my kinda retro...

Wow, I have been pretty lax at 'getting back' into the blogging game.  Couldn't tell you why- I mean, it's a great time of year for colour, colour, colour! (and boots, boots, boots!) I suppose I could blame some of my creative reluctance at the early darkening of the days.  Well, I got home from work slightly earlier yesterday evening so I grabbed a photo in the dusky gloom.

J Crew Liberty popover in Strawberry-Thief floral, J Crew tweed blazer

It was a chilly autumn morning, and I'm running low on tights options until my full winter, er,...'archive'...is unpacked.  And thus a cozy blazer and denim day with this fabulous liberty print shirt from J Crew.  Once I saw the print I had to have it- the Strawberry-Thief floral is a classic William Morris design (and in that delectable J Crew Liberty cotton lawn- yum!)

Oh the memories. My teen years were spent quietly discovering beautiful things in an expanding (yet introverted) world- Walden and Dostoyevsky, Chet Baker and Chopin. The internet barely existed and William Morris was my hero. You see before you one of the first art books I ever bought myself, first of many (at 15? 16?) The classic 'Renaissance Man' (or indeed the first 'Arts and Crafts guy') he was an artist and patron, building a collective of designers, artists and architects, fundamental in the revival of traditional crafts in an industrial age and active in the budding movement for architectural preservation.  A scholar of medieval romances, he also sort of  'invented' the fantasy genre (later inspiring Tolkien and C.S Lewis). Yeesh. I can't even keep up with blog reading and occasional posting. What have I done with my life? I think I have some old-school reading to catch up on.

I love the unnatural tone to the colours- I wanna wear it with weird combinations.  And I will!  Morris is famous for the maxim "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."  I think a heck of a lot of things are beautiful (#anthropologie #jcrew) And clothes is useful, right?! I bring a lot of them home. But I knit myself a scarf this year.  William Morris would be proud...