I made five new belts today. I only had enough time to photograph this one, but I love it. I named it after Taylor Dayne of the 80s.
Yep, that’s it for now. ;o)
Beltie Belts & Ryan Gosling
I can’t stop my hands from moving and creating most days and here is the little of family of belts I have dreamed up. A few more new designs are going to be joining them soon once I get to photographing. I don’t know why I am writing like an old Southern woman talks today, but it’s Friday, whateva.
A whole slew!
ALSOOOOOOO I’ve been working on this idea for a really long time and finally, in time for Valentine’s Day, Ryan G can be yours.
Yeah!!!!!!! I’m making nice V-day cards with this drawing today and they’ll be in my Etsy Shop by the weekend in time for sending out one or twelve to your Valentines. xooxo
HAPPY FREAKING FRIDAY! (Where did the week go?????)
Desira
Gallavantin’
I grew up in the woods.
And I moved to the city so when it snows here, I first get very very excited like any kid at heart and then in the rapid succession of minutes afterwards, the snow turns to grey slush and then disappears with the salt trucks that come barreling through the urban streets. This leaves us all barely enough time to finish our morning coffee before the ability to sled has become nil for anyone living near modern roadways. On Sunday, I awoke, stretched, and had a feeling.
I had a feeling that it had snowed and boy was I right. I threw open the blinds that obscure my nearby neighbors from spying on me and beheld a glorious site: SNOW SNOW SNOW!
I had lots to do, oh boy, but I could not and would not wait until the sun went down to go outside. No one was around so i went out alone. I live on the edge of Brooklyn where it meets Queens and walked towered Queens where I knew there would be more of a suburban feel and thus more snow to traverse. I walked with no goal in mind and everything is obscured when it’s covered in snow anyway. I passed a McDonalds and a Dairy Queen and kept walking. As I approached a very high hill, I saw a huge scary building up ahead and decided to check it out.
That scary building turned out to be a “crematory”, where they cremate people. AUGH!!!
Scary! This building was right across from a massive cemetery and to be honest I really enjoy going to cemeteries in the city no matter how weird that may seem because it’s the closest thing to woods i can find without spending an hour on the train to get to Central Park or Prospect Park. Sigh. I wound up walking four miles that day. I went really far out coming upon a giant mall with a BJ’s. I love walking long distances and do it often. That must have been why it wasn’t ok for me to live in LA. You really can’t walk there. It’s dangerous. I did though and I got stared at and honked at and overall it was mildly unpleasant because when no one else walks, it’s no fun. I don’t know where I was going with the post other than sharing my weird and long and nice walk in the snow and also that frankly I miss the suburbs sometimes.
Saw some cool stuff though:
Extra Extra Read All About It!
I’m totally going to write a huge post on the SAG Awards and Oscars and nominees and my favorite movies of the year and who I think should win and all that tomorrow. Right now, because I am in my bed in pajamas at 8pm with some popcorn and chamomile after a long cold day and really just want to watch one of the 900 movies I need to watch in order to appropriately vote for the SAG Awards, I’ll say this… I am SO glad that The Tree of Lifehas been nominated for best picture. I was scared that they were going to leave it out of the mix. I am also going to say that although I really like and admire Michelle Williams and the other actresses nominated for Best Actress Oscars, although I haven’t seen Albert Nobbs yet, I really want Viola Davis to win.
Okay, I said enough. Right now I am going to share the new belts I made yesterday and photographed today!!
and in green and purple!
A Whole Gang!
LBD
I just finished this dress, which was a custom fit design of mine from two seasons ago. It also just so happens to be the last of this design in blue… I’m out of this fabric! I am happy to see it go, as I now have reason to buy more fabric and make a new design!!
It’s Friday, I’m in Love
With warm hats, huge scarves, hot cocoa, a hot bowl of pozole, fireplaces, warm hugs, and down comforters.
It was freaking freezing today in New York. I hope everyone stayed warm and has nice plans for the weekend, if they celebrate it.
Goodnight after a LONG day
Xoxo happy Friday the 13th!
It’s Midnight Soon
You know one of those days that is like 18 hours long and you can’t remember if this morning was indeed this morning?
That was today. Now, it is over and I am drinking wine and eating popcorn and clipping coupons from Whole Foods, grandma style. It was a good day and yet I am glad it is over. I worked on the tv show, Smash!, for the fourth time and was 3′ from Anjelica Huston, who is amazing and has amazed me since The Witches, The Addams Family, Buffalo ’66, Royal Tennenbaums, and Alexander Calder’s jewelry model and others that I have forgotten to name in my tired stupor. YAY!
