Dress Of The Day with Angela

  Photos from Wikipedia and Wiki Commons articles on Holi. March Mid-March (variable date) Hindu Holi Festival of Spring/Colours/Love. Also celebrated by Indians, Nepalese, some Sikhs and some Buddhists and Indian communities and their friends worldwide. Celebrated with colours from paints or coloured powders on skin and old clothes. Traditionally, and preferably for those on the modern health-conscious trend, from flowers and herbs. These natural remedies which were originally thought to prevent or alleviate illnesses during the changing weather.  Some schools ask parents to send children to school in old clothes which the parents don't mind getting stained with colours. Useful Websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi

I was giving a speech about St Patrick's Day at a Toastmasters International speakers' training club. The previous speaker was evaluated. The evaluator complimented the speaker on being dressed appropriately to match the speech subject.   Oops. I need a suitable hat or scarf to go with my speech. I looked at the outfits online. Not just free tee-shirts. Most of the people worthy of being photographed were wearing high hats, like leprechauns.   How to make a hat? I could take a baseball hat and cover it in green fabric. No green fabric? I could print green and fold the paper. How to fold it? Use the baseball hat as the base, with green paper over the brim and crown. The crown was the wrong shape. I could make a cake shape, circular with a flat top.  I looked at my hats and my eyes discovered my happy birthday Daiso mini hat.  Angela Lansbury in Daiso Happy Birthday hat. Selfie. Much easier to cover in a hurry. I didn't even need fabric. A couple of pieces of gree...

  I was wearing a loose caftan. My Singaporean friend had said disparagingly, "Caftans are just for round the house. Nobody wears them out to the office or even for shopping. You look like you forgot to dress. They are house coats." Goodness, how things have changed in two years. Now everybody is working from home. They have their camera off because they are lolling around in shorts, pyjamas, who knows what.   I was on Zoom in a speech contest in London.  The President of my club was complimented on his smart outfit. He said, " I am dressed up because Angela told me I should dress to impress".  Yes, I had told him, "The club president should dress up to set the tone, and show he is president."  I meant wear a shirt and tie with a jacket. Not just a polo shirt with a jacket. Still, it was better than a tee-shirt. I remembered when a UK colleague who had gone to live in notoriously countrified New Zealand, returned to the dressy city centre of Singapore. On ...

 My Singaporean friend Yenny was wearing a wonderful red dress.  She said, "It's loose and comfortable and never creases." I commented, "It's what we call broderie Anglaise, in England, usually sold white. The words are French for English embroidery. The fabric used to be cheap, folksy. But then it got hard to find and fashionable and expensive. Maybe it's getting easy to find and affordable again. Where did you get it?" Yenny replied: "I bought it in Thailand. There's lots of it there. They call it eyelet." Red eyelet dress from Shein 28 Singapore dollars. It is 65% polyester, 35% cotton. (Non-stretch.) You have to click on the word description to find out the fabric. You can read reviews.  On ebay I found this: Useful Websites Background information and a couple of photos in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broderie_anglaise Lots more photos in Wikimedia If you associate white broderie Anglaise (called whitework) with clothes which are old-f...

Selfie of Angela Lansbury with birthday flowers. Flowers with two Ferrero chocolates on sticks, Ferrero chocolate box, and baloon with the words Happy Birthday, Delivered by Flower Chimp of Singapore. Selfie by Angela Lansbury.  The hat from Daiso is in silver with the words Happy Birthday. The label says Mini Birthday hat. Sparkling with elastic. Made in China. I took a selfie and the words Happy Birthday appeared reversed. I was able to reverse the photo right to left using the edit function on my Samsung mobile phone.  I took another photo and the reverse left to right function had disappeared I must have had the hat lying around for some time. The elastic has gone too stretched so the hat keeps slipping sideways. I could shorten the elastic, change the elastic, or add two ribbons and tie it under my chin at the front or under my hair at the back. I tied a knot in the elastic to shorten it and that did the trick. The family had asked me" What do you want for your birthday?...

  I was thinking that what I really needed for my birthday was not more clothes but more drawer organizers.  Commercial Drawer Dividers I used to have drawer organizers which I bought in the USA. They were in the top drawer of my bedside cabinet. They consisted of strips of thick card, with half height slits at intervals. You interlaced the verticals and horizontals to make a checkerboard grid. This had two problems. The spaces were small, suitable for hair clips but not larger items. I did not think of using only every other slat, and then having larger compartments and enough dividers for two drawers. Because there was no base, small items kept sliding underneath. As a result, the dividing strips bent out of shape. Eventually they became a nuisance. I threw them away. I rescued them, folded them flat, and pushed them under the bed. I don't know where they are now. Meanwhile, what can I do to copy the idea of dividing up drawers with thick card? I was thinking, a shoe box wou...

  The saying goes, if you've got it, flaunt it. See later post on using trophies as props. We took these out of the glass fronted cabinet because light was reflecting on the glass. These large trophies belong to Braddell Heights Advanced Club. They were donated to the club by winners who have no room for the trophies at home or would rather have them displayed in a public place. Angela's trophies displayed at home in Singapore 2022. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright. I have other trophies in the UK. I gathered the trophies together at the request of club President Sdddiq who wanted records of the latest trophies to put on the club website on Facebook. 

  The bright lights were a photo opportunity and created a halo effect on my blonde hair. Lights are excellent if you are wearing sequins. I went out for the evening wearing a sequinned scarf. 

  Green is the colour for St Patrick's day. You can buy outfits with leprechauns. Tee-shirts with assorted designs.  Or make your own green outfits and ear-rings. I have described making ear-rings or buying applique fabric in another post.  I am wearing a green silk top. You can buy a simple green silk tank top, a sleeveless straight top, from ebay for under ten pounds. Amazon has lots of leprechaun and other seasonal tee-shirts. So does lazada. singapore Useful Websites https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=leprechaun+tshirt https://www.leprechaunmuseum.ie/

  The ear-rings were created from a set of three satin circles with a ribbon attached. the colours were red, yellow and green. I now realise that you can create effective ear rings from any circle of attractive material. Attach the fabric to your existing ear rings, whether clip on or the hook style, using a narrow matching or contrasting ribbon. You could also make a look like the ones on a mask, or attach the dangling ear-rings to a mask. The DIY fabric ear-rings if not secure might drop off in the dirt if you were out in public. But when you are sitting around at home in a Zoom meeting, they can enhance your appearance when talking or in a photo. 

Photo by Angela Lansbury.  I bought sandals with a green pattern like a shamrock ready for St Patrick's day. The brand, according to what is stamped on the shoes and typed onto the label is AvvaRa. The R is reversed like Toys R us. Unfortunately I have not yet found how to produce this reversed letter. I looked up AvvaRa. I found that they have a Facebook page. However, they appear to be selling wholesale to shops or suppliers and not selling or showing their full range online. I bought my sandals in Sunshine grocery store in Cashew Heights Condo, Singapore.  I bought the sandals in size 4. I buy boots in size five, and can wear socks to pad them out to the right size. I prefer adjustable shoes as my feet swell up in the heat and then shrink in cold weather or air conditioning. However, you need to buy toe-post shoes smaller. Too large and you are gripping them and getting hammer toes.  Or the sandals slip off. You fall. Or risk falling. Inconvenient. Unnerving. Inelegant...

 March 1st every year is St David's Day in Wales. Not yet a national holiday but lots of people voted for it to be a national holiday, even if they had to sacrifice a different day to replace it by St David's Day. The colour is yellow, for the yellow of the Daffodil.  However, the flag of Wales is green, and white with a red dragon.  This was the flag of the first Tudor King, Henