Saturday Style: Navvy Boots

Hello, peoples all! It has been far too long since I've had a spare hour to photograph my clothing. I promise I do wear clothes, even when you don't see them on here. XD Also, I am feeling increasingly vexed with iPhone mirror selfies for these posts. Hopefully I can get an actual camera on duty soon (and an assistant to photograph me). For now, though, no sense in being a crosspatch and not posting for the silly reason of poor photo-quality.

Today, I have three fun components to my nautical-themed outfit: a striped crop-top with latticed back (not pictured), turquoise belt, and high-heeled knee boots. I am so excited about the boots. I bought them to wear in my brother's outdoor wedding in November...I have wanted boots for so long, but being a curvy-girl, most tall boots don't fit over my calf. Enter Kohl's and a pair of boots created especially for women like me. They are so comfortable, so stylish, and so fun to add to an outfit. So yes: the boots. I like them.

People say you can't mix brown and black very easily, but I believe you can...you just have to get the right mixture of other colors in the combo. I didn't want to do the red & blue nautical thing today. Instead, I chose to bring out another level of blue for a somewhat playful feel to the thing to counteract the serious Parisness of the boots. ;)

Light flares because it's sunning like crazy over here.

Virginia Octobers are beautiful and cool, but not so cool you actually need a coat. Enter useful things like lightweight, long-sleeve tops and boots. I used to dislike tucked in tops because I don't have a tiny waist, but I am growing to love the look of being able to show off a sweet belt or cute top. I have definitely been inspired to try new things by curvy fashion bloggers such as Girl With Curves. Following a few of them on Instagram gives me a fashion boost each day. (Did you know I'm on Instagram?) Knowing that certain styles can either look chic or sloppy encourages me to be mindful of my posture, and they really can look great when I remember. ;) I chose to put a tangerine-colored cami under this crop-top in case it decided to rise up. Been thinking it would be useful to do a post sometime on how to modestly style a crop-top...would you guys be interested?

As you can see, the shirt won't always stay put and it's nice to know my belly isn't showing. Otherwise someone might start calling me Winnie-the-Pooh, and much as I adore him, that isn't exactly what I'm going for. XD

What are you wearing this bright October Saturday? Do you have any plans? I'm for a morning of book-release work (Anon, Sir, Anon comes out the Fifth of November! Add it to your Goodreads list if you love me), then a baby-shower this afternoon. Wanna guess what I'm giving the wee lad? (Hint: it starts with "winnie" and ends with "thepooh." ;) Cheers!

Autumn Styles: Peeking Ahead

If I have one flaw in my relationship with summer (besides high humidity and mosquitoes) it is the fact that summer fashions don't thrill my heart as much as those belonging to autumn. Maybe it's because I don't have the fabulously toned arms to rock a sleeveless top, or the fact that I cringe whenever it's strictly necessary for me to wear shorts. Maybe it's the hellish temperatures that make me wish wearing no clothes whatsoever was passable in society. ;) Whatever the reason, by this second week of August, I am always ready to break out the jeans, high-heels, sweaters and my magenta trench. So what sorts of fashions am I looking forward to trying this fall?

I've recently been inspired by Ginnifer Goodwin in Once Upon a Time:

She's feminine, practical, and stylish -- all things I will be needing to consider while continuing my nannying job this fall. Not so much digging the pixie-cut, but it looks just fair on her. One thing I've learned with a summer of nannying: I want my clothes to be kid-proof and cute. Also, Ginnifer Goodwin is a fellow (albeit petite) curvy-girl so I can take styling cues! The costume designers did such a good job bringing her personality into her wardrobe ... love it. 

Skinny Jeans & Heels & Boots:

Inspired by many curvy fashionistas, I want to try a pair of skinny jeans this year -- especially with boots or high heels. Another curvy friend and I plan to shop for a well-fitting pair together. I hate the painted-on look; I want a pair that will go well with longer tops (I would love to get a sweater-tunic) and stuff well into boots. Also, you can't beat skinny jeans and a trench-coat or blazer.

Cardigans

Also inspired by Ginnifer Goodwin and my love of all things vintage, I want to get a couple of short cardigans to pair with skirts and dresses.

Silk Neck-Scarves

Always one for that Hepburnism, I have ordered a few silk scarves and will be styling them this fall as a way to expand the versatility of my wardrobe.

Say hey to the guy creepin' on Grace Kelly

Hats

I really want to get a couple of different hats to wear this fall. I will be getting bangs of some sort "put in", if that's how you say it, next weekend and I'm looking forward to trying different styles of hats/headbands/etc.

 Yes. I am ready for autumn. This is going to be fun.

Indian-Summer Kiss

"There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood;

Touch of manner, hint of mood,

And my heart is like a rhyme

With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time."

-Bliss Carman

There are so many beautiful things to love right now.

There are maples with veins so red you hold your breath, knowing that soon the red in the veins will spread to the body of the leaves and turn the treetops scarlet as Rahab's thread.

There is a bit of a moon hanging low and copper over the field across the way in the pre-dawn hours, when you stay up too late and ought to be in bed but step out on the porch instead just to look at the majesty for a moment.

There are nights and nights of open-window weather which is enough to set the soul right again. Very little can be all that bad when a dark and beautiful chill is seeping through the screens.

There is the smell of mown grass baking hay-sweet in the riot of hazy sunlight, the aroma rising up to fill your nose when you make the trek, barefoot, to the mailbox.

There are cookies--smacking and powerful and punching with the amount of fresh ginger baked into them--cooling on a rack in sugar-sparkling rows.

There are books on the most fascinating aspects of history sitting on the shelf waiting for the moment in the day when I lay aside everything else and take one with me to the porch.

There are lazy evenings at the county fair in the company of friends, everyone pretending, for this moment, that nothing has changed; that no one has moved on; that we are all children again with nothing to do but squash together on the bleachers and watch bull-riding in almost horrified fascination.

There are free photo-prints arranged in a happy cloud on the wall, summoning un-looked-for memories from the recesses of your brain.

There are dewdrops silvering the roses and kittens squirming wiggly-warm next to their mothers, and late-night Sherlock marathons in the itty-bitty house across the land.

There are cotton-candy-eating sessions and then high-from-cotton-candy sessions afterward where we are much less brilliant conversationalists than we like to think, and we collapse against the counter waiting for the chicken-wings to get out of the oven and then, having seen them safely through the inferno, go straight to bed without eating any.

There are phone-calls after phone-calls, setting the pace for the business as a merciful storm--so much abundance of provision in that respect that Saturdays are work-days.

There are hugs to be given, and back-rubs to receive and dusty country roads to drive with the windows down and the music up.

There is feed to buy, and goats to chase off the berry-bushes, and scuppernongs to pick and suck and eat with the sour-zing running up and down your jaw like a trapped tickle.

It's Indian Summer, y'all, and God is just so amazingly good to me.

There's none of it at all!

"The funniest thing about it is the way it likes to grow:

Not at all like proper children which is always very slow.

For it sometimes shoots up straighter like an India-rubber ball

And it sometimes gets so little that there's none of it at all."

-Robert Louis Stevenson

Though Robert Louis Stevenson was, of course, referencing his shadow, I think this quatrain fits well with the current state of my life. (and probably the lives of many of you gals who are graduated.) It seems like we're either sitting with so much free-time we're about crazy, or the schedule merits none at all. I'm about to enter a none-at-all stage, and I'm looking forward to it.

Since we're a "political family" (i.e. don't sit around with our heads in the sand), autumn is not so much pumpkin-spice lattes as it is campaigning. And in Virginia this year we have a really vital race. The spot for governor is up for grabs and the nation's (collective) eye is on the race; whoever becomes governor will swing Virginia one way or the other which will effect national elections in the next few years. You'll likely remember me speaking of the SAT's last year (student action teams) with Generation Joshua; they have called for two early SAT's in addition to the normal ones over election-week, and are trying to gather 200 students for each round! I have volunteered as a leader for those two (as well as the normal one). That means that from the 19-24 I will be in Northern VA, and from October 3-8 I will be in Southern VA. In addition to this, we have our beloved County Fair this weekend, a family camping trip planned for the week after the second early SAT in October, and the girls go to camp mid-October. (I am not taking that full week out of my time for obvious reasons. :D) Of course after October comes election-week with the normal SAT. I'm really hoping and praying that we can get Ken Cuccinelli elected as our next governor; he's a Catholic, homeschooling father with excellent values who stands for everything I am concerned about as a young, intelligent, and voting single woman. Please be praying with me that the fondly-termed "Operation Shock & Awe" will change the course of Virginia history--most candidates whose races our SAT's helped push through election day credit GenJ kids with tipping the final scale. I know it has worked before and I pray these kids' efforts will help push Ken Cuccinelli through. I am SO excited! If you've never done something like this you can't understand the energy and thrill of working so closely with the stuff that changes American history. Seriously now. Get involved with politics; if the country has lame leaders, it's really our fault.

Off the political topic, I am also teaching English Literature to Leah and creative-writing lessons to Leah, Anna, and our cousin Emily. (This will have to be slipped here and there through cracks.)