This is a good ending song to the day and it’s playing on shuffle right now anyway:
Oh man, I want to go on a trip soon. I like traveling too much to be sedentary. I guess I can always watch Planet Earth…
Godspeed, goodnight, Gute Nacht
The Theme of Home
I love a good still life and by arranging my fruits and vegetables in bowls the other day, I got one. That sentence is like the most boring sentence anyone could ever hope not to read on a blog. I wanted to post these pretty pictures and move on…
Finding an amazing, affordable, comfortable, well-attended, and quiet apartment in NYC is like trying to find a tropical sea turtle in a lake in Massachussetts. Ya really can’t…find…one…unless you pay $8,000/month. I, in my six and a half years here, have managed to find a semi-oasis in several cases, but accent on the semi. There is always something lacking and I am not being picky. There’s always a couple of pieces of the equation of perfection, but then there are ALWAYS headaches.
http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/adw/ADWHlights/largepix/109Vanderb.jpg
For instance, my first apartment in NYC was in Sunset Park, a neighborhood in the Southern end of Brooklyn populated by Latino families and cheap produce stands. My room was part of a two-story apartment in a brownstone with parquet floors, a fireplace in my room, with wide windows, decorative mouldings and gorgeous tin ceilings with two bathrooms and a backyard! My room was also just $125 per month more than my apartment in Upstate NY where I lived alone was! This all sounds perfect right? Well, I didn’t mention that my room was formerly the dining room and I had a sheet to divide my room from the kitchen and shared common rooms because I only had three walls… Also, I lived with a militant vegan straight-edge guy, who I started dating and then quickly realized was not for me. I don’t have to elaborate there. The neighborhood was a majestic mix of beautiful and disheveled old buildings and the renters of these places were VERY fond of blasting music to ear-piercing decibels from their cars, boom boxes, what-have-you. It was party time all the time. I would awaken at like 7am to these songs penetrating my pores, shaking me awake…we’re all acquainted with the power of subwoofers and I grew too acquainted with.
Lastly, the location was off of the N train, which for some reason at this time took an hour to get to my job every day. I was spending two+ hours a day in transit to and fro my job. I moved…
I am a fashion designer/artist and always have had a use for extra space for a “studio”. The next stop was an artist-laden loft space with seven roommates. The price was really great for how much space I had, but to make a long story short, it was full of crazy people, the loft should have been condemned, it smelled weird, the floors above would produce a layer of dirt/particles all over me upon awaking in the morning…
–no one cleaned
–people had parties constantly and people would throw beer cans on the floor
–a pigeon took up residence above the main door and no one fixed it and I can go on into disgusting detail, but let me spare you…
Other apartments thereafter had their fare share of annoyances and crap and currently, I am in the most pretty and homey of any apartment in NYC I have had…but I have an insane landlord:
–he wants to be everyone’s best friend
–he is here at least 3x a week
–he calls me and texts me all the time
–instead of knocking on my door unannounced, he screams my name from the hallway to get my attention when he’s here
–he’s always hours late for appointments and shows up unannounced to fix things or do things
–he doesn’t pick up on social cues, i.e. when I am obviously busy and flustered he’ll still bang on my door for the 15th time that day to tell me he picked grapes in the backyard and “try this one, try this one, try this one”………
……..I haven’t even gotten to my crazy neighbors…
All in all, it must just be simply impossible not to have something bothersome in New York. It’s part of the game. It’s part of life. Everyone has crazy neighbors, an absent or overbearing landlord, leaks, drips, faulty wiring, loud trains next door, a long subway ride, no transportation, gunshots, yuppies, children everywhere, what have you. We’re all in this mess together. If it really was so bad, I’d just move upstate, eh?
Storytime
I was just published today in the great storytelling blog, Loop. I wrote a story corresponding to the theme of “running away”. Originally, I was going to write the gory tale of getting myself lost in NYC alone at 9 or 10 but seeing as it’s holidaytime, I opted for something more bittersweet.
- Runaways
Here it is and then a link to the rest:
Run, Child
by Desira Pesta
Growing up an outcast in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I’d often dreamed of running away and being someone else. I ran away often. My family owned a suburban home in our large town and sandwiched between other homes belonging to people we couldn’t stand, I felt trapped.
