Montreal Street Art. Ville-Émard.

i had a lengthy post in mind for today but i' wiped. i somehow got through my first nine-to-five since july on only four hours of sleep and i'm not quite sure why i'm still awake so today i'll leave you with unedited photos that i took a few blocks from my place, while on a walk with my son, yesterday.

let's kick this off with château st-henri seen from the other side of the lachine canal:

there was another guy with a camera touring this building and several cars slowed way down to get a look at its walls, too. ian and i were quite happy to have access to this, now that the st-remi tunnel has been revamped.

the a-shop at it again:

what's up now, youpi?

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Final Fall/Winter 2012-2013 Office Wardrobe Update

i'm going to lay the whole fall/winter wardrobe challenge to rest today so that i can move on to what i want to put together for spring, as of next week. seeing as i was busy job-hunting, writing up "25 days of etsy christmas", redecorating three rooms in my flat (pictures of that are forthcoming) and working on the new shop, i didn't really give myself time to sew until now. that said, i did scour thrift stores and go through every piece of clothing i own (no small feat, i'll have you know!) and i did put together twelve basic, occasionally interchangeable outfits that are great for the office and that work for fall and winter. i've put together a few collages to give you the gist of these and, although the brands vary from those that i found and own (a lot of my pieces are vintage and i prefer lancome, dior and sometimes mac, when it comes to make-up), you'll get the idea!

i must say that the following h & m trousers were really well priced and are ridiculously comfortable.

i was so happy when i found a similar pencil skirt in this exact shade of purple, in verdun, secondhand, for $5!

my glasses have more of a cat-eye shape and, after buying a pair of cole haan chelsea boots online only to discover that they are too narrow for me, i came across a great pair of baxter boots at last year's swap team exchange. you can see them here.

even though i am a white girl with some arabic blood and probably shouldn't wear yellow, i can't seem to stay completely away. for a more casual work look, i've put together an outfit resembling this one and i like to wear it with a good 'ol fashioned french twist or by styling my hair with a slight, 60's bump at the crown, pinning up the side and letting the rest of it down and slightly curled at the ends. 

although i do my best to jazz up my office wardrobe, i'm usually seen wearing this combo or something quite like it:

a friend of mine bought this betty page clothing dress, never wore it and sold it to me for $20. i wear it with neutral panty hose or stocking and burgundy, suede mary janes that i also got from this friend but at a clothing swap. 

i was also lucky enough to come across a lovely, burgundy, a-line dress with leather pocket trim from lord & taylor. i bought it at my favourite verdun thrift store for $7 but most of their house brand dresses are between $110 and $300 so i'm quite pleased! i won't be able to shoot in natural light until next week-end and i can't find an image of the dress online so it'll have to have its own post, sometime soon!

this is the last time i'll be referring to this particular wardrobe, as i'll be focusing on the spring fashions i want and/or have, as of next week. the timing is great, too, because i go back to working nine-to-five in an office, tomorrow morning. 

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Merci à Mme Arthur Bélair et à Saint-Phil! (Or, alternatively: "Vintage Pattern Score!")

when i had a car, i tried to visit the montreal mega reuse center as often as possible. over the course of one year, i found so many beautiful treasures and i'll be sharing images of them as they relate to my different posts. in a few months, i'll be purchasing another vehicle and the mmrc is pretty much the first place i'm going to drive to. one of my best girls, annie and i have taken to calling the gentleman who works there "saint phil" because of how he clearly guards a subdivision of heaven and because of how helpful and nice he is.

on one of my last visits, i acquired a clear, plastic bag containing several brown envelopes addressed to a mrs. arthur bélair, in laval, québec, in 1959, and three vintage patterns. the envelopes had been sent from pattern companies so i thought, yay! a bag of vintage patterns! and then promptly set them aside with all of the other patterns i wanted to "one day" sort through. at the time, i was working as a relocation consultant and the job occupied my mind from the time i woke up to the time i finally lay my head down and, even though a i often daydreamed about all of the wonderful things i wanted to sew, i rarely got the time to actually do so. when i did have free time, i threw an overnight bag, some water bottles and my kids (if it wasn't their fathers' week-end) in my car and left town in order to properly clear my head. 

in the last few months, i've had more time to dedicate to, well, everything and so i've been organizing my work space, sketching up a storm and finally starting put together a few plans of action. the plastic bag from the mmrc ended up in my hands for the first time in over a year. now, i'm not one to squeal but i must admit that such a sound did escape my lips upon opening the first envelope. 

