To dream of my charm jewelry at N.Y. Fashion Week

Last week I had a some oral surgery. After leaving the dentist’s office I made my way over to the local Whole Foods and purchased some chicken noodle soup and the latest issues of The Economist, The New Yorker and In Style magazines then made my way home to spend the rest of the day relaxing.

There was an article in the New Yorker by writer Lizzie Widdicombe and it focuses on the fourteen year old blogger from Chicago, with the Fashion blog " The Style Rookie".
Tavi Gevinson has been blogging since she was eleven. The article is eight pages long and covers a lot of Tavi's different perspectives and opinions.

What interested me the most about this article was not the immediate obvious which is Fashion and blogging and her natural enthusiasm to create. There is a photo of Tavi where she has self styled herself in some very hip current fashion garments, right down to the charm jewelry in her hair.

I looked at that photo of Tavi and thought to myself “Run with the wind girl”….

When I was in Design School that was the main premise that we were taught about the “high” of designing clothing - or anything for that matter. It revolves around artistic expression which translates into a wearable art form and that is what clothing is. We get to tell the world about how we feel and who we are every day in our social system through our clothing. A quick picture for example - think blue button down shirt and a pair of chinos with a pair of deck shoes, “you know what that person is saying who they are”.

This month is New York City Fashion Week, which Tavi has been invited to. It brings up happy memories of when I had my own clothing label back in 1984 and sold my collection to a small boutique in Soho New York. I had gone to New York in the late spring and walked door-to- door trying to get someone to buy my collection. Finally I got a sale. I flew back in September with my shipment for a trunk show. The store shut down a year later due to a health situation with the owner, but it was just a few blocks from Parachute, which way back then was a very cool store. My girlfriend who I went to design school with had an apartment in an area that made it walkable to Soho.

So I arrive at the airport in New York City, having had some drinks on the plane bought for me by some nice Americans - okay, I am only nervous taking off and landing. Yvo greeted me at the terminal and we jumped into her Camaro and drove into Manhattan. There was a new restaurant I had read about in the WWD newspaper called the Odeon in Tribeca and that is where we headed. I was completely overdressed in retrospect, for the Odeon ( I don’t even know if that restaurant is still around) I wore my most expensive evening dress. The bar there was busy and jostling and we were celebrating with probably $20 dollars but that didn’t bother me because I was in the Big Apple.

At one point I made my way through the restaurant to the ladies room at the end of the building and used the facilities and then walked back to the bar. I thought that the restaurant clientele were admiring my beautiful dress I was wearing, and when I finally got back to the front of the restaurant where the bar was Yvo, my friend grabs my arm and says “Rena you have tucked your dress into the back of your pantyhose”. I honestly thought I was going to faint, and couldn’t untuck my back dress hem out of my pantyhose fast enough. I just have to say in my defense, that the bathroom stalls at that restaurant were really narrow. That is what the restaurant clientele were looking at, not my dress, but my bare naked pantyhose butt as I cruised through the restaurant. Needless to say more nice Americans bought us some champagne.

Yvo and I are standing and talking at the bar by the door and the next thing I know a gentleman with white hair and dark frame glasses who is walking by me to leave the restaurant, touch’s my arm and says this to me: “I don’t know who you are or where you are from lady, but I like your style”. Turns out it is Andy Warhol, and so now that all pride is out the window, I follow him outside and ask for his autograph. Mr. Warhol had an issue of “Interview” under his arm, it had that classic Warhol graphic style of "Twiggy"in brilliant green on the front cover. He graciously signed it “To Rena” with his autograph.

I was too embarrassed to say anything of the much, that I was a new Designer in town....

The next day was the trunk show at the boutique. It was a huge success and the boutique sold a lot of pieces. The store had two or three models wearing my designs and I can’t remember who but a very kind person took the girls outside and photographed a few of the pieces on the streets of Soho, N. Y.

(I tried to place the photos here but apparently, I cannot get them to, so they are at the top of the page)

I closed my studio in 1986.

