My 30th Birthday Soiree

I turned 30 this week, and in celebration, I threw a Downton Abbey/Gosford Park-themed birthday party last weekend.  Nothing beats a group of friends who are amazing sports (everyone showed up in costume!) and many, many bottles of champagne.

A few photos from the party:

 2014 and my 30th are going to be a good year. I can feel it.

F.L.W.

I love reading best-selling novels. The problem is, I buy my books almost exclusively at thrift stores, which means that my pickings are generally the best-sellers of several years ago, now thumbed through and discarded after vacations, lunch breaks and book clubs have gotten the best of them. Regardless, they're new to me.

In vintage-land, I've been obsessed with the Edwardian era (obsessing over past seasons of Downton Abbey doesn't help things) and I've finally read the two Frank Lloyd Wright novels that everyone was raving about in about 2008-2009.

Thesis statement for Loving Frank and The Women: Frank Lloyd Wright was an arrogant ass, but was super-talented. Also, read these books. The facts about his life are things of fiction. CRAZY.

A nouveau dress.

This dress has been an obsession of mine since I found it. It dates to the 1910s, sometime after the S-curve corset shape was in style, but before the slightly shorter hemlines of those stylish, heavily beaded flapper dresses. It was obviously inspired by the Greek goddess look, with the fluttery draping around the sleeve holes and the wing/column-like draping down the back of the dress.

This dress feels like a thin, crinkly silk, and is embellished on the front with the tiniest beading details, and on the shoulder with a cluster of pearls. This dress is in shockingly pristine condition, with the only flaw being a faint stain on the left arm draping that is unnoticeable when worn.

To figure out how this dress might have been styled, I wove some off-white ribbon through an opening in the draped area. A wider cloth belt might have been worn the same way.

 Visit Inherited here to look at all of my vintage offerings!

Ex libris.

 While we were in the mountains, Steven and I did some serious thrifting. We found the most amazing book collection that looked like it had been pulled from some old library (notice the handwritten numbered labels on the spines). We were immediately drawn to the titles and the fonts and the colors.

 Each book has its own unique details. I am more than a little bit obsessed.

It turns out that we stumbled upon the old library of the Hotel Wyoming in Orlando, Florida. Because I am a tremendous nerd, I did some online research (i.e., "Googling").

Hotel Wyoming started as the private home of some dude (j/k, his name was Nathaniel Poyntz) in 1870. It was turned into a 15-room hotel in 1900. The hotel was expanded five total times, going from 15 rooms to over 100. The height of its popularity as a leading tourist hotel was in the 1920s, until it was torn down in 1959. (Image from Wikipedia.)

 This it it, post-expansions, in 1948, 11 years before it was torn down. (Image from vintagepostcards.org.)

All that really remains of this hotel are old postcards and apparently a collection of books from its library that sit in a Habitat ReStore in the mountains of North Carolina.

These books transport me. People read these books on vacation in Florida, before the tourist traps, and Disney World, and Universal Studios, and strip malls. I imagine some rebellious teenaged girl reading the copy of Grey Wethers, written Vita Sackville-West (Virginia Woolfe's lover, gasp!), tucked in the library away from her family.

I wish we'd bought the entire collection. For a dollar each, we've brought home all sorts of things for me to daydream about for ages.

Jazz Age Party on Governor's Island

The 1920s might be my favorite era, so looking at the pictures The Sartorialist takes of the Jazz Age party on Governer's Island every year makes me nothing less than envious. Especially since I'd love to have a Gatsby summer. I have to go to this one year. I have to.

All images from The Sartorialist.

A Gatsby summer.

I want to have a Gatsby summer: white dresses and shingled hair, gypsy jazz and vintage slang, gin fizzes and champagne, and most of all, that unattainable green light across the water.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – to-morrow we will run farther, stretch out our arms farther…."

 Image from chaplinatra.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am currently devouring this book:



It's by the same author who wrote the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald that I adored.

Though I've always loved her poetry, I knew practically nothing about her as a person. She was an enigma...people were falling over themselves to be near her and it seems that the whole nation was in love with her.





Even though she wasn't conventionally beautiful, she had charm, natural flirtatiousness and wit, and then that wonderful je ne sais quoi that must be vital to enchant as many people as she did. And not only that, but she was brilliant. She could just sit down and churn out work--amazing things.

This biography is so good that I'm rationing it out...I only allow myself to read a few chapters every day. I'm going to be so sad when I've finished it. I need to find another interesting person to read about. Any ideas?

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

Quietly and loudly crazy and I love her.