Manolo for the Big Girl

To my dearest, superfantastic readers,

It is with sadness that I must announce that Francesca will no longer be working on this blog, for the foreseeable future. She is leaving to invest her time in other (alas, non-fashion-related) projects.

Manolo for the Big Girl has been a gracious and loving home to me for the past three years, and it is not easy to leave. Yet, Francesca knows that you will be in the best of hands with our wonderful, inimitable Plumcake and dear Twistie.

I have learned much from you, my internet friends, and from all our excellent co-bloggers in the Fatosphere, especially from Plumcake and from the incomparable Kate Harding. My own self-confidence,  self-acceptance, and sense of personal style have increased because of all of you. I hope that I have been able to contribute to your lives, as well, in the most positive of ways.

Francesca will continue to check in on the Manolo empire and perhaps comment from time to time, so this isn’t exactly a “goodbye.”  However, I feel a need to leave with an example of Big Girls in Art,

and a parting lesson about beauty: the first rule of being superfantastic is to be thoughtful of others. The second, third, and fourth rules involve clear skin, a good bra, and a good haircut, but I’m sure Plumcake will have plenty to say about those. Listen carefully to what she tells you!

Happy shopping and happy LIVING!

xoxo,

Francesca

Hey there caption lovers! It’s time once again to play Twistie’s Sunday Caption Madness.

You know how this works. I post a picture that needs a caption like Plummy needs fabulous silk scarves. You provide those captions via the comments function. Next week I declare a winner and we all celebrate with our various drinks, snack foods, or glittery jewelry of choice…or something.

This week’s picture comes to you courtesy of my abiding affection for fabulous handbags, and it looks a bit like this:

Ready…set…snark!

It is a fact that I love greens. I love spinach and kale and collard greens and mustard greens and…well, most things that are leafy and green.

It is also a fact that I don’t eat as many as I would like. Why? Because Mr. Twistie isn’t wild about them, and most of the time I’m feeding him as well as me. He often finds them bitter and unpleasant. Sigh.

Because of these two facts, I went looking for a recipe that would let me have my green and leafies while pleasing Mr. Twistie’s palate. I found just the thing in my copy of The Savory Way by Deborah Madison. It’s a fantastic vegetarian cookbook that I pull out both when I’m feeding someone who doesn’t eat meat, when I feel like having a good meal sans meat, or when I’m looking for the perfect side dish to go with a great piece of meat. I was going to link to the book on Amazon, but at present it would appear to be more or less a collector’s item over there. The cheapest copy I found was something like seventy-eight bucks for the hardcover. The paperback started well over two hundred smackers. I suggest going to your local second-hand bookstore and seeing if you can find a previously loved copy.

Anyway. The dish is pretty easy (and easier if – unlike me – you get your chopping and dicing out of the way before you start cooking rather than after), requires no specialized equipment, cooks pretty rapidly, and is surprisingly fabulous. It’s also flexible. If you go to the store or your farmer’s market and there are no collard greens or the broccoli rabe is looking limp, just pick up some mustard greens or Swiss chard and have at it. Follow the cut for the recipe.

(more…)

WHERE’S MY JETPACK???

Good morning mein schnauzers! (I don’t really speak German, although I HAVE seen Cabaret a bunch of times. Plus I stole the line from the occasionally NSFW Mr Peenee anyhow.)

Today’s blog post is going to be Law and Order style: Ripped from today’s headlines.

Except by “Today’s” I mean “Yesterday and quite late the night before” and “headlines” I mean “conversation I was having with an aerialist cum chef pal of mine who may or may not also breathe fire.”

The question?

Whether one might learn to be photogenic.

Listen, I’m not going to lie: I take a hell of a picture. In person I look like an extremely posh cartoon frog and I’m at peace with that, but on camera? I’m Myrna freakin’ Loy.

See, the things that make people beautiful to look at in real life don’t necessarily translate onto film, so there is absolutely no use hating bad photos of yourself. You DON’T really look like an off-Broadway musical revue staring Lady Bunny as The Elephant Man. It’s just a bad photo.

BUT you can hedge your bets by learning how to fake being photogenic.

How? Easy. Learn how to work your light.

You do this two ways: through makeup (easy) and through posing (easier).

