Russian Sledges

eco-conscious clothing company reformation hasn’t really been on my radar much. i’d heard of the brand before, but they really didn’t grab my attention until today when they launched their latest aptly (or amply?) titled collection, i’m up here, featuring summer styles made specifically with busty ladies in mind. the collection is designed so that you can conceal a bra, and has more generous proportions along the bust line to accommodate women who wear a c-cup or higher. while i have my doubts about a few of these pieces working for my well above a c-cup body, i do appreciate the concept behind the designs. i don’t know how many times i’ve tried on a dress only to discover that i need to size up just so that the bust will fit, leaving the waist, hips, and everything else just a little bit too big for my frame. i know it’s kind of a niche issue, but hey, unless you’re a fit model, you probably have fit issues of your own.

while not every style is quite up my alley and some of the pieces still require a strapless bra (which isn’t very easy if you’re over a dd), there are some promising looks in the bunch. now that i’m living in such a warm climate, i really do appreciate the odd strategic cut out if i can still conceal my bra. and i’m not always totally opposed to showing a bit of skin if it means i’m not revealing way more than i bargained for. and of course, i always appreciate a company that focuses on eco-friendly and sustainable practices. so bravo to reformation for capturing a new market! i’ll be keeping an eye out from now on.

see the complete collection here.

photos of ashley smith for reformation.

The post reformation “i’m up here” collection appeared first on calivintage.

gameraboy:

Harrison Ford practicing with a whip on the backlot for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Plates from a 1722 geometrical treatise that attempts to explore every arrangement of square tiles bisected diagonally with black and white shading.

Doüat, Dominique. Methode pour faire une infinité de desseins differens, avec des carreaux mi-partis de deux couleurs par une ligne diagonale, 1722.

Typ 715.22.334

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Aaron Renn contends that over-regulation and generous government benefits have hampered the state’s economy:

Depending on the month, Rhode Island has either the worst or second-worst unemployment rate in the nation: 9.3 percent, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. Since 2000, the state has lost 2.5 percent of its jobs, and what jobs it has created are mostly low-paying. The job situation is so dire that entire local economies have become dominated by the benefits-payment cycle. In Woonsocket, for example, one-third of residents are on food stamps.

Rhode Island boosters cite its per-capita income of $45,877—4.9 percent above the national average and 14th-best in the country—as evidence of the state’s economic strength. But this number is misleading. It’s driven in part by high levels of government-transfer payments: everything from retirement and disability insurance to workers’ compensation and unemployment, veterans’ benefits, and the whole panoply of federal grants (Medicaid, food stamps, SSDI). Rhode Island ranks third in the country in such transfers per capita. Incomes have also been stagnant for decades. As late as the 1930s, Rhode Island’s per-capita income was nearly 50 percent greater than the national average. By the mid-1940s, though, it had declined to just a tick above the U.S. average, where it remains.

8.00 USD

Yoshiko Jinzenji for Yuwa

100% cotton oxford

Medium weight

1/2 metre (50cm x 110cm, 19" x 43")

If you would like continuous yardage please change the quantity at the checkout.

Parcels are shipped via small packet international airmail from Japan.

Japan Post does not provide tracking numbers for small packet airmail.

A shipping upgrade with a tracking number and insurance can be purchased
for an additional $5. If you would like to upgrade to registered small packet airmail
please let me know.

Thank you.

As our brand spanking new pattern gets closer and closer to it's release date, so we get more and more excited about all the possibilities, variations and hacks we can dream up for it's future... This new pattern (currently in the arms of our wonderful pattern testers helping us to produce something as close to perfect as possible) is no exception. I for one, have already made up five variations for my own personal, ummm, testing process! The next variation I want to make involves today's DIY: armed with 3m of a deliciously soft and drapey cotton chambray purchased from The Village Haberdashery and a bottle of bleach, I'm going to show you how to create a bleached out border print...

What you'll need:

• Your fabric - natural fibres will work best
• A little ramekin full of bleach - I used Domestos thick bleach
• Various shapes to print - think corks, flat ended knitting needles, pin heads, cookie cutters, shapes cut into potatoes, paint brushes, or any flat shape stuck onto the end of a knitting needle works a treat too.

Step 1

Get your workspace prepped: gather all your shape printing bits, pour a little bleach into your ramekin and lay down some newspaper or something to protect your surfaces from the bleach.

Cut a scrap of your fabric to practice printing on before diving into the Real Thing, and be prepared to change or adapt your design according to how your test turns out. I had originally planned to print polka dots, but after getting a feel for it, I decided instead to print using glow stars which I had stuck onto the ends of a pair of knitting needles with UHU glue (shown above).