Fast forward to my latest collection of charm jewelry. My artistic offering is something that just gushed out and here I am designing for myself again all these years later. There was no stopping it. I just had to do it. My fashion statement dangle, is wearable art. It makes me jump up and down with glee when I get an order and I can package up my product and send it to it’s new home.

I can only imagine the memories that Tavi is stacking up at Fashion Week in New York City.


Have a beautiful day,

Photo: PKM


Joy,


Rena

www.talktotheturtle.com

Our dog is the lucky charm

Our dog is a senior now I guess. Fourteen years converted makes him 98 in human years.
We were sitting on the front deck watching him lie there in the driveway, prone with his back two legs crisscrossed over each other. We were talking about what an amazing animal he is and how much happiness he has brought into our lives. “Fluffy” really is our lucky charm.


Our high maintenance doggie “aka” zoo creature has kept us on total high alert for a decade now. The last three years he has slowed down a little and just when we think he has slowed down for good, a squirrel crosses his path and the roaring creature comes forth and shows us he has still got it in him.


It was year five that we actually found out what his mutt pedigree really was. Of course it was a totally surreal moment. We had him with us to go to my Mothers funeral and it was a day's drive, and by the time we got there, he starting having these really weird dry heaves. So, we called a local vet in the yellow pages and the Vet that showed up was in a portable “Vet Mobile” is the only way I can describe it.

We were on the West Coast of Canada and our Vet was from Santa Barbara. He had moved up North with this high tech decked out animal hospital on wheels. So when he looked at our snarling, heaving animal, he asked, “What kind of dog is that”? Husky/Collie cross we replied.

Big pause….

“No he’s not.” “Your dog may have husky in him, but your dog is part wolf.”
The Veterinarian went on to say that he worked with Minnesota timber wolves as a study group and that he knew our dog had wolf in him. “He is neutered I piped up.” There will not be any more like him. He was a really cute puppy and he was free. “I always thought that the collie in him made him so high strung”? Are you sure? My boyfriend rolled his eyes staring at me, as we have argued for years over Dakota’s genealogical make up and I have always maintained that he was a Collie/shepherd/husky mix. My boyfriend~God bless him after all these years - looked at me, and said the inevitable: “told you so”, "told you he was not a normal dog".

The Santa Barbara Vet went on to say that our dog gets stress colitis very easily when he is not happy and that we need to remain calm around him, and to introduce yogurt and cottage cheese into his diet as a staple and that will help with the dry heaves.

He gave him a shot to get through the funeral, and so that all three of us could make it through the day really.

That was eight years ago now. Shortly after getting home we bought a pair of shears and a muzzle and starting giving him hair cuts to tone down his wild side. I tried to make him into a poodle kind of or “schmoodle” as we affectionately called him and that is also where his other nickname “Fluffy” came from. We bribe him with a hot dog that we feed him through the muzzle while I am giving him his haircut. Sometimes the end result looks like mange. Other times one side of the haircut is shorter than the other side because by the time we get to that point we are both so exhausted by the sheer energy of trying to outsmart that dog. There have been a lot of haircuts as his hair grows unreasonably fast.

As we continued our conversation on the deck staring at him lying there soaking up the sun, we discussed the fact that it is harder for him to walk and we have to lift him into the truck now. The reality that maybe we should consider leaving him home the next camping trip, is on the table.

“Schmoodle” sits up and blinks that slow lazy blink that he does with such attitude, gets up and slowly walks over and down into our “virtual” gravel pond and takes a big poop. I look over at my significant other and say “that’s new” he has never done that before. “That’s not cool Dakota, I bark, “I don’t want you doing your business in there”.

“Schmoodle” turns around and blinks at us again. Then he walks over to the walkway that straddles the pond and with cat like agility jumps up onto the bridge. On the bridge he shakes his fur so that he is as big and fluffy as he can possibly be, blinks at us again as he walks past us on the way back to the driveway, lies back down and closes his eyes.

Who says dogs can’t talk…..


