Vest: Anthropologie (sold out, similar here) // Top: Old Navy // Skirt: J.Crew Factory // Clutch: Kate Spade // Sunglasses: Karen Walker // Necklace: BaubleBar // Belt: Old Navy // Shoes: old
Things have been pretty quiet on the Cheapishly front for the past month or so, and that’s because I’ve been tethered to my keyboard, working hard to set up this shiny new site. Welcome to Homemade Banana!
When I first started Cheapishly, I was working at an incredibly unfulfilling job for a faceless, unfeeling bank and desperately needed a creative outlet. I’ve always been an avid consumer of fashion literature and passionate finder of deals, so a personal style blog with a focus on bargain hunting made perfect sense at a time when fashion blogging was coming of age. Fast forward a year or two, and I’ve come to realize a couple of things:
1. I feel really uncomfortable with the vanity inherent in the personal style blog. Yes, I love getting dressed in the morning, and yes, I love to share my favorite outfits with friends and family via my blog, but I feel incredibly ill at ease with routinely directing people I know to a website filled with pictures of me posing awkwardly on street corners (or in corn fields, more recently) and little else. Now, this concern won’t stop me from sharing outfit photos altogether because on some level, I just can’t help it, but in an effort to curate a more well-rounded site, this does mean that I’ll be adding a lot more non-style related content to this bad boy. Which brings me to my next point…
2. I really like making things! Whether it’s recreating a $500 designer hat I see at the store and can’t bear to part with or whipping up some spirited (and maybe just a little too sweet, because that’s how I like ’em) cocktails after a particularly long week, I love the gratification that comes with making something altogether new out of distinct, disparate parts. As a kid, I was always making a necklace, designing a bookmark or plotting my poor bookcase’s next paint job; it feels really great to get back to this sense of tangible creativity.
So, whether you’ve found yourself here through an old link from my previous site, or you’re just taking a look for the first time, it’s my hope that you’ll find here a steady stream of beautiful and inspiring things: from the perfect striped t-shirt (see pictures above) to beaded tassel how-tos, tangy quick pickle recipes and commentary on next year’s color forecast. The bottom line? I’ll be posting here a lot more, and about a much broader range of topics, all with the intention of sharing my ideas on how to create beauty around you.
I hope you like what I’ve done with the place!
