At Ease

With a weekend of starched uniforms and formal ball gowns behind me (see my post titled "The Buzz"), I was ready to dress in a decidedly more relaxed manner for a week of research at the Library of Congress on behalf of my longtime employer. For today’s commute to Washington D.C. from my home in Baltimore County, I chose jeans and a sweatshirt. But not just any jeans and not just any sweatshirt, I assure you.

My dark-washed Perfectly Slimming Levi’s boot-cut denim trousers are crisply tailored and look all the more refined when paired with heeled boots by Pink & Pepper. My orange Sabaku sweatshirt, with pull-string ruching at the neck and the hem, is a gorgeous work of art featuring colorful silk-screened, Southwestern-style ponies overlaying a pebbled, golden background image of a large Trojan-style horse on both the front and the back of the garment.

A close inspection of the golden "pebbling" reveals that my background horse is actually made up of tiny desert-inspired figures, petroglyphs of Native American life such as suns, lizards, deer and turtles. This remarkable artwork is titled "Big Horse, Little Horse", and was created in 2008 by Nancy Lenches, a graphic artist who has owned and operated Sabaku ("desert" in Japanese) in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, John Alagret, since 1988 (www.sabakuart.com). I received this lovely "art-wear" for Christmas several years ago from my dear friends, Robert and Jan, and have treasured it ever since.

Today I brought out the color in the smaller pony overlays by wearing a vintage, electric blue knit top by Units beneath the jumper (remember electric blue?), which I purchased in Northern California in the early 1980s, and finished my look with some painted ponies of my own: enameled metal horse earrings by Laurel Burch (www.laurelburch.com).



Yesterday's snowstorm brought winter back to Baltimore

Although Monday’s day-long snowstorm deposited several inches of unseasonable white stuff all over the region, leaving my Civil War-era farmhouse swathed in a sparkling "sugar" coating, today was sunny and bright, although not necessarily very warm. Nevertheless, I felt perfectly comfortable in my toasty Southwestern sweatshirt and jeans, whose sundrenched leitmotif allowed me to conjure desert warmth all day long.

Cheers,

Lynell