what surprised me the most was the sizing. i'm a size 10 to 12 so, as far as pattern sizes go, this is something i can work with without having to spend too much time grading. 

behold the contents of pattern number two:

and:

all three of them will be used when i start putting my spring wardrobe together, next week.

i was also quite happy to discover this lovely apron pattern:

in what i presume is mrs. bélair's handwriting, the contents of the next envelope were described to me, "pattern for little girls coat":

and here it is, in need of much love but still relatively in tact:

and how cute is this?? it's from 1957:

for women (or, rather, for me), there was also this one:

this one was also in the bag but i have a feeling it came from elsewhere because i remember bringing it home alone, at one point:

so yes, all of this was discovered right in time for the creation/revamping of my spring wardrobe and i absolutely had to share it with you!

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Roots. Part Two: The Wicked Stepmother. 1987-1996.

after my parents got divorced, my father moved my brother and i to an ottawa suburb and life changed dramatically. i went from living in a rosemont duplex, raised by my parents, my grandmother and my aunt and playing with dirty, poor kids in the back alley to living in a townhouse with my father, my uncle, their friend and my brother, playing with slightly less dirty kids in our backyard and on the lane and suddenly being able to afford outings and take-out and a huge, ninth birthday party. as far as my brother and i were concerned, we missed our mom but we were completely wooed by this new lifestyle and, to this day, we agree that it was the happiest year of our childhoods. a few unorthodox events took place while we lived there but we were used to that beat and none of it scarred us in any way.

the school we attended wasn't so understanding. my dad was called in for a meeting and was informed that our home situation was unacceptable, given that i was living with a boy and at least two men (the friend left after a few months but because he owed the brothers money, they confiscated  his bedroom set and gave it to me until the funds were reimbursed) and that the stories we were telling our friends might seem rather interesting to a child services worker. my father decided that the best way to have the hounds called off would be to ask the female accountant they'd just hired to work a bit of overtime and pick his children up from school so that they could be made aware that such a presence existed in our lives. 

in what seemed like no time at all, my brother and i were sitting in the backseat of my dad's truck, parked in the driveway of an unsightly duplex with aluminum siding in gatineau, quebec, with my father having gone inside the building and his accountant-turned-lover sitting in the front seat. she turned to us and asked us if it would be okay if she moved in with us and we all lived in the home we saw before us. we hesitated and then said yes, knowing we didn't really have a choice. the had already purchased the duplex. our year of fun was over. 

on the very first day we crammed ourselves into the two-bedroom, basement apartment (they took over the living room and my brother and i each had a bedroom), she told us that we should call her "mom" and that, from then on, my mother was to be referred to by her first name when she was not present. 

what ensued was eight years of verbal and occasionally, for my brother, physical abuse. that's why it took so long for me to come to terms with the fact that one of my greatest style influences was the stepmother that had raised me for the second half of my childhood. i've come to terms with everything and so i am free, now, to discuss this woman's fierce sense of aesthetics, without conjuring up any ill feelings.

one of my stepmother's own style icons was elvira, mistress of the dark. we'd occasionally stay up late and watch her on television and a certain spooky seed was planted at the back of mind at this time. around this time, so nineteen-ninety-three or the year after, she took on a part-time job as a barmaid on the hull strip to help with the bills and to finance her car, while she also studied at algonquin college. i absolutely loved watching her get dressed and made up for this job! she had layered the top half of her dyed-black hair and backcombed the hell out of it so that it stood up in a dome of sorts, much like elvira's. she wore one green contact lens and one yellow one, purple eye shadow, lots of black eyeliner and blood-red lipstick. from her closet, she pulled out all sorts of interesting outfits i'd never seen the likes of before, all outfits she'd bought at flash cadillac, on rideau, in ottawa (part of this shop then became savannah deville's, when it had to shut down due to marital conflict between the owenrs). my favourite one was this crazy, off-white, denim, sleeveless catsuit with small gold zippers at the ankles and one wide, gold zipper starting at one knee and going all the way up to its bust line. there were suede booties and studded catsuits and skinny jeans with zippers. there were gold stilettos, wide, studded belts and itty bitty mini skirts with corsets and bustiers. my stepmother shopped at the same store the ottawa punks shopped at and styled her hair in a manner that would make most goth girls of the time quite envious. 

she drove around in a silver, souped up, 1987 audi gt coup, leather racer gloves boasting audi's famous rings on their wrist straps, her left hand resting on the wheel, with a du maurier cigarette usually held between its index and middle finger and her right hand busy shifting gears. she loved classic rock but also played the cult, the cure and the clash when driving around. her absolute favourite band was ac/dc and i can remember "highway to hell", "hell's bells" and "back in black" playing loudly as she gunned down ottawa's highways.

once i started peeling back the layers of anger and bitterness and was able to remember these details, a lot of the fashion paths i've walked began making a whole lot more sense and, as i like to extract and retain the positive from any situation, i guess that's one thing i have to be thankful for. 

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...Almost Back

i hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season! i spent some time with family and friends in gatineau, québec, prince edward county, ontario and toronto before returning to montréal just three days ago. tomorrow i'm hosting my annual turkey dinner, pot luck and gift exchange for my best local friends and then i'll take a few more days for myself before i come back to post on a regular basis.

in the next six months you can expect the unveiling of my new etsy shop, sewing and craft tutorials, interviews with designers and local artists and a variety of articles that will be written in response to what's happening in the fashion world both abroad and home. a few surprises are in store for after this period as well. 

à bientôt! 

xx
rosemary

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Roots. Part One: Elise.

i was born in montréal, québec, in nineteen-eighty, to a seventeen-year-old high school drop-out (nobody took a moment to tell my mother that there was a school for pregnant teens or that there were any alternatives at all, for that matter) and an eighteen-year-old whiz kid who'd been working on one of the first prototypes of the electric car with some local scholars and who would spend a good decade sporadically reminding me that he'd turned down a full scholarship to concordia university because he had become a father and "someone had to pay the bills". with my dad usually holding down two jobs and my mom struggling with her new role as a housewife (my brother came along a couple of years after me), i ended up being raised by a whole group of people and it's only in the last few years that i've truly begun to appreciate how each of these people laid a stone or two in my foundation and, whether directly or not, guided me toward what i am aesthetically drawn to now and, in some cases, created within me severe aversions toward other style elements. 

growing up, one of my two favourite people in the world was my paternal grandmother, elise. no matter what i am sewing, not one half hour goes by without me thinking of her. she grew up very poor, one of a multitude of children, and had to drop out of school in grade four to stay home and help with the younger children. eventually, she got a job at a luggage shop, got married and had four children of her own. times were difficult for her in the 50's and 60's and, for a time, one of the rooms in her apartment was a makeshift shop that instantly became a craft room when an inspector came by. she and my grandfather would walk down the street with a baby carriage, in which they'd stuffed some of the lovely dolls she had made, trying to sell them to passersby. 

most of her children's clothing was handmade. here is my father (right) with his older brother (who sadly passed away almost ten years ago. more on him soon) in matching outfits my grandmother had sewn. 

she eventually saved enough money to buy a triplex on rue de lorimier, just south of holt, in montréal's rosemont district, and the ground floor apartment was my first home. i obviously don't remember too much from when i was a toddler but i know that she constantly made me matching dress and bonnet sets like this one:

and made me my first bikini:

i remember my aunt and mother often running to my grandmother for a dress they wanted to wear that very night. she would always stop everything she was doing, including breathing, just for a moment, while she quickly thought of what she would construct and then inevitably said yes. a few hours later, whoever had asked for a new dress could be seen admiring herself in a then-sexy (it was, after all, the 80's) dress that been expertly made with love. 

when i was seven, my parents split up and, while they screamed at each other and tried to work out how to go about separating, i was sent to live with elise, at her new duplex on davidson street, for almost a year and my brother was sent to live with our maternal grandmother. i had already grown accustomed to falling asleep to the sound of my grandmother's sewing machine and waking up to it the next morning, to groping the hundreds of fabrics she had in boxes or on rolls, in her fabric room, on floor-to-ceiling shelves, to emptying out jars of colour-coded buttons, counting them, admiring them and putting them back where they belonged but this was the year i started to want to create clothing for myself. i must admit that, at that age, i mostly sketched out an idea or selected a pattern, picked out fabric from the magical fabric room and asked my grandmother to make whatever it is that i wanted and she did, usually in one evening but most certainly within two days. i don't know how many seven-year-old kids can say that this is their norm but, boy was i in heaven. 

that summer my brother and i were sent to an awful, awful camp and, at the end of august, 1987, my father arrived in a gold-coloured, ford pickup, it's bed piled high with our belongings, and told us we were moving to ontario. right before this time, my grandparemts also got divorced but continued to live next door to each other. 

