if I wouldn't like a few of Minnie's vintage pieces. What a tremendous compliment and honour. This purse was one of Minnie's pieces that is now mine - don't you just love it?

The horsie detail is just too darling. And the strap is long enough that I can wear the bag across my body, which I did the other day.

I still have to photograph the other pieces, but I promise I will soon as some are really special.

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A look at a nook

I still have to snap a pic of the vintage jewellery piece I bought in Notting Hill, but until then I'll show you a bit of the apartment re-org I did before I left on holidays.

I love this little corner nook that I refreshed by adding pops of orange: the paisley pillow found at a massive church sale for a buck; the Made in Canada retro glass vase on the top of the bookshelf (thrifted for about $10 if memory serves); the not so thrifty Anthropologie lampshade that I fell in love with when the store first opened in Toronto.

I found the beautiful framed mini picture hanging over the chair - handpainted flowers on black velvet - for 99 cents at a thrift shop. On the back there's a label that reads, "Mrs. D. M. Gowing, 77 Stubbington Avenue, Portsmouth, Hampshire" and then a postal code and phone number. Isn't it just wonderful that this little treasure made its way from England and across the pond to me and my grungy little home?

The silver glass lamp was $5 at a lamp sale; and the wrought iron chair was part of a set I thrifted at Sally Ann years ago, one of my first major thrift purchases in fact. I spray-painted them silver and covered the seats with a tablecloth I cut up, bought at the dollar store. There's grungy style for ya.

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English charity shops

Well I'm back from lovely England and I'm a bit blue missing my hunnie, but I'm armed with heaps of fab memories and interesting cultural and fashion observations! On the fashion front, I didn't get to wear any of my lovely frocks as the weather was too chill - so I had to shop, natch!! Here I am, in front of a traditional English red phone booth in the lovely town of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire county, sporting a semi-thrifted outfit from a charity shop in the area: the Pepe London jeans (killer expensive new) were seven-pound-fifty (12 Canadian dollars), and the hippie top for 4 pounds (just over $6 CND).

If you cast your mind back to my blog posts from September 2010 when I first went to England, you'll remember that I commented on the general low, mass-market quality of thrift shop clothing there - but that was in a wee town in the north. The charity shops in the southern and quite posh area of Beaconsfield and surrounding area are an entirely different matter: good quality labels, though not a ton of vintage as far as I could tell.

Still, I'm impressed with the calibre of the charity shops in England - the ones I shopped were hyper-clean, immaculately merchandised and well organized - in other words, leagues above the chaotic, stinky and dirty shops here.

The marketing of organizations like the British Heart Foundation, where I picked up the Pepe jeans, are well-thought out - as you see here, an 'urgent appeal' bag, containing a bag for me to put my donation in, accompanied my BHF purchase.

My humble opin is that charity shops in England are run more like corporations (such as Value Village in Canada, which is not a charitable organization but rather part of the Savers corporation in the US). I'm not bashing charity thrift shops here as I rather like their grottiness - but what accounts for the diff between them and their nicer UK counterparts, I wonder?

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Boho bling, not yet worn

I'm supposed to be hanging around the Blackpool Tower today, but alas, the Holiday Gods want to give me more nesting time with my Brit mannie, who has not only been looking after me and my broken foot, but is as of this morning flaked out on the couch after an emergency tooth-pulling episode.

Aren't we a pair of sad sacks.

So, in honour of the Glastonbury Festival that just wrapped up in England (which is the new millennium version of Woodstock, I'm gathering) I'm showing you a fab piece of boho-inspired bling I bought the day I left Canada for England (which I haven't had a chance to wear here yet as I've been living in yoga pants).

I loved it on sight when I plucked it out of the case at my fave neighbourhood thrift shop, Canadian Thrift in Toronto, as the chunky, rough-hewn chain reminds me of the 1970s pendant necklaces designed by Raphael. The large disc pendant also has a distinctly boho vibe to it, and you know my penchant for bohemian chic. Not sure if it's vintage - what do you think?

It's quite large, which could be a style challenge as all I'm seeing in my mind's eye is some Woodstock hippie dude from the 1960s wearing it with super wide leg jeans ... and nothing else --- but perhaps it's the painkillers.

On that note, back to the couch.

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