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Home & Style / Summer Lounging

posted on May 26, 2016

It appears the fight is slowly fizzling out of spring and summer is beginning to settle in, which, despite me being a massive homebody, somehow makes me want to be outside all the time. I have a small patio that’s a bit of a pain, and one of the things I’d like to do when I have the money is create a bit of a lounging space for summer nights (summer days are dangerously hot over here, let’s not even) to read and chat and have supper. I’ve put together some of my favorite looks from Pinterest, and found pieces you can use to get the vibe.

sources: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4

get the comfort: antilles daybed (omg gimme) / sunbed + coffee table / dining sets / outdoor fireplace / outdoor rug / floor lamp

And here’s an idea of what to wear during those lovely relaxing times:

maxi dresses / sunglasses / swimsuit / backpack / hat / shorts
sundress / shell top / espadrilles [find more offers for New Look]

This post is a PR collaboration.

Where do you like to hang out in the summer heat?

Things I'm Thinking

Life / Not Another Life Post

posted on May 15, 2016

Yes another life post. Duh.

It’s been a little while, and I don’t have relevant photos to break it down with as usual because I’m still working my way through those three days I spent not-in-my-hometown in March, so I’m going to jump right in:

1. I got Snapchat. I’m @lixhewett over there, predictably, and I post a lot of my face — with and without snapchat filters that make me look like a koala/goth/comic book character — and a lot of my cat. Sometimes there are glimpses at my notebooks and whatever I’m editing on my laptop at the time. Occasionally I whine. If you’re interested in seeing that kind of thing from me, you’re welcome to follow.

2. I finished my very first bullet journal, of sorts. I call it bullet journal because it’s a notebook that I use in specific ways, but it’s very very low-key — I draw up a 10-day chart for my habits every four or six pages, and then the rest of the pages are divided in two vertical halves to host a) daily to-dos and b) rolling to-dos. I have no intention of making it any more complicated. (I do want to start using my planner more, but that’s an entirely different thing). It’s not perfect, but it’s working well so far, and I’m just going to hold on to that for a bit.

3. Over the month of April I tweeted a poem every day under the hashtag #aclassicnotion. For the most part, it’s free-verse work by female poets from the last hundred years. It’s all poetry I really, really love, because it’s my first time doing something like this and I had no reason not to reach for my favorites. If you decide to have a browse, I hope you find something that speaks to you.

4. I wrapped up week three of onefiftydips! It’s already been five days and I’ve not started week four yet. I’m keeping up with my exercise chart and everything, but the super low bar I have for workouts is about a fifth of a program workout, and everything else I do is flexibility and balance things; my endurance sucks, and dips are the only thing strength exercise I don’t hate. Still: progress!

5. Baking and being scared of feeling dirty do not mix smoothly. Thought y’all should know.

6. If my purpose in life were to be a pillow for cats, I would be happy. Just let me know, universe dear, so I can stop worrying about other shit.

Home & Living Life + Style

Wishlist / Decking Out The Perfect Reading Nook

posted on May 10, 2016

the chairs: baltic sea fitted chair (5) / linea riva armchair (2) / stoned linen slate gray
the side tables: aldo side table (6) / sauder edge water collection (1) / zuo modern zeon (find discounts for Kohls here!)

+ a nice pillow (10)

I’ve been looking for a laundry basket to serve as a side table since I got a tub chair for my room. I need both of those things, and I only have space for one, so I’m trying to find something that does both jobs at once, or two separate things that can be stacked together.

I’m not fussy about the laundry basket part; as long as I can haul it around and it doesn’t look like a garbage can, I’ll deal. I’m a little bit more preoccupied with the sturdiness of whatever surface I end up using as a table, because this is what I want it for:

1. Wine glasses (3). This is the main thing, really. Coffee mugs, too, and iced coffee glasses and tea cups occasionally, but it’s the wine glasses that really worry me. As I’ve got my tub chair set up now, the handiest place to put a glass is a shelf next to it, and I have to twist my arm to get the glass. It’s frankly shocking to me none of my glasses has yet ended up in bits all over my poor cat’s scratcher. I want a place I can reach without breaking my wrist… and maybe a place where it looks good for Instagram photos. What?

+ coasters, preferably in the shape of a kitty (9)

2. My phone. Duh. As my phone is a flat horizontal object, I usually leave it on my desk chair. It’s not terrible, but the thing keeps sliding off and hitting the floor because I have the focus and hand-eye coordination of a newborn child. I’ve always thought about getting myself a pretty case with my photography, but I think the most genuinely useful thing I could do is get a protective case (8) instead. So far the phone is holding up, bless its heart, but I’ve seen one too many cracked screens on public transport to leave my phone’s well-being up to chance.

3. Notebooks, pens. Notebooks are easily stacked; pens are easily provoked into rolling straight to the ground. I have a veritable collection of Minted notebooks from a giveaway win and a previous collaboration with them; the example on the board (4) is the design I picked for my blank white page sketchbook. In addition to that one, I always keep handy a pseudo bullet journal, my blog notebook, and my planner.