from then on, time with elise became even more sacred, as she was suddenly two-hundred kilometers away, instead of six. we started visiting our mother every other week-end and getting some time with elise during summer and christmas holidays. she was more than someone to visit. i escaped to her home and hid under her wing. i drank green tea out of a large, geisha-shaped mug, ate grilled cheese sandwiches stamped with "i <3 you" and i got to wake up to the sound of her sewing machine somehow blending in just fine with vivaldi's four season and to the smell of belgian waffles. she started teaching me more about seams, garment construction and pattern alteration and i became more and more convinced that i would one day be a fashion designer. one of the most exciting things that happened on several occasions was when my grandmother would call me and tell me to quickly turn the tv on and  switch over to fashion file, where a design very similar to one i had drawn would be making it's way down a catwalk. this trend definitely helped me to believe that i could do this. 

in addition to all of the crafting and sewing, i learned how to hunt treasure. elise would take me to seemingly random church basements in east montréal and would buy me the few items i really swooned over. this is where my love for beautiful vintage fashions stems from. i got into even more when i started delving into old hollywood biographies but, for many years, this was it. i still have crocheted gloves, a cloak, jewelry and a pillbox hat that i found in the early 90's, while thrift shopping with my grandmother. sadly, over time and in my late teens and early twenties, i lost shoes, the red bowler hat with black satin ribbon and crow's feathers and many other items i had found and cherished, back then. 

when i started fancying goth clothing, my grandmother was the one to help me sew a cloak and, a year later, made me a killer, royal blue, vinyl mini skirt. 

in two-thousand, my daughter was born and i gave her my grandmother's name as her middle name. around that time, my grandparents packed up, sold their duplex and moved to gatineau to be closer to the rest of the family (everyone ended up migrating to ottawa or gatineau at some point, for various reasons). a few years ago, she sold her house and she and my grandfather moved into apartments. she sent a trunk and five boxes of fabrics and notions my way and, a little while ago, sent her surger to me, too. i still have a hard time using some of these things, as they symbolize the end of sewing for elise and that breaks my heart.

elise is the person i call the day after a clothing exchange to let her know how it went, i call her when i'm having trouble with the lining of a coat i'm assembling or if i have a question about what seam i should use. she is the one person i know who is guaranteed to understand some of my deepest loves in this life and it makes me sad to think of her living in an apartment building, in gatineau, of all places. i wish her health was good enough to allow her to come down here for some shopping and sewing but those days are gone. i'll see her in a few days, over holiday dinner and games, at my father's house and i'm grateful for that. i hope she knows how instrumental she was to me in choosing this path and sticking to it because i daresay that, without her, i would not be where i am today. 

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25 Days of Etsy Christmas Gifts. Day Twenty-Five: Montréal, Part Five.

we have finally reached the twenty-fifth and last day of this series! i hope you have all enjoyed discovering new artisans and small businesses and that most of you have found gift ideas that appealed to you. 

please note that almost half of these shops had much more inventory when i first scouted them out and bookmarked them but we're lucky because a good portion of the shops i had fallen in love with are currently set on vacation mode so i can't share them with you at all!

today, the final ten etsy shop are all based in my hometown of montréal, québec. remember them throughout the year, too!

1. sara lagace offers up a wonderful mix of silver jewelry and accessories made with recycled fur. 

2. i love, love, love rocky b creations! i met barbara, or rocky b, at a craft fair a little over a year ago and immediately adored everything she'd painted. if you have anyone into rockabilly, tattoo, psychobilly, tiki, mod or pinup culture, you must check this shop out!

3. for super fun clothing in eye-catching prints, be sure to have a look at what kayleigh peddie has in her shop!

4. i've already featured not one but two items from purpose design but how could i not include julie's shop in this list?? if you have anyone who likes to bake or cook on your list, you must take a look at what's in stock here!

5. le chat clothing is another shop to check out for stylish designs from la belle province!

6. for your mini, four-legged friend, how about a warm, wee coat or even a rain coat from creations anne-claude?

7. how adorable are faux fauna's creations? 

8. josiane perron is definitely another local designer to keep an eye on. why not start this holiday season?

9. in addition to these original, wood and guitar string wedding bands, ebeniste offers up a lovely selection of handcrafted wooden jewelry. 

10. after seeing countless, "rippled" (or, er, warped) bowls made from old vinyl records, i'm really digging groove bowl's sleek, original design. i'm sure someone on your list will, too!

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