Have a beautiful day,


Photo: PKM

Joy,

Rena

www.talktotheturtle.com

Feng Shui and desk placement

When I want a great smile of a read I visit Heather Armstrong at her blog, dooce.com Heather has the writing prowess of Joan Didion with a really really wonderful sense of humor. Her style of writing is not as wacked as Hunter Thompson but she dives in and out of that hemisphere and I so applaud her unplugged style.

I usually show up at Heather's blog when I am tired and need a head shaking guffaw laughing moment. “The squirrel in the tree”, and well the list is endless as to how she can make a normal day at home read like a episode of Saturday Night Live except you are reading it.

In her latest installment Heather made a new office renovation and it made me start to think about Feng Shui and office workspaces.

I thought it would be of interest to those of you who have wondered about what and how to place your desk for the best optimum Feng Shui experience. I will list both Eastern and Western styles.

Directional Feng Shui is what I am going to start with here. This is not some big secret that you are receiving. I mean really you can read it in just about any book out there on Feng Shui. I am however, sharing and tailoring this set up for office/home work place specifically. This is using Eastern style Feng Shui.

If you want to change your office, if things are not going the way you like try this out for grins.

It is kind of scientific in that you need to do math. Well just a simple add and subtract.
You use your birth year and come up with a single number. Then that number correlates to auspicious directions. There are four to choose from that will be beneficial to you, with one being your very best direction. Then you place your desk with your chair facing that direction. Or to say it another way, if your best direction is North place your chair down and sit facing or looking north. Now add your desk in front of you. I hope that is clear enough for you to understand how to do this.

You take your year of birth to start:

Men and Women are slightly different adding and subtracting: Here goes,

MALE:

Take the last two digits of the Year of Birth and add them until they make a single digit.

Minus the number from 10

Example: Male born 1956
5 + 6 = 11
1 + 1 = 2
10 – 2 = 8
So 8 is the number for that birth year.

** Note: If the total reaches #5, Males assume #2 and Females assume #8.
(I told you it was mathematical…..)

FEMALE:

Take the last two digits of the Year of Birth and add them until they make a single digit.

ADD 5 to the number.

Example: Female born 1956

5 + 6 = 11
1 + 1 = 2
2 + 5 = 7
so, 7 is the number for that birth year for women.

Please Note: February 4th marks the beginning of the Chinese Solar New Year. If your birth date is on January 1 st thru February 3rd then take the previous years directions.

So next I will list the numbers that correspond with direction. So let's say you figured out your number to be (7) like the above example you would go to the list and see the locations that are the best for that number. They will be sorted as A,B,C,D. All the directions listed are good with Letter (A) being the best. A Feng Shui consultant trained in Eastern style Feng Shui would use this information as a guide and work with the aesthetics of the room and see if one of these directions could be worked into the desk placement and overall room design.

Here is the list: again, the # is the single digit you derived, with ABCD best location to look at.

# A B C D
1 SE E S N
2 NE W NW SW
3 S N SE E
4 N S E SE
6 W NE SW NW
7 NW SW NE W
8 SW NW W NE
9 E SE N S

You will need a compass to find these true directions and I guess it is kind of exhausting to go through all this to find out, but it is there for the sharing if you are at all interested.

In Western Style Feng Shui the direction is called a power position and you work the aesthetics into the room by positioning the desk to face the door. That means when you are sitting down you are looking at the door with the desk in front of you. If you cannot face your desk and yourself to look at the door, then a good design/Feng Shui tip is to place a mirror on the wall that you are facing so that you can see who is walking into the room.

That is your desk placement using Western style Feng Shui, to arrive at a pleasant well balanced office space. There is no need to work up the mathematical like the Eastern style I have listed above, and you really use your “intuitive” to feel the space into a balanced and flowing environment. I hope you find enjoyment in all your comings and goings.

Happy Feng Shui trails,



Have a beautiful day,



Photo: "nice view" PKM


Joy,

Rena

www.talktotheturtle.com

Fun sayings, positive affirmations and powerful quotes:

If you have made mistakes . . . there is always another chance for you . . . you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down.”

~Mary Pickford (1893-1979)
American actress



“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.”