Also in the background is my online shop, The Warren, which hasn't exactly taken off with a bang because of the fact that I've had no  time to publicize it. So if any of you felt like helping me out with that...(blog buttons, mentioning on your blog, following The Warren on Facebook... :) The business is finally beginning to boom (after three years of nil), praise GOD, and we are having to work Saturdays to keep up. I am still doing billing and occasional office-related things in addition to going out on the work-crew now and then. (the other girls and Benj still carry the brunt of that.) This month I got to do it all at Starbucks. (hence the picture above. Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate is divine.) Oh yes. And I'm writing a Cinderella-novella (25,000 words) which I have to finish, get critiqued, edit, and send into author Anne Elisabeth Stengl's contest by December. The reason I'm pushing to do this is that the best five stories will be published by Rooglewood Press in an anthology dubbed: Five Glass Slippers. Of course A.E. Stengl will get all the money from it, but the winners have have glory, honor, and free publicity in connection with a very successful author in the Christian-fiction circles. So I'm writing my best and shoving it in the ring and we'll see what outcome the Lord has for all that! It would be a lovely break into the realm of publicity for my writing which is currently-unpublished-but-seeking-to-remedy-that.

So yes. I'm bonkers. This fall is bonkers. And I'm loving every minute of it. ^.^

Doughnutty

On our rare most recent library trip, Sarah got a Cake Boss cookbook. Now, I don't know if any of you have watched Cake Boss, but our family loves it, and it is on several of the kids' bucket-lists to have birthday cakes made by Carlo's Bakery. :D Benjamin is quite practical about it:

"If I start saving up now, it'd only cost...y'know...like a thousand bucks to get a simple birthday cake."

Well-said, dear sir. But thank heaven for Buddy Valastro's willingness to make a Cake Boss cookbook so little boys like Benjamin don't have to break their bank to satisfy their sweet-tooth. (I don't charge) Though, come to think of it, Benjamin is ten times (quite literally) as rich as I am, so it might not be that long before he could afford a Carlo's Bakery cake. ;) To further clue you in, in a proposed road-trip to NYC which will probably never happen, a large stop on the way will be Hoboken, NJ for the original Carlo's Bakery where we hope we don't have to drop, say, ten bucks on one cannoli. But of course since Labor Day was Monday, Tuesday felt a tiny bit (in our heads) like autumn. And I got a hankering for cider doughnuts. I can pin-point the exact first time (and one of only two) I had cider-doughnuts:
It was at Taft Farms: a country vegetable-fruit-bread-stuff stand in the Berkshire mountains from which Uncle Lon and Aunt Heather bought much of their food during the summers when they lived up there so Aunt Heather could work at Tanglewood. That one summer--the beautiful, glorious week--when Sarah, Daniel, and I went up to visit, Uncle Lon drove us to Taft Farms and paid the laughing girl in the baseball cap for a white paper-bag with the grease-spots coming through and in that bag was heaven on earth. We bought the doughnuts one more time on that trip (sometime after Boston and Fort Ticonderoga) and I've never been that close to the Other Shore since. ;)

because you all need gratuitous cuteness in your day.

Well. All that melodrama to say, I thought to myself that we'd make cider-doughnuts while Mama was at a funeral. (morbid, I know) But it appears that the cider part of cider-doughnuts actually has something to do with cider and not just a reference to the best coupling of beverage with bakery-treat. C'est la vie-- we'er all excited for fall around here, but I'm not exactly sure that Food Lion sells apple-cider yet. Anyway, Sarah came to the rescue by telling me that inside that Carlo's Bakery cookbook (don't you love how New England rallied for us?) there was a recipe for Buddy's doughnuts; they didn't require cider (woo-hoo) and they didn't require butter (woo-hoo). And we happened to have a tub of lard on hand for frying, which never EVER happens. (WOO-HOO)

I made up the dough with Levi, and had lots of fun watching him watch me. (and help a bit) The batter looked like dubious cookie-dough, though, so I shoved it in the freezer per instructions and lived as a doubting Thomasina for the next several hours.

Jimsie was none too keen on the loud mixer

But afterward he insisted on turning it on...

...and messing about with a teaspoon and a bit of flour...

Awwww, itty bitty toe-prints in the spilled flour!

We rolled out the dough per Buddy's instructions and cut out the doughnuts with a mason-jar lid and a little medicine-cup....there was nothing left to do but fry them up! So Sarah and I melted and heated lard from our friends' farm, figuring that people used to cook doughnuts in lard, so why not? :) We also double-checked with the rest of the cookbook and saw that since cannoli can be cooked in lard, it's not like the doughnuts would come out tasting like bacon. (though isn't that the trend right now?) I don't understand that....the other day on Google+ I saw a picture of a friend's ideal burger: a patty smushed between two glazed doughnuts....the opposite of what I would imagine to be tasty. Oh well. To each his own culinary adventures, oui?

