A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Star Wars turns 40

Today is basically like Christmas, the anniversary of the moon landing, and Cake Day all rolled in to one: Star Wars is 40 years old! I know #MaytheFourth literally just happened, but it's not every year that my favorite thing in the world turns the big 4-0, so I decided to save my geeksplosion for a dedicated birthday post.

#AllDressApril Outfits and My #WeekWithBernie

I haven't worn pants in over a year. To some, that might sound unusual or challenging, but at this point, my wardrobe is 90% dresses and skirts, so it wasn't actually difficult to come up with a month of dresses for All Dress April. A few of my Instagram/Facebook friends were participating in the event, so I decided to join in. For me, 'joining in' just meant using the hashtag when posting photos of outfits I was already planning to wear ;).

Anyway, I had a blast participating in this challenge! It was so much fun to see what the other participants were wearing, and to virtually 'twin' with people, or plan to wear the same outfit. I only repeated one dress, because I'd worn it early in the month but when a group of ladies decided to do a week of Bernie Dexter twinning days, I wanted to participate!

A Month of Colors

When I was about sixteen or so, I fell in love with the color black. I think there were a few different reasons for this. I was in the pit band for my high school's annual musicals for all four years of high school, as well as Jazz Band president from sophomore year onward, and the uniform for all of these performances was head-to-toe black. Dressing like that on non-performance days reminded me of something I really enjoyed. I was also super into the Cure at that point, and sort of a metalhead/punk to boot. Oh, and I had a seriously major beef with authority.

Anyway, my love affair with the absence of color relaxed a tad in college, and I got a little more comfortable wearing color after I moved to LA. In college, I'd wear neon pink with my black pants, skirts, and tops, and as a grad student, I discovered that teal and subtle prints were actually my friends. As recently as five years ago, though, my closet still basically looked the same whether or not the lights were on. Black dresses were my go-to outfit, and even when I wore a more colorful skirt, I'd generally default to a black top. The colors I preferred were saturated jewel tones, in smallish doses. In fact, I distinctly remember going shopping in Vegas in March 2015 with one of my best friends, who kept making fun of how I continually gravitated to the monochromatic clothing. At that point, I guess I finally realized I was getting a little too predictable!

Oh, how the times have changed. These days, I want my clothes to be fun! I still love a head-to-toe black outfit from time to time (obviously!), but reading so many awesome blogs and getting into Instagram has reminded me how much fun it is to dress expressively. There's so much one can convey through clothes, and I'm much more excited about it than I have been for a long time. I'm a loud, excitable person, and I want to wear things that turn my enthusiasm up to 11! I also think that moving to a place where the sun doesn't shine 355 days out of the year has really helped to solidify this rediscovery of color.

So here's my outfit roundup for the month of February. Every day for the entire month, I had color in my outfit. Most days, it was quite a lot of color; one day, it was just my beloved BB-8 and seriously red lipstick, but the color was there nonetheless!

#7ShadesofRed and Valentine's Day Recap

I hope everyone had a lovely Valentine's Day, in whatever way you chose to celebrate (or not celebrate)! Today's post is a first for my blog: a recap of a week's worth of outfits! I'm very susceptible to themed things, be they outfits, parties, meals, or some fourth category I haven't yet thought up. It's fitting, then, that my first outfit roundup features everything I wore for #7ShadesofRed week. The idea of 7 Shades of Red was simple: people would wear something in red or pink every day in the week leading up to Valentine's Day. I embraced this idea with the wholehearted enthusiasm I generally reserve for self-invented challenges, even though there was absolutely nothing challenging about finding a week's worth of red in my wardrobe, and it was so much fun! Here's everything I wore:

My very first Ur-Collage!