Makeup first:
Most people who wear makeup focus on their eyes and lips and don’t pay much attention to their skin. This, particularly when it comes to photographs, is a mistake. Even if you want to go for “the natural look” for a photo, a little foundation or powder will even out the way light bounces off your face, making for a much smoother look.

For the look above -which was taken last night after an evening out celebrating the newest acquisition of the Château Gâteau Collection of Enormous Sparkly Things: a vintage Kenneth Jay Lane necklace the size of a sheep– I’m actually wearing relatively little on my lips and eyes.

The lips are just a generic tinted lipbalm and for the eyes I simply took my trusty MAC 217 brush and blended Paradise Pearl pure pigment from Coastal Scents over the lid, ran a bit of Milani’s Mediterranean Blue eye pencil along the waterline and along the outer corner of my eye and topped it with a lick of Rimmel Sexy Curves mascara.  I just cleaned up and shaped my brows using an old brown pencil whose make and model have been lost in the mists of memory.

What I did spend a lot of time on was the highlighting and contouring of my face.  For those of us who are fat of face or otherwise not blessed with an aquiline nose, cheekbones so high and sharp people try to commit suicide off them and the generally accepted number of chins (i.e., one) highlighting and contouring the face can be a godsend.

The painfully lovely and exceedingly talented Chapman sisters can teach you this and pretty much everything else you’d ever wanted to know about l’art du maquillage (I say that in French because it sounds nice, the sisters themselves are from Norwich) through their wonderfully accessible tutorials.

Sam Chapman Contouring Tutorial

Of course it doesn’t hurt that Sam Chapman might actually be the most gorgeous woman to ever have lived and if Crystal Renn ever got a look at her she’d be cowering in her technically-plus-size Martin Margiela boots.  I highly commend these videos to anyone with even an sprinkling of interest in makeup. If you’re an old hand, they’ll be inspiring and if you’re new to the wonderful world of better living through eyeliner it’s a great place to start.

So we’ve got the makeup down, right? Now on to posing.

Any small success I had as a photographer’s/artist’s model (my plus-size fashion career was as short as my too-short-for-fashion neck) was because I knew how to literally put myself in the best light.

Part of that is just being aware of your face and how the light hits it. You know when it’s nice outside and you turn up your face to get just that perfect sweet spot of sun? That’s a really natural example of finding your key light.

The undisputed queen of key light was Marlene Dietrich.

Killer bone structure notwithstanding, Dietrich wasn’t a great beauty (and let’s not even talk about the tragedy that is Jean Harlow’s wighat)

but she knew how to play to her light when a camera –moving or still– was on her.

Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor worked lights well too, but they had the disadvantage of being actually breathtakingly beautiful, too, so it’s not as useful from an academic perspective.

A silly “key light” finding exercise, is to set up a spotlight in your house (yes, this can be a flashlight or a can light on a music stand on your commode) and practice just moving your face around in the light.

Odds are you’ll find some positions where the light just feels better, feels right.

That will get you in the habit of paying attention to the light, so the next time someone wants to snap your photo and you have a second to pose, just lengthen your neck, find your light and you’ll be surprised how much better your photos turn out.

Now someone go find me that charming Mister DeMille.

This weekend I met with two new Glam Rehab clients. They’re both kinda hip and groovy in a crunchy sort of Austin way. They’re in their late-ish 30’s and generally pretty awesome (they also gave permission for me to talk about them on the blog. Thanks!)

We were chatting about their fashion time line, what they like what they don’t and they both told me they loved Betsey Johnson. I nearly had two strokes (one stroke each.)

Because Betsey Johnson?

No.

I mean sure, love Betsey Johnson the whackadoo designer , because she is totally endearing and would probably be a really fun friend to have as long as you didn’t embarrass easily (confidential to BJ: when I see you and the first words I can think of are “Nylon hair” “hot mess” and “Deranged Suzanne Somers stalker having a really difficult time with her m-to-f  transition” perhaps it’s time to rethink the look) but really, you do not live in a world where it’s All Junior Prom All The Time and maybe it’s time to up your sophistication level.

Does that mean you have to burn all your cute young clothes and only leave the house in St John knits?

YES.

Wait, I mean NO. (Although I love St John and I don’t CARE  that it’s as WASPish as you can be without having a tax shelter literally built around you. But they don’t make plus sizes so whatevs)

What it means is that you’ve got to start looking at what appeals to who you are today.