~Anna Freud (1895-1982)
Austrian pschonalyst



“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”

~Helen Keller (1880-1968)
American writer



This is one of my favorite positive affirmations statements:

To create your tomorrow, go over your day when you are in bed tonight just before you fall asleep, and feel gratitude for the good moments. If there was something you wanted to happen differently, replay it in your mind the way you wanted it to go. As you fall asleep, say, “I will sleep deeply and wake up full of energy. Tomorrow is going to be the most beautiful day of my life.” Good night!

-Rhonda Byrne
Creator of “The Secret”


Here is an excerpt of Marianne Williamson,
from her book: “ A Woman’s Worth”

Don’t you get it? Can’t you see? As we change our minds, we will change the world. And until we do, we will remain where we are. And all the laws and all the bashing and all the silly, childish, petty political arguments will continue for years, and for more years beyond, until women remember, followed by men, that a woman is a miracle and in her heart lies God. She is here to love God, passionately and truly, and to reveal to all others- men, children, and other women – that God is good and God is here. But we must be good, and we must be here, or our function is denied and the mission is aborted. It’s time to get started. It ‘s time to wake up. Don’t wait another minute. Claim your heart, and claim your glory. You have all you need. The new world will seem like nothing you have seen before. It will shine like you. It will smile like you. It will feel like home.


Have a beautiful day,

Photo: 'nice walk' PKM

Joy,



Rena

www.talktotheturtle.com

The unique gift of Eat, Pray, Love

I have a mirror over top my sink in my kitchen. From time to time I will admittedly use it as a post-it reminder board. One that is a steady visitor has the saying: “Be Realistic ~ Plan for a Miracle”. The other one that has been with me also for a long time is: “Today is the Greatest Day of My Life”. I find the unique gift in both of these post-it note reminders (tattered curled edges and all from the sink's humidity) is they always make me smile. O.K. actually I have quite a few more, like: “There are Angels assigned to listen to every one of our prayers”.

Often I will add “floater” post-it notes: These post-its stay for a few days or weeks. These can be anything from pay a bill to a book. The post-it that has been there for at least a year or longer now is Eat, Pray, Love book to read: that is what the note says, and I have to say that in the end the book was given to me as a gift from a friend who had read it.

I originally heard of the book through an email from a friend who mentioned it when telling me what books she was reading. This has got to be well over a year ago if not more. I saved the thought onto a reminder, because I have such a high level of regard for Hilary Rosenfeld on a professional basis (my friend in the email) who is an East Coast Costume Designer. I thought if Hilary was reading that book then I was going to read it too.

Time passes…..

More time passes….


I am in the local book store last Christmas and they have an assortment of books and collectibles with the signage “The perfect Unique Gift” or something to that effect.
I scanned the table to see what books they were promoting and there low and behold was the book title that had been living on the post-it note mirror over my sink. I picked it up and was reading the front jacket when two extremely well dressed, well groomed young women late twenties most likely, dressed up like they were in their late thirties (they will regret that like the rest of us ) and they were gift shopping like me. One of the two savvy shoppers picked up the book I was holding and this was their discussion: “Giggling” “Oh, that book forget it, just another mid life crisis story of a disgruntled woman”.

I put the book casually down, and picked up “Life with Morley”. It seemed forever in my mind how I was going to walk away from the table; I felt that the book I was waiting to read in my mind without knowing anything in advance about it, was to be likened to something such as Deepak Chopra in nature with spiritual lessons like he so amazingly does, only with Food, Prayer and Love. I honestly was stunned to hear the book I was waiting to read was referred to as a midlife crisis mixed in with a self indulgent, self-discovery of self.

Time passes….

The book I put down is now on the big screen as a Feature Film. Just a few weeks ago I was talking with a girlfriend and told her the story of how I have missed reading this book and she gifted me the book as she has read it. I am always amazed to see the translation from book to film, so I picked the book up to read it and got to page 6, and burst out laughing.

You see on page 6 the Author says that she is thirty-six years old. I flashed back to the two young women, me now giggling that they thought mid life was 36 years old. Then I stopped giggling and thought maybe they were right? So, I googled mid life crisis and after reading two pages on Wikipedia about mid life crisis with everyone from Freud to Betty Crocker giving his or her hypothesis, typically the age for a mid life crisis is 47 years old.

