Outshine the Sun

No worries, Pacific Northwest! 

When sun is hidden behind the clouds, I will come to the rescue. 

Welcoming Sun and Blini Recipe

Happy Maslenitsa!

Today (Sunday) is the last day of a week-long celebration of MASLENITSA - an ancient Eastern Slavic folk holiday which, as I understand, is the only pagan holiday approved by the Russian Orthodox Church and included in the church calendar - it is always the week before the Great Lent (40 day long, before the Orthodox Paskha). Maslenitsa is believed to be the oldest surviving Slavic holiday and celebrates the end of long Winter. In Russian, the name comes from the word "maslo" (масло) which means butter, in English we could call it Pancake Festival because the most important tradition is to bake blini - pancakes or crepes every day of the week. The deeper meaning of it is celebrating the Sun and the arrival of Spring.

Reset Button

14 days without a new photo shoot is all I can handle! Thank goodness for good health, no rain (though I missed many sunny days that we had while I was sick), and of course for Justin who is good with the camera. 

I am happy! I am celebrating all of the above!

6 Romantic Outfit Ideas

While I am still on the mend and have no new outfits to share, I thought I'd look into In The Writer's Closet for romantic date outfit ideas - surely, in almost 4.5 years of blogging I came up with some! They are not necessarily traditional in a Valentine's Day sense, but the beauty of getting to know myself during the years experimenting with my personal style is that I can wear what I feel like, depending on my mood and nothing else. If my mood flows towards the traditionally romantic colors and shapes, I go with it, and if it doesn't, then I don't - as simple as that. So in this post I invite you to see my picks and maybe look into your closet in a new light and discover what kind of unexpected romantic outfits you can create with your clothes. When we don't have any preconceived notion in our heads, we realize that our sense of what is romantic can be quite broad, and it changes from day to day. If we follow our current mood and trust that inner sense of what feels romantic right now, we can come up with fresh outfits and surprise both our romantic partner and also ourselves. 

Two Magic Ingredients

Inspiration comes from all sorts of sources, sometimes unexpected ones. I don't know what you thought when you first saw this outfit on me, but I know what two little girls in a movie theater thought when they whispered to each other and giggled, looking at me wearing this very outfit. And what do you know, they read me as an open book!

Modish Matrons #20: Simply Red

Hello, my dear friends and readers, and welcome to the month of February with MODISH MATRONS! This time, Beate of the Little Railroad Keeper's House offered a theme, and we played with the title for a while, until we came up with Simply Red, remembering the music band (back in the early 1990s, I was a huge fan of MTV, exotic to post-Soviet Russia, and Simply Red was one of the most memorable groups then). Anyway, the idea behind the theme was wearing lots of red at once, and if Beate wouldn't have emphasized it from the beginning, I'd probably settle on one, maximum two red items. But since her thought was to play with red in abundance, I took all the red things out of my closet to see what combinations could work, and came up with this one. I must say I love the result and once again I'm thankful to my style buddies for ideas that help me grow!