At school, I traversed the halls with my head down, picking it up only to answer questions in class, to be engaged with my studies and nearly nothing else. I ran away constantly to the minds and bodies of others in works of fiction and non, burying my head in books, sometimes laying out in the sun and finishing a whole novel in one sitting. I also ran away through my own works of fiction, by the time I reached sixth grade, I would complete one nearly full-length novel with characters who were on physical journeys, the journeys I would take with them. I played other people in my spare time as well. Years and years before Twilight and Harry Potter would debut, I hunted and escaped bites from my vampire neighbor who kept a garlic wreath on his door; and used my amulets and amethyst stones to procure magic in my neighbors yard. I was constantly bobbing up and down between fantasy and reality, tying real life into the dreams and fictions I lived out in my head. I sometimes had accomplices in my journeys, a best friend named Michael who was equally in need of escapism. I once ruined a brand new outfit after dunking myself in a pool of mud as I was tried as a witch in Salem and found guilty, my mother ready to punish me as I emerged from my dream.
The beautiful thing about my hippie family was our large property in the woods just a few miles from our home. We planned to build there one day, but until then, we just spent 2-4 days a week in the woods. It was here that I lived out my greatest escapes. I ran blindly through the fields of trees I knew as well as the back of my hand; and took off at lightning speed escaping imaginary captors, wicked warlocks, and sometimes just a life as an orphan. My parents let us roam far and wide in this woods, knowing we knew our way, but once, I went too far. For hours I walked and walked, weaving in and out of paths, following no clear direction and after the sun was lowering in the sky, I knew I was lost. Weaving this reality into my tale du jour, I decided that I would sleep in a burrow I would carve out, eat some of the plentiful teaberries and raspberries I knew the woods grew, and drink from the cool clear creek that undulated and turned through the length of the acreage we had. I was not afraid, I was an experienced warrior in the forests of my ancestors and I would emerge a hero at journey’s end. As the sun was setting, I grew not scared, but despondent, the thought that my parents would freak out broke my excitement and fervor for my adventure. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, or so I thought. Taking up screaming “hello!??” for a while, while walking in what I felt was the direction towards the car, I somehow reunited with my parents and made my way to my home, my fantastic journey thwarted by stoplights and radio banter.
A few months later, during the summertime, my sister, her friend and I set off on an epic adventure, following the creek that ran northward through our property and up to the next. We forged the creek, which sometimes poured down rocks and sometimes merely trickled. We climbed up steep embankments, braving the 90 degree angles using all fours to continue. At one point, the path grew perilous and the steep walls that we would have to cover to continue following were very difficult to cross. As I groped and footed my way across the wall, I started to slip.
Grasping for leaves and roots around me, I found no savior and tumbled into the cold pool of water below. Fully under and splashing, I emerged to hear my sister screaming for my help above, despite the fact that I had already reached the place she was afraid of heading. Her friend grabbed her and helped her to safety further on the bank and I made my way out. Fully drenched from head to toe, my thirteen-year-old self declared that I would get frostbite and I removed my pants. We decided that in efforts to save my life, we should head back. An hour later, we caught site of my father up ahead, chopping wood. Seeing my pants-less legs, he yelled “What’s wrong with you?” Weird people were living in the woods and I would be an easy target for foul play.
I proudly declared that I didn’t want to get frostbite and he brashly replied, “you can’t get frostbite in 50 degrees”.
I hated my town and left for college as soon as I could, but over the years, I have gotten a pain and it’s deepened as time goes by. Since leaving, I have found myself, found “my people” and ideologies and adventures in real life; and as much as I wanted to escape the place I found to be so unbearable as a young person, I come back to it. I miss it. I miss the things that plagued me as a child, that I wanted to replace. Our shabby chic home, I wished was more grand, the tractor I had to drive to cut the grass or the two ton duel wheel pickup truck of my dad’s that I drove to high school when everyone else drove BMWs, Mercedes, and Lexus’. We were different, I was different and it took running away from this place to make me come to a realization that this is just fine, in fact, it is awesome.
HAPPY NEW YEARS EVE!!!! I don’t know what everyone has planned, but I hope it’s a great night for all. Here’s a moment I love from a hell of movie:
The Day After (sale, etc. )
I hope that whatever everyone celebrates, they had a great last few days. My Christmas was a small gathering, but it was nice and everyone was happy, even the dog, who couldn’t stop wagging her tail since Friday.
I am having a big sale in my Etsy shop on all belts:
Buy two, get 30% off your entire order including shipping
[use coupon code: { christmasbelt11 } at checkout ]
Belts of all kinds —-> shop
In other news, me and my hippie biker parents are en route to the original site of Woodstock. They’ve been there 500 times, including those days in 1969, but this is my first time.
I’ll be taking photos, although it’s just a big ole field. I’m sure the feelings and vibes are still strong though. 
Happy Monday!