There is some great Sufi teaching story about a swan egg that got in a chicken coop somehow, and he was happy and all with his adoptive poultry family (clearly they weren’t Danish poultry, who –if we’ve learned anything from Hans Christian Anderson– are all bastards) who taught him how to eat grain and keep dry in the rain and all sorts of handy things. He’d watch the swans fly overhead and swim in the sea, secure that when the time was right, his chicken momma and chicken daddy would teach him how to fly and swim. But they didn’t, because they couldn’t, so the swan never learned because he thought “they have taken me this far on my journey so well, surely they can take me the rest of the way.”

The moral of the story is (kinda) just because something worked then, doesn’t mean it works now.

When was the last time you took a good look at your wardrobe and asked “does this fit who I am and what I want to project now?”

Maybe those lug-soled mary janes were super cute when you were 21 and it was kind of ironic that you were wearing old lady clothes since you were so  young and winsome, but now you’re 36. Don’t give up the essence of what you love, but make sure it’s being continually refined.

If you love punk, don’t give it up, just make it a bit more sophisticated than pink kitties and skulls on Ugly Knitted Things.  Alexander McQueen did it beautifully, and Viv Westwood, the Godmother of Punk, kept the punk sensibility without sacraficing sophistication when she showed for Fall 2010.

(I am DYING for that jacket).

SPEAKING of Betsey Johnson and Lee McQueen, how do we feel about her little homage at Fashion Week? Her heart was in the right place, but it didn’t quite sit right with me. And the hay-strewn runway? Didn’t Herr Karl do that for Chanel last season?

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve spent a lot of my time this week staring at a screen at what’s going on in Vancouver (a lovely city where, incidentally, Mr. Twistie and I honeymooned). That’s meant less time than usual for cooking and more need than usual for the kind of fun, easy to eat snacks that one doesn’t feel so horrible about accidentally strewing about the room on seeing someone do something incredible or seeing one’s personal favorite athlete make the podium (Go Evan Lysacek!).

In addition to that, this happens to coincide with a request from reader JB who apparently read my mind and requested a couple recipes that don’t require an oven, since she is currently without.

I also decided that it was time to take a look at some of the great recipes available for free on the web instead of cookbooks that might or might not fit into the current available budget of some of our readers. There are some fabulous sites out there brimful of great recipes that are fun to make and utterly delicious. Besides, my personal challenge was to use written recipes I’ve never used before, but I never said they had to come out of books!

So it was that I perused the quick and easy snack recipes over at epicurious and found a couple goodies that looked tasty and wouldn’t dislodge me from the hypnotic joys of curling or the drama of short track speed skating (You couldn’t pay me to watch roller derby, but put it on ice skates instead of wheels, and I can’t look away. Go figure.) for too long.

Since the recipes are both available online, I’m just posting links to them and notes about how they worked for me.

First up, Pecan Praline Popcorn Treats. This is what Cracker Jack wants to be when it grows up. Ridiculously simple, quick, and a fabulous combination of crunch, goo, salty and sweet. In short, this is the almost perfect TV watching junk food. The almost? Well, that gooey, sticky factor does eventually make you either go wash your hands or get caramel all over the remote. Keep a couple wipes at hand, so you don’t wind up with a remote that sticks to both the couch and the cat. Enjoy the heck out of this one!

Next, Cheddar Chutney Tea Sandwiches. After all, you’ll need some savory treats as well as sweet. These lovely little bite-and-a-half sized sandwiches are a breeze to make (all you’ll need is a knife, a grater, a spoon, and a bowl, really), delicious, zesty, and satisfying. Watch for drips if you don’t just pop the whole (tiny) sandwich in your mouth. I recommend extra-sharp cheddar for the bite, but it would still be good with a milder cheese. I also substituted a different chutney than Major Grey’s. MG’s is more than fine, but I get an incredible tamarind-based chutney from my local farmer’s market. Play with cheeses and chutneys until you find the combo that makes you smile.

Maybe I’ll have some of both while I watch tonight’s broadcast.

Readers, I have a confession: I am no freaking good at sports.

