TEEPEE

I KNOW: How to Make a TeePee

Here is how

1: Pick a Place

2. Find sticks and stick them in the ground with wet mud and rocks around the bottoms and leather binding the top

3. Buy a cool canvas at the fabric store. Drape it around the sticks and sew it on. Cut any unnecessary pieces of canvas.

 4. Use the left over leather strips to braid it into the front of the teepee and to make closures. Take the stitching out. Tie leather pieces to canvas and to sticks.

 

  

5. Give paint to kids and let them go bananas

           
  6. Sit Under It

      
 7. Be Proud of It

   8. Look cute and love your mom

HEADBOARD and BATHROOM

I KNOW: How to Feng Shui in a small space.

I heard recently that it is bad Feng Shui to sleep without a headboard. Unfortunately, I did not have room for a headboard behind my bed. I was also sick of our bathroom being white so Hugo and I broke out the paints and went to work. Check out our handiwork.

Try it. It's also fun to just give your kid paints and say "go for it."

REIKI

I KNOW:  That I am in love with Reiki. 

Reiki healing is a form of energy work in which the practitioner lays hands on the recipient, bringing healing energy to different parts of the body, mind, and spirit in order to remove blockages, open channels and return people to a general state of health and well-being.

I have always had an interest in the healing arts, in the way that I love to get healed. I love acupuncture, and Reiki, and homeopathy, zero-balancing and cranial sacral among others. I love learning about new ways to get healed and passing them on to other peeps in need of healing. Healers always told me things like, "you will be a healer some day" and "someday crystals will find you" and I never believed them. I never even believed, wholeheartedly, and without any skepticism, in all of the healing treatments that I was having done, until now.

In January of 2012 I went to see a psychic medium named Gemma Deller and my life changed. I had been in a state of confusion and didn't know which direction to go. My life was spinning around me. Too many things were happening and not happening to me and I couldn't decide where to set myself up or where to put my energy. Gemma explained to me that I was going in the right direction already. She gave me pointers on how to stream line, and different signs to look for but mostly not to worry. She said, I needed to enjoy the journey and stop trying to get "there." She connected with my dead father and the universe, and showed me how I can do the same for myself every day. She told me pages and pages of amazing things that have all come true.

After I went to see her, I wanted to tell all of my homies all about it because I was pumped up with excitement, tears, and a new vision of my future. I met up with my friend Jessica who was with her friend Malin and I was so annoyed because I wanted Jessica all to myself so I could talk about myself and my new direction(s)! But I was too excited and I met her and her friend Malin Landaeus and just talked about myself anyway. It turned out that Malin is a Reiki Master and she and I clicked. At one point shee started telling me about her Reiki class that was coming up. I told her that I was interested in taking it, but in the back of my mind when I said that I thought "it's never going to really happen" like most things in a busy freelance single moms life. But it did happen.


For the next two weeks Malin did not let me off the hook. She made sure that I could take the class by working around my schedule, offering me a payment plan and insisting that I could/ should do it. A few weeks later Malin told me that the night we met she didn't want to meet me either. She also just wanted to talk to Jessica. Funny how the Universe works. 


I am so eternally happy that I did meet her though for a million reasons. I will tell you a few and then I will stop gushing about my new found love for Reiki.
1) I believe in almost everything now. My skepticism is fading.
2) I can actually, literally, feel healing energy
3) I am a thousand times more "in my body" than I can ever remember being.
September of last year I went to a spa with my mother in Mexico. I had just finished 3 years of non stop work and it was her present to me to relax and get back to myself. It was so amazing to try all of the classes and eat healthy food and have massages and be in such a special place and also spend quality time with my mother. I remember saying to her while we were there, "Mom, I wish I had something like this that I could give to people. I wish I had a talent or a trade that was like a gift and it would help people." I have it now. It's Reiki.


I also made a vision board last year and the first line of it is 
"This is the Year. The Perfect balance of Serenity, Service, and style." I remember putting it up there and saying to my friends who were at the vision board get-together that I wanted to figure out a service that I could give... Now I have that. It's Reiki.


I can also heal myself with Reiki. Every day I give myself some. I give it to my friends, to my family, to strangers. My son Hugo does his own version that he calls "Spritual Video Games." 
I actually feel it working. I feel those blocks leaving me. I feel my connection to everyone and everything, and I believe in it. 
So now I am getting closer to what I want. I am going to say what that is because I believe in it now and that it, and everything else is possible.
I want to have a full,fun money making career for a while in styling. I am going to work hard and make great money and get great new clients and keep the same old ones too.  At the same time I am going to keep doing Reiki and practicing it and learning it along with other healing arts. I am going to gather a strong client base of people to style who are interested in furthering themselves, people who want to go deeper and also work on themselves. I can style them and give them Reiki.

And at the same time I am going to work on my TV show, but that is another blog post for another time...
For now I feel a lot of hope for the future. I guess that is what happens when you fall in love.




 

ROYAL JELLY HARLEM

I KNOW: I love an African Print

I worked on a shoot last week for Royal Jelly Harlem. RJH is an  amazing clothing/home furnishings, accessories line designed and built by incredible mother daughter duo Maya Gorgoni and Teta (aka "MOM") Originally we were going to shoot a lookbook for these ladies, but after meeting with them and seeing their natural beauty, dynamism and gorgeous loft in Soho, we decided to do a lifestyle story about them and their line. The clothes just looked so great on them! Here are some pics from this story. We will also shoot a lookbook for them when they get back from their trunk show in Paris!
www.royaljellyharlem.com

 

MERMAIDS

I KNOW: That I love jewelry

I few months ago my friend Isa showed me pictures of her beautiful, funny, intelligent aspiring model and daughter Julia.  I immediately wanted to have her model in a shoot and had so many ideas. One of the cool things about Julia is that she dyes her hair blue, so I wanted it to be a shoot where that aspect was highlighted. I was talking about it to my friend Caroline one evening and she had the brilliant idea of a mermaid story. I then remembered a whole bunch of jewelry artists that I wanted to shoot that were extremely "Mermaidy" in the sense that the pieces were either made from or inspired by nature or organic geometric shapes. My friend and photographer Erin Patrice O'brien had the idea to shoot it for a beauty magazine that she works with sometimes called "Your Beauty Industry." 

Some inspiration

For hair we wanted to do some jewelry in the hair and make it gorgeous, but messy and also have some braids. I'm really into braids right now.

  
For makeup originally we had wanted a clean clear look, but then as the shoot progressed on the actual day, as you will see, we got really creative. We decided to get another model and I went hunting for my favorite jewels and mermaid clothes. Here are some samples (All credits and websites at the bottom of blog post):

Alex Streeter

Flotsam and Jetsam

Erika Dray

Hilary Park

Emily Miranda Studio

Perry Gargano

I picked up clothes from some of my favorites, Zero and Maria Cornejo, Marc Jacobs, Mara Hoffman, Mandarin and General, Artists and Revolutionaries. (Credits and websites at bottom of blog post. Here are some of the pics from the shoot. These are just snapshots. When the mag comes out I will re-post. 

Photographer: Erin Patrice O'brien
Hair: Christina Mirabella
Makeup: Debra Macki
Stylist: Stella Metzner
Jewelry: Alex Streeter, All For The Mountain, ARENAgal, Erika Dray, Emily Miranda Studio, Flotsam and Jetsam, Hilary Park, Lisa Levine, Perry Gargano, SonicRibbon.
Clothes: Artists and Revolutionaries, Mandarin and General, Mara Hoffman, Marc Jacobs, Zero and Maria Cornejo.