After removing the doughnuts (and holes) from the lard, we rolled them in cinnamon and sugar. Yum! 

Jimsie approved.

So did Grace

I would have liked to see a bit more flavor inside the doughnuts, so next time I would like to try an honest-to-goodness apple-cider-dough recipe, but these were amazing when fresh off the stove and paired with a cup of French Press coffee. Bon appetite! 

Old-Fashioned Doughnuts:

(makes at least twelve doughnuts)

I have edited the recipe to reflect how I did it

3 c. all-purpose  flour, plus more for the work surface

1 c. sugar

3/4 c. milk with a tablespoon of lemon-juice dissolved inside

2 extra-large eggs

2 Tbs. coconut oil

2 tsp. baking power

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt 

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

Lard for frying

cinnamon & sugar for rolling

1. Mix half the flour with sugar, milk, eggs, oil, baking soda and powder, salt, and cinnamon in a mixer. When smooth, add remaining flour.
2. Turn dough onto plastic wrap and chill for at least one hour or up to three days. Dough will be TERRIBLY sticky and not look anything like you think doughnut-dough ought.
3. Remove dough from fridge and let sit till room temperature
4. Flour work surface and work half the dough into a 7-inch square, 1/2 inch thick. Fold in third, the roll it again into a 7-inch square. (this doesn't have to be precise)
5. Punch out doughnuts, or roll balls by hand. (repeat with other half of dough when ready)
6. Heat lard in pan till it is about 1 1/2 inches deep. Heat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Drop doughnuts in two or three at a time and fry till golden brown on both sides, flipping with a wooden spoon when one side is done.
7. Remove from pan and dab excess grease off onto paper towels. While still hot, roll in cinnamon and sugar.
8. Repeat with remaining raw doughnuts.
9. Eat hot with a cup of French Press coffee, and enjoy! :) 

When the frost is on the punkin'..

Life is picking up quickly as we start up schoolwork. Of course I'm a graduate so I don't technically have schoolwork, but I've set myself a goal that keeps me plenty busy enough each day. :) Everyone else is deep into their books and working hard. :)
I've always been a big reader but I've found it increasingly harder to actually make purposeful time for reading...when I do I generally go directly to my beloved classics and pass over other reading. ;)

{hee-hee}

So I decided I wanted to read for 2 hours a day, and divided it thus:

40 minutes of classics (including Shakespeare, which I'm learning to love)

40 minutes of history (includes biographies or general history)

40 minutes of life/Christianity

This new schedule's been working pretty well, and combined with my goal to write 1,000 words a day or do an hour of editing/research as well as spending up to an hour in the office, planning lessons for Leah and Anna, and helping out with the house, my days are full and productive. :)

But though it is technically still summer I cannot wait for all the of the lovely pieces of Autumn that make it my top-favorite season! <3 Some of the things I'm looking forward to?

Fall colors! We've had an exceptionally wet summer so I'm optimistic for a vibrant fall!

Autumn clothes. Best ever.

Scarves and jeans :)

Making Gingersnaps or these ^ Snickersnaps or Gingerdoodles! :)

----And please pardon this horrid mess while I change the look of the blog!--

Fashions for Fall

Getting excited for fall fashions? I am! I think the possibilities of Autumn and Winter fashion-wise are so cozy and cute! <3 Here are some of my favorite pins getting ready for the cooler weather!

I want a red slouch beret/tam. I need a red tam. <3

These shoes from Shabby Apple! So adorable, even if they're more like Spring.

And though my figure in a thousand years would never be this slender, I love that outfit ^

Ooh look! More Kate! This coat = temptation for me to get rich quick so I can buy one. :P

And another coat I adore. <3 I need a princess-style coat...I just do.

Can't begin to tell you how much I love the details of this dress....

I love well-tailored clothes! <3 But I'd make the buttons black here.

Boots! I love boots with a passion...even though my stupid calves won't fit in many of the straight ones. :P Good grief...the woes of being a substantial sort of person. (yay for Shrinkage!)

Very pretty Maxi-dress for the cooler months.

I love daring patterns.

Doth I see Cary Mulligan in here? I doth.

This belt is very close to a Christmas present a friend got for me last year. :) Can't wait!

Sweater-vests are really cool too!

What are your fall-fashion favorites?! I can't wait for cool weather!!! <3