Also, mid life crisis does not exist in Japan or India.

So, that is as far as I have gotten in the book. It seems to be a wonderful read and I thoroughly look forward to get back to it. I thought about those two young women and how grateful I was to be who I was and where I am on my life journey. The power of youth and beauty can be intoxicating but you have to wait for the real inner yearning of self-acceptance to settle in. No matter how hard you try to be forty when you are thirty, it is really the only thing that cannot be hacked like identity fraud. You can look and walk like a person who is self realized but only you know yourself when you are there.

This sums up where I am on my path presently,

I am beautiful, You are beautiful, We are all beautiful.


Have a beautiful day,


Photo: 'passage way' PKM


Joy,

Rena

www.talktotheturtle

Toltec wisdom and inspirational jewelry

I picked up a book I have had years now that is called The Four Agreements and re-read it. It got me thinking-mostly that you cannot be 40 when you are 30 years old. Let me explain myself further. I remember reading this book years ago, and I just could not for the life of me understand it. I mean I read it but it just did not sink in. When I picked up the book to read it this time, I read thru it quickly without stopping and understood every single nuance. I also had a "ah-ha" moment when I understood the value in inspirational jewelry in our day to day comings and goings.

Here is an excerpt from Don Miguel Ruiz book, The Four Agreements:

PRELUDE TO A NEW DREAM

There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself.

In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, “This is what I am. This is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality, that is fantasy; this is possible, that is impossible.”

One single agreement is not such a problem, but we have many agreements that make us suffer, that make us fail in life. If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy.

Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest. Unfortunately, we spend all our personal power first to create all these agreements and then to keep these agreements. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless. We have just enough power to survive each day, because most of it is used to keep the agreements that trap us in the dream of the planet. How can we change the entire dream of our life when we have no power to change even the smallest agreement?

If you can see it is our agreements that rule our lives, and if we don’t like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements. When we are finally ready to change our agreements, there are four very powerful agreements that will help us break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy.

Each time you break an agreement, all the power you used to create it returns to you. If you adopt these four new agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements.

You need a very strong will in order to adopt the Four Agreements but if you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation in your life will be amazing.

~The First Agreement~

~Be Impeccable with Your Word~


The first Agreement is the most important one and also the most difficult one to honor. It is so important that with just this first agreement you will be able to transcend to the level of existence I call Heaven on Earth.

The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. It sounds very simple, but it is very, very powerful. Why your word? Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God. The Gospel of John in the Bible, speaking of the creation of the universe, says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word is God.” Through the word you express your creative power. It is through the word that you manifest everything. Regardless of what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word. What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are, will all be manifested through the word.

The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life. You can speak. What other animal on the planet can speak? The word is the most powerful tool you have as a human; it is the tool of magic.

Pretty lofty reading I will agree, but very thought provoking as to how you can have choices in your life. Well worth the read and $13 it costs for the book.

The Four Agreements : a practical guide to personal freedom /Miguel Ruiz
ISBN 1-878424-31-9


Have a beautiful day,


Photo: 'walk in the trees' PKM


Joy,


Rena

www.talktotheturtle

Charm of The River Runs Through You

Finally some beautiful hot sunny days here in the great Northwest. Some days are sealed forever in my memory of a picture perfect day. The charm of this day revolves around a visit to a mountain fed river that at this time of year is at its deepest four feet. It winds its way thru farmland on the way to the Snoqualmie River which is a huge fat lumbering river waterway in the State of Washington.

Kids and Adults and dogs flock to this river all with the same thing in mind, and that is to cool off. How to do this is mixed. Some people-well actually entire families on their inner tubes-will float down the river and then hike back upstream to where they started.

Others will just float in the water without inner tubes. The shoreline is dotted with people just sitting on their beach chairs right in the water. The rocks on this river are all about a perfect median size of an ostrich egg. These rocks are smooth to the touch, and slippery to the foot in the water.

One of my favorite things to do is to put on my water shoes, and wade out into the swift water and plunk down with a rock in each hand to weight myself down. I find two rocks to brace my feet against and then I sort of float while going nowhere and this feeling of the river energy running through my body is the only way I can best describe it. It feels like the ocean except it is one continuous body current of water that is quite a wonderful experience.

It is on my top ten list of happy experiences in my lifetime. We bring along a cooler with some sandwiches and iced tea and build a pool of rocks to keep the tea cool on the river's edge.

The water at first touch feels quite cold, as it is the season's end of the run off of the Cascade Mountains snow melt. After the first dunking in however, it becomes this dreamy experience of baking on the hot stones by the river's edge and then cooling off in the water where you can see the occasional little fishy cruising by.

The group next to us had a golden retriever to which the family would throw rocks, and Penny the dog would chase out into the water and actually dunk her head down into the water to retrieve the rock.

The water is glistening, and the trees are gently rustling, and I wait all year long for this day of my river healing, as I refer to it. The window is actually a couple of months long but usually with work and my life schedule I get a narrow two-week period and it is usually in August.

Its effect (of sitting in a mountain river) is dreamy and extremely purifying. For days afterward the lasting feeling of actually having all that water moving through you, releases what feels like ions of stuff that I hold onto, is gently moved along, and I let go of it with the grace of this kind mountain river. I am smiling and giggling like a child (along with everybody else) and it is not something I set out to do; the only participation on my part is to enjoy the day, the sun and the water.

To add to this day there was a reported meteor shower at night, and I was really excited because the sky had been so clear that I was looking forward to seeing the awe of the evening heavenly stars. However, I was so happy wasted tired from the day I could barely stay awake till dark. I did though, and went outside onto the deck with my pj's , my hooded robe and my ugg boots to ward off any mosquitoes nipping at my ankles.

I lay down and gazed up at the sky.

There were so many stars out I couldn’t even find the Big Dipper. It was like some sort of rock concert of the heavens and all the stars came out to shine in their glory. I lay there thinking that here I am, human being spirit Rena looking out to a galaxy of stars from my beautiful home planet Earth.

Earlier in the day we were discussing the meteor shower, and I mentioned that shooting stars and meteor showers are one and the same are they not? My reasoning for this is I have always wished on a shooting star? So, I figured if there was going to be a shower of stars I should be able to make a wish on every one I see. Kind of the lotto of star wishing, so to speak.

I thought about this a lot during my time in the river and I thought I would start off with something big like “World Peace” and then with every star work kind of backwards, like a good trending stockmarket, and then throw in a wish for a new car for grins. Why not, I mean there was to be a shower of stars?

So, I am lying there gazing at the heavens and stars and "whoosh” a shooting star happens. It always takes my breath away to see a shooting star and I don’t know why but it has never lost its ability to do that to me. I immediately said, “I wish for World Peace”. I closed my eyes and lay back waiting for the rest of the amazing meteor show to continue.

The next thing I remember is BB touching my arm saying “twinkletoes you have been asleep out here for awhile now, best to come inside to bed”.

I fell asleep, can you believe it? I just couldn’t even keep my eyes open or the energy to stay outside anymore. I got up and went inside.

Over breakfast in the morning, we were talking about the Meteor Shower and BB asked me if I saw any meteors, and I said well yes I did and I only got out my wish for a World of Peace and didn’t get any farther down the wish list. No new car, just World Peace. Then I fell asleep.

This day I have had the honor to experience and write about is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Ann Scott. Mother to Sandie, Jimmy and Johnny, who are my cousins. Their Grandmother was my Grandmothers sister. Barbara was seventy four years young, and was an ordained Minister and I send a prayer of love to the heavens.

My Dad phoned me last week and told me that Barbara had passed away after a lengthy illness. "You know your Mother and Barbara are already off and away on the path to shopping. Those two had a passion for beautiful things, and so no doubt your Mom Elsie was there to greet her".

Have a beautiful day,

Photo: "room with a view" PKM

Joy,


Rena

www.talktotheturtle