4. Speakers. My current ideal, or aesthetic guideline, is this Fastnet folding portable speaker (7) from Ted Baker. It’s compact, wireless, and lovely to look at, and I think my cat would play well with it — I may actually have mentioned this particular model before because I’m obsessed with it.

My cat is obviously a consideration in everything I do or acquire, but he’s generally well-behaved around technology. He has however knocked my speakers off the shelf by the door — his shelf, really — several times this year by getting caught up in the cables, so a wireless speaker on a bookcase shelf or a small side table should about get rid of that pesky risk.

5. Mobility. For it to serve my tub chair it would have to be in the middle of the room or blocking some drawers I use, so it needs to be something I can move over to the side of my bed as a nightstand of sorts at night, and whenever I want to plug something in.

Does this cover your reading nook needs? What makes the perfect relaxing corner for you?

Disclosure: This post is a PR collaboration.

Barcelona Fashion Life + Style Outfits

Style / Fuzzy Flare

posted on April 22, 2016

Flare jeans: the elusive love of my life. As I understand it, they’re coming back into fashion, but my hometown in Spain remains three years behind the rest of the world, so it’s still incredibly hard to find good pieces. Back in the January sales, however, I was determined to find a pair I loved… and I did. It was twice my budget for jeans, but it was beautiful. It fit perfectly. It looked amazing.

So I checked a few other stores, went home, thought it over, and came back that evening for them so I wouldn’t feel bad about my purchase. In hindsight, this was some A+ decision-making on my part, method included. Go Lix.

(I could do this during sale season because, see, Esprit? Not popular in Spain. The shop? A little ways away from the main chain store cluster. I was concerned, to be sure, but I knew I could risk it. The shop itself however may be gone already, and I am very saddened by this turn of events.)

I wear these jeans on a weekly basis, and they were one of the two pairs I took to Barcelona last month. For my second day there — a long walk around the city, hitting some architectural spots, a museum of modern art and, unbeknownst to me, the Cathedral of Barcelona, as well as a weird art gallery and some bits and pieces from my leisurely photo walk back to the hotel I’ve yet to identify — I paired the flare jeans with a beautiful pair of flats from Yull, thick Pimkie socks that matched my cardigan and helped me pretend I was not breaking in a new pair of flats on a major city walk, a fuzzy cardigan I was sent last year by Blue Vanilla, bless them, and one of my many standardfare long-sleeve cotton t-shirts, this one from Sfera, which, believe it or not, has some real gems if you look hard enough.

(I wouldn’t call anything in my collection of long-sleeve t-shirts a gem; I’m talking about other pieces. But I rely on long-sleeve t-shirts to be comfortable, and I have an identical shirt to this one in a sweet dark blue-green color. Both were on sale, both are comfortable as all get-out, both I wear so often I am wearing this red one again today.)

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Barcelona Fashion Life + Style Outfits

Style / Seaport

posted on April 15, 2016

I’ve wanted a floppy hat since I started watching Pretty Little Liars — all the way back in 2010. Spencer wore a burgundy wool (felt?) hat in an episode and looked hot as burning, and a floppy hat in another episode (the first was a cloche, if I recall), and an obsession was born. Justifying the expense of a hat is hard for me for two reasons: a) I know myself, and I know I’ll rarely wear it no matter how much I like the look, and b) it’s kind of hard to find hats that don’t engulf my entire tiny head, face included. There’s a reason most of the hats I own are custom knits.

But just days before my birthday, there was one available in multiple sizes at Pimkie, and they sent me a voucher because I have a loyalty card, and the rest is history.

Actually, the rest is: if that hat had been in my mind for a long time, this location? Was getting there. Back in September, I visited Barcelona with my best friend, and we ended up hitting Maremagnum for a quick t-shirt shop on our last night there. Maremagnum is a mall situated on one of the long docks parallel to the port by Passeig de Colom. At night, with the streets lit up, the boats moored, the soft summer breeze and the mild resignation that my camera would never capture it well, I just wanted to breathe it all in.

Well, breathe it all in, and come back sometime in daylight to photograph someone in it.

And so it was, predictably, the first place I suggested to Megan when it was time to pick a location for our first outfit shots.

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Diaries Life + Style

Life / A Fortnight In Pictures And Also Words

posted on March 14, 2016

You read that right: I’m giving you words AND pictures! Get pumped.

March so far:

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Diaries Life + Style

Life / A Fortnight In Pictures #1 (The One Before My Camera Broke)

posted on February 8, 2016

One of my goals for the new year was to take a picture every day. If you have a fancy camera you may be familiar with the situation — when you travel or do something fun it gets a ton of use, but then you’re home and you go transfer the photos and you realize you’ve shot two days in three months. I wanted to challenge myself to get better photos of everyday things, as well as find beauty in the common.

