I swear, this jacket looks fantastic in real life.

I'm disappointed with how today's photos turned out. This faux Persian lamb jacket is one of the things I almost always think I look great in. It's one of the few things I've ever paid full price for at Anthropologie and it's been worth every penny I paid for it. In fact, I've always planned to make a couple of similarly styled jackets in a variety of fabrics when I have time to sew again. It's a great jacket with jeans, or with a skirt. I've worn it over simple dresses and thought it looked fantastic. But in the photographs it looks pretty ho-hum.

Every time I wear a black top (often) Chris complains when he's taking my photos. He says that my top half looks like a big black blob. It's very difficult to see any detail in these photos and they really aren't doing my beautiful jacket justice. You'll just have to take my word about how great it is because it certainly doesn't look like anything special here.

I think if I'd worn a colored shirt underneath the jacket, instead of this black one, the outfit would have looked better. What if there were just a few inches of leopard print (to match my shoes) peeking out beneath from beneath the hem of the jacket? I'm pretty wary of leopard print, in general. It can go bad so easily. But I think when judiciously applied it can be fantastic.

I did receive a number of compliments on these leopard wedges today. They are a bit worn out. They're missing hair in a few spots (you can see a shiny spot on the heel in the picture below) and in one place both the hair and the pattern are gone. I'm going to be sad when I finally have to lay these to rest.

One of the reasons I'm already mourning the eventual loss of these shoes is that they epitomize a type of shoe that it seems is becoming increasingly hard to find lately- the pretty, feminine shoe that could be worn by a regular person in real life. More and more, what I find when I'm shopping are shoes that are either unappealingly orthopedic or ridiculously impractical for anyone who might have to walk more than thirty feet in the course of her day. There doesn't seem to be much in between. I like heels. I like them a lot. But heels of upwards of four inches? And with platforms? On almost every pretty shoe out there? I'm convinced that all of these shoes would be every bit as beautiful with two or three inch heels, and (as an added bonus) a woman would stand a chance of being able to wear them for more than a half an hour with out being reduced to hobbling in pain.

I'm featuring my purse with pride today because I actually took the trouble to take my stuff out of the bag it was in and put it into a bag that coordinated with my other accessories. I've been carrying the small burgundy patent clutch I posted here, for weeks now. Sometimes it has worked really well with what I've happened to be wearing and sometimes it has clashed horribly. I'd like to believe that I'm going to make the effort to switch out my purses to go with my outfits from here on out, but I'm afraid that it's more likely that I'm going to be carrying this one, regardless of whether it looks good with what I'm wearing, for the next month. At least this clutch is more neutral than the purple one- I have an increased chance of it being appropriate for any given outfit than I did with the purple.

Amber and silver ring