It’s not about fat. I was actually kind of a skinny kid. I was no good at sports then, either. I had balance issues and a fondness for not getting hit in the face with objects hurtling through the air. When the class was taught to play volleyball in the fifth grade, I clearly heard the teacher tell us that the goal was to get the ball over the net and onto the ground on the other team’s side. Twenty-nine other kids heard that the goal was to see how many times they could get the ball to hit Twistie precisely on the top of her head. I can understand the confusion. My head was, in point of fact, a much more precise target than several square feet of asphalt, and we all love a challenge. Still, it made the game Not Fun for me on an epic level.

When we were ‘taught’ baseball in sixth grade, the teacher insisted that everyone already knew all the rules, so we would move straight to the game itself. Nobody took me seriously when I said I had no idea how to play. Everyone has played baseball in the womb! Not me. Then I watched classmate after classmate get up and try to hit a ball the size of the school bully’s fist (and I knew from experience just what size it was and how it felt coming at my nose) out of the way of their faces with a stick. That thing had to be doing forty! No way was I going to let it hit my face even faster than Jeff’s fist! I dropped to the dirt.

Yeah. That went well.

I spent most of my time between the ages of twelve and fifteen with a sprained thumb, ankle, or wrist somewhere on me. I played through the pain and the gym teachers gave me D- for participation, because apparently participation is only proven through competence at the game. You try playing an entire two-week round-robin doubles badminton tournament solo on a sprained ankle and tell me how many teams you beat. Yeah. I beat zero. My partner who didn’t show up to class for those two weeks (yet miraculously arrived every day at our shared Art class) got a better participation grade than I did.

As soon as I got the chance, I ditched gym class forever. And while I have done many things that give me plenty of exercise since then (including Scottish country dance, until a series of knee injuries and a move to a place where I couldn’t find a convenient class pushed that to the side), I have never again participated in organized sports.

I walk. I sometimes just run up and down the stairs in my house because it’s convenient and works up a sweat. I do housework…including things like moving furniture. Dusting might not be a big muscle builder, but putting together that Ikea entertainment center and filling it with many of the contents of the old entertainment center two weeks ago was. Say what you will, the pieces were heavy.

The new entertainment center was to hold our new, larger television which we acquired just in time for me to go into my regularly scheduled Olympic Haze.

You see, I may not play sports. I may not even watch sports (with the exception of figure skating) in between Olympics, but every two years I spend a two week period being a walking stat sheet. Mr. Twistie tears out his hair, because even the Olympics can’t get him caring about organized sports, but he’s remarkably patient when I start spewing times, scores, artistic deductions, etc. at him.

When it all ends, life usually goes back to normal. ESPN never gets a look from me, I don’t know the names of any of the skiers or biathletes or (in the summer) Greco-Roman wrestlers anymore. I may or may not happen to remember to see any skating competitions (though I will probably tell everyone who doesn’t gnaw their own leg off to escape about the time I sold books to Scott Hamilton, who was a really nice guy).

This time, though, I’m hearing the siren call of an actual sport. Curling.

I’ve been watching, and I’m mesmerized. I’m catching on to the strategy. I’m deeply amused by the sweeping, but I’m also starting to get what it’s accomplishing. Even the fact that it’s played on ice which is cold and slippery isn’t daunting me. Even the relentlessly dull polo shirts and sensible shoes aren’t putting me off! Of course, there is that one men’s team in the harlequin diamond pants, but while they aren’t dull, they aren’t exactly the ultimate in tasteful, either. I feel sure Tim Gunn (call me, Tim!) would pronounce them ‘a lot of look.’

But I’m loving the camaraderie, the fact that teams talk about going out for a pizza after the game instead of carefully weighing every calorie vs its specific nutritional value to their sport, the way they usually look genuinely happy to shake hands with the other team at the end no matter who won or lost. I’m loving the fact that it’s a quiet game of precision rather than a hurried race to a finish line or a subjective balance of skill and artistry. I like the fact that it’s something that takes some time to understand. And of course I love the fact that it allows for a range of body types.

While I haven’t seen anyone as fat as I am on the ice for curling at the Olympics, there are plenty of players with spare tires, as well as the rail thin. Body type doesn’t matter in the game. It’s about throwing the rock at just the right angle with just the right amount of speed. It’s about sweeping harder, softer, or not at all to get the rock to curl just where it needs to go. It’s about setting up the ice so that the other team’s shot might accidentally do your team some good. Tall or short, fat or thin, it’s about strategy, and about muscle control. It’s a slippery game of chess, and I’m falling in love.

Now, if we could just do something about those shoes….