I did a fairly good job for sixteen days; on the sixteenth day, my camera made a whirring sound and said, “Error 99!” And that was that. I have now borrowed a Nikon camera from a friend, which should hold me over until I figure out what to do with my Canon. I’m waiting to hear whether it can be repaired at all, and how much it will cost me to do so. If all else fails, I can probably afford a 700D body. I’m telling myself it’s not the same as spending on a laptop that won’t last; it’s always good to have multiple camera bodies, so the 700D won’t be left in the dust whenever I have enough money to buy my dream 5D Mark — but it’s still money I wasn’t planning to spend.

What this means on a practical, blog-front level — I will hopefully have another fortnight in pictures for the middle of February, but I skipped three weeks. I still kept up with many other habits, so it’s all a work in progress and I’m not too fussed about it. I take plenty of photos — I’m a bit compulsive as a shooter — so there’s never much of an obvious gap. And here’s a summary of my January — at least the first half.

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Fashion Life + Style Outfits

Style / Icicles

posted on January 11, 2016

The icicles are each one of my individual limbs. To be clear there.

Since I moved home I’ve gone shopping more often than I used to, mainly because I keep running out of clothes to wear while I wait for them to finish drying, and even if I could afford a dryer I wouldn’t have a place to put it. This was one such time. I always look significantly better put together on laundry day, because when I have things to choose from, I always choose the same stuff. And I like that stuff! So on Saturday, while I was waiting for my jeans to dry, I scavenged around my closet for something to wear under my new shiny green coat — a gift from a friend — and go find myself a new pair of jeans, and shoot an interesting outfit while I was at it, since me wearing interesting outfits is such a rare occurrence.

It was cold and rushed and while I was editing the photos, I kept rumbling, “I can’t believe I wore tights for this.” But that’s week 1 of 52 self-portraits complete! (I haven’t picked the One yet. Possibly the one above?) And the coat is awesome, shopping was quite successful, and my jeans were dry when I came back.

It’s possible, however, that I lost the tights and the hairdo around Zara, and walked around in mismatched socks and bare legs in the middle of winter for about an hour. You guys, tights suck. Why do they have to look good?

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Fashion Life + Style Outfits

Style / A Warm Winter

posted on January 4, 2016

Is this global warming? Is it just weird out there? Some may know, but I am not one of them.

It’s not like it’s summer hot outside, but it’s warm enough to prance around without a coat on at 5 in the afternoon, and that’s a little weird. I remember this time in late December or very early January a couple of years back when I tried to shoot a knit dress under my coat, and not only did the pictures come out blue (I hadn’t learned about white balance at the time) but I pretty much decided then and there that I wasn’t putting on another dress until April at the earliest. I kept that promise.

It was around that time that I accepted I couldn’t stand tights no matter how good they looked, so it wasn’t all that hard.

I’ve become pretty good at shopping for myself — you would think you’re born with that skill, but it took me many years to figure out how I worked, clothes-wise, and these days I get a ton of use out of everything I buy. Half this outfit was bought on Oxford Street back in September — I’m wearing the gorgeous booties I splurged on as well as half my Primark purchases: sweater, and not pictured: long-sleeve tee, bra, two pairs of socks.

The jeans were the only (kinda) flare, (kinda) thick jeans I could find in town, because all anyone ever sells anymore is skinny jeans that are so thin they’re more like leggings and I bloody hate leggings and if I wanted to wear leggings, I would not wear jeans! Why is this a thing? I had a browse online before going to a few stores and ended up buying the exact same jeans I’d found on the Zara website. Even the store itself has changed and is weirdly disappointing now? But at least the jeans are good.

And so: a post featuring an outfit I wear roughly once a week. Comfy stuff.

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Fashion Life + Style Outfits

Style / Where The Winds All Blew

posted on December 28, 2015

Lounging at the mini pool on the roof terrace at the Vincci Bit in Barcelona, or quickly slapping on a pair of heels and sunnies, getting the elevator up, taking the pictures and running so my best friend could catch her bus. Nobody has to know which these are. But these are the latter.

The weather wasn’t even that great to enjoy the roof terrace, which was sad, but if that’s all the pool they had in mind, meh. How about the beach five minutes down the street instead? Mm the beach.

I rarely wear sunglasses, but I’m obsessed with these Twiggy frames from SpecsPost. I think I tried cat’s eye glasses once when I bought my first pair, but the shops in town mostly carried stuff that was way too big on me so I looked terrible. These aren’t petite, but they’re on the smaller size, and when I put them on I felt that feeling I rarely get anymore where something just fucking fits. They didn’t just look right; they looked good and made me look good.

I am a cat’s eye convert. Unfortunately sunglasses aren’t really my thing — I look at these photos and I’m torn between “damn I’m hot” and “damn I look like an asshole who is also hot” — so I’m hoping I can get a pair of these same frames with standard lenses sometime, because I truly love how they look on me.

The shorts are from ASOS and the shirt I bought on a last-minute Sunday run at Maremagnum right there in Barcelona because I packed like shit and had nothing to wear on Monday unless I bought it. Maremagnum is a big mall and the only thing I could find that was open on a Sunday (it is Spain, after all), and it is situated on a pier of sorts, so basically I got to see the port and a whole lot of sea at night, which was impossible to capture well on my camera, but which I enjoyed immensely.

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