Step 2

When you're happy with your design, lay your fabric on the newspaper and get stuck in! Dip your printing tool into the bleach - you want it fully coated but not drenched - and simply dab it onto your fabric once, being careful not to smudge it, and remove it after a second. It'll take a good few minutes for the bleach to work its magic, and you won't see the full effect until about a half hour after printing.

Step 3

Once you've finished printing, leave your fabric to dry and then stick it in the washing machine to get rid of any bleach residue.

I couldn't be happier with how this turned out and have already ordered my pearl snap fasteners to complete the look! Watch this space...

whitehouse:

The President is answering your questions tomorrow, and it will be awesome. Tune in Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET on whitehouse.tumblr.com.

You know, if you’re hip to all these things.

A beautiful, crystal clear photo of an F-15E Strike Eagle piloted by Colonel Jeannie Leavitt—the first US Air Force female combat fighter pilot and the first commander of a combat fighter wing. This was her last refueling and her final flight—on May 29, 2014—after 2,600 hours flying this beautiful jet.

A beautiful, crystal clear photo of an F-15E Strike Eagle piloted by Colonel Jeannie Leavitt—the first US Air Force female combat fighter pilot and the first commander of a combat fighter wing. This was her last refueling and her final flight—on May 29, 2014—after 2,600 hours flying this beautiful jet. Col. Leavitt commands the 4th Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, in Goldsboro, North Carolina. According to the USAF, it’s one of the largest fighter wings in the United States Air Force—she’s responsible for 5,700 men and women, $5.1 billion in airplanes and equipment, and a yearly $240 million maintenance budget.

More in link. HT to @brianmbendis for the pointer.

(fixed the link)

Iceland, with its extreme landscapes, jagged lava fields and Northern Lights, is arguably one of the most photogenic countries in the world. So it’s no surprise that over half a million tourists flock there every year to shoot the landscape. But UK-based photographer Andy Lee, on his first visit to the country, came back with a series of photos titled “Blue Iceland” that captured the waterfalls, peaks and roads in, literally, a whole new light. Using infrared photography to pick up invisible light rather than visible light, Lee transformed Iceland into a series of stark, moody and somewhat dreamlike silhouettes. At times the austere rock formations and glowing waterfalls almost appear to be painted. You can see much more of Lee’s work over on his portfolio site. In the words of Lee himself, “Infrared and Iceland, a match made in heaven.” (via PetaPixel)

An aperitif is a bitterish alcoholic beverage that was originally meant to be served before a meal to stimulate the appetite because people in the nineteenth century believed all sorts of wonderful things about alcohol, which they had to drink constantly because water, prior to modern sanitation, was a biohazard. Also it's sort of weird to think that you needed to drink alcohol to become hungry since basically everyone was starving all the time back then.

Anyway, one aperitif is called the negroni. It is a cocktail that is made, typically, with one part gin (a neutral spirit not unlike vodka, but with plant stuff, most commonly and notably, juniper berries); one part sweet vermouth (a fortified wine with plant stuff); and one part Campari (a pinkish, bitter liqueur…with plant stuff). A million, literally a million, articles have recounted the negroni's origins, usually by stating "so the story goes" or "so the tale goes," before going on to recall that it was named for Count Negroni, a man who preferred gin to soda because he was in fact a monster. The negroni was relatively obscure in America until the mid-aughts or so; a Times piece in 2002 described it as "a relative stranger on these shores," but for San Francisco, which was "the stronghold of the drink in this country." Its popularity grew slowly, until circa 2010-2012, when everybody who intensely talks about things like beverages lost their collective shit over it. (The numbers support this teleology: Campari, the linchpin of the drink and most of variations, saw sales rise just four per cent from 2009 to 2010, but then sixteen per cent year over year from 2010 to 2011, followed by twelve per cent growth the following two years. This is likely driven by negronis, rather than the more refreshing Americano.)

When made properly—not too heavy on the gin, not with shitty vermouth and without telling anyone next to you how great it is—the negroni is perfectly fine. It has, itself, committed no sins. However, if you were to put everybody who is dying to tell you how much they like negronis into a bar, it would be the single largest and worst bar in the world, a sticky cesspool of people, standing should to shoulder, talking animatedly about nothing except how wonderfully the negroni balances its floral, herbal notes with bitterness and sweetness; how they can't believe that other people don't love them as much as they do, what is wrong with their palate; how they had the best negroni of their life at some bar you've never been to, or in Italy (which is a steadfast lie, because no one in Italy knows how to make cocktails); how their own slightly tweaked proportion of clear liquor to sweet wine-liquor to bitter pink liquor is in fact the best of all possible negroni variations, and while the negroni spinoffs like the far sturdier boulevardier, with a backbone of whiskey, are fine, the true negroni is better and able to be enjoyed at all times of day, but most especially during negroni season, which is a lie and doesn't make any sense because if it's actually really hot you should probably be drinking beer or seltzer with a lime, not a syrupy concoction all too often served up, rather than on the rocks.

The subtext of the discussion at this mythical world's-most-awful bar, which might actually exist on the Internet, is that anyone who enjoy negronis has an incredibly distinguished palate which allows them to fully enjoy negronis in a way that most people can't appreciate. One person told the Times that the negroni is "a sophisticated cocktail, too, for an audience that appreciates the cocktail and the story behind it." Bon Appetit described the negroni at one point as "a secret handshake, a sign to bartenders that you knew what you liked, and how to order it." Serious Eats calls it "a serious drink for serious drinkers." GQ says, "A Negroni, like black coffee or Texas, is an acquired taste."

This notion hinges on the negroni's purported bitterness and botanicals, and the way it balances these flavors. But one third of its profile is sweet vermouth, like Carpano Antica—this, by the way, is when a negroni drinker will pop up and offer their own preferred vermouth, such as Punt e Mes or Cocchi Vermouth di Torino, particularly since there is a slight Carpano Antica backlash that seems to be brewing given its ubiquity in cocktail establishments—which is thick and rich and powerful and sweet. The negroni, in other words, is a generally sweet cocktail for people who wants to say that they enjoy the bitter things in life, a loud clamoring brought upon in part by the Great American Palate Shift, which venerates bitterness as way to celebrate the superiority of its proponents vis-a-vis their conquest of both evolutionary biology (our inherent primate brains associate bitterness with poison) and mainstream American taste (which demands only salt, fat and sugar).

As the primary medium by which Campari makes its way down the gullet of Americans who believe themselves to be tastemakers, Campari, the company, cares deeply about the ongoing success of the Negroni (look at those sales!). It has even succeeded, in partnership with Imbibe, in making #NegroniWeek a real thing that is currently taking place. Participating bars around the country are donating one or two dollars from each negroni sale to a charity of their choice. (Which, before I proceed, all donations to local charities, whatever the reason, are of course inherently good. BUT.) Campari is promising to give ten thousand dollars to the charity of the bar that raises the most money by selling the most negronis. A case of twelve bottles of Campari goes for three hundred and forty dollars at Astor Wine & Spirits (though obviously bars pay less than this). It is expecting more than eleven hundred bars to participate, raising at least one hundred thousand dollars, making for roughly ninety thousand negronis. That's a lot of Campari. For this, the company is giving just ten thousand dollars to charity.

The negroni cannot support the weight of a cause, much less an entire belief system, despite everything that its adherents have poured into it. It's a drink. A drinkable one. I guess. Sometimes. Drink it if you want. Or drink a beer. Or literally anything else. Just don't tell anybody about it.

"Carbonated negroni" photo by Bart Everson.

The post Death to Negronis appeared first on The Awl.

vastderp:

thekumazone:

Owls may be symbols of wisdom, but they’re actually complete morons

"WHATWHATWHAAAAAT!?"

"Bitter clowns tears with a hint of suspicion. Great with lobster Thermidor. Best drunk in the street. Taste guide: Trouser jazz."

Read more...

[Photo: Facebook]

Aeronaut Brewing Company, Somerville's first brewery since the 19th century, officially opens on June 21 — although if you don't already have tickets to the all-day party, you'll have to wait for another day, because the festivities are already sold out.

What started as a home-brewing project dubbed TBD Brewing has grown into a self-described "craft brewery and urban farmhouse" where "brewers and scientists collaborate with New England farmers and food makers to drive the invention of craft beers and spur a renaissance of local victuals and industrial revitalization." Aeronaut leases some of its space to other local companies in the food and drink sphere, including Something GUD, a home delivery service that brings customers goods from farms and local producers, barismo, a coffee roaster that began in Arlington, and Somerville Chocolate (what it sounds like).

Aeronaut has hosted a number of open houses leading up to its grand opening, and it has already racked up a small handful of reviews on BeerAdvocate. The debut roster of beers includes Armadillo, an American IPA; Lagerfeuer, a Rauchbier; and more. Stay tuned for tasting hours.
· Aeronaut Brewing Company [FB]
· All coverage of Aeronaut Brewing Company on Eater [~EBOS~]

Twin Peaks, Meng-Chai Lai

This post brought to you by Michael, a seven-eyed dog from Brooklyn. Previously in this series: Two monks invent medieval art.

It doesn’t really work for monks to appear in this installment of the series, seeing as how the influence of the Catholic Church on popular art movements had really waned by 1848, but I’ve already committed to the general conceit, so. 

MONK #1: ok wow
what should we draw what should we drawww
everybody’s doing landscapes and rich ladies in front of old buildings so maybe we should –
MONK #2: bitches
MONK #1: what
MONK #2: we gotta paint bitches
just stone cold bitches man
MONK #1: i dont understand
MONK #2: bitches are it
bitches are the future
people want one thing from art
and that’s to see unsmiling, lush bitches brushing their hair
MONK #1: wow
ok
MONK #2: like this

MONK #1: oh wow okay yeah i see what you mean
MONK #2: or this

MONK #1: okay so like this?

MONK #2: um
you know what
that’s a really good start
MONK #1: thank you!
MONK #2: something i really like about it is the moon
and the veil is great
and she looks like she might have consumption
which is great
MONK #1: thank you!!!
MONK #2: but that’s a woman
not a bitch
you didn’t paint a bitch
so
MONK #1: oh man
MONK #2: no no it’s okay don’t feel bad
it can be tricky
here’s another example
just for reference

MONK #1: ok let me see if ive got it yet
how’s this

MONK #2: hmm
MONK #1: oh dang
MONK #2: haha dont be so hard on yourself i’m just thinking
this is definitely better
MONK #1: yeah?
MONK #2: yeah
MONK #1: i feel like im getting closer
MONK #2: you definitely definitely are
she’s not smiling and that’s a great start
don’t really see any jewels though
MONK #1: yeah
MONK #2: remember your aiming for this

MONK #1: WHOA
MONK #2: haha yeah
big hair, no heart, that’s the key

MONK #2: tell you what
lets practice some
ill give you a general activity
and you guess how a bitch might look while she was doing it
okay?
MONK #1: okay
MONK #2: i really think it will help
MONK #1: okay
MONK #2: gathering flowers
MONK #1: i guess
peaceful?
MONK #2: furious
MONK #1: dang
MONK #2: bitches gather flowers furiously

MONK #2: lets try another one
picnicking
how do bitches picnic
MONK #1: um
angry?
MONK #2: solemnly
they picnic solemnly, in billowing velvet capes

MONK #2: okay
we’re picking flowers again
what’s happening
MONK #1: um
they’re picking flowers
gravely
like for a funeral
MONK #2: right!
is anybody smiling or having a good time?
MONK #1: no
definitely not
MONK #2: you got it kid

MONK #2: sitting in a castle
MONK #1: mega pissed off
MONK #2: that’s the one!!

MONK #2: okay bitches are swimming
set the scene for me
MONK #1: they’re trying to drown a guy
but real slowly
MONK #2: yes
that is exactly how bitches swim

MONK #2: how about dancing
what do bitches look like when they throw a dance party
MONK #1: enormously sad
just shatteringly grief-stricken
MONK #2: that’s right
bitches hate dancing

MONK #2: okay i think you’re ready to try again
lightning round
draw me a bitch in front of her house
MONK #1: ok hows this
MONK #2: is that a spear?
MONK #1: yeah
MONK #2: NICE

MONK #2: gimme two bitches
MONK #1: hows this
MONK #2: YES
I LOVE HOW SHE’S STARING AT ME

MONK #2: show me what it looks like when two people fall in love
MONK #1: like this?
MONK #2: YES THAT’S HORRIFYING GOD YES

MONK #2: what does it look like when a bitch goes on a date
MONK #1: ahh
she
she carries her dog and won’t look at the guy
MONK #2: you are ready

MONK #2: last one
show me a happy couple on a carriage ride
MONK #1: okay
MONK #2: CHRIST THAT’S UNSETTLING
is he missing part of his jaw?
MONK #1: yeah i thought it fit the scene
MONK #2: this is great stuff
MONK #1: you really think so?
MONK #2: i really do

MONK #1: okay um how about this one
MONK #2: YES
THATS IT
YOU GOT IT
MONK #1: really??
oh man
MONK #2: absolutely
this is it
we’re done here
lets call it the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and go get some opium

[All images via]

Read more Two Monks Invent The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at The Toast.

bill-holmes:

how the fuck did we get from there to where we are today

1930-40s Dragon’s Breath Ring, Glass, Sterling (sold)

ursulavernon:

becausebirds:

The island of Java is home to the Cemani, a chicken that is jet black from head to toe.

This rooster is so goth he should come with little skulls on his spurs.

mikerhicks has added a photo to the pool:

Radnor Lake State Natural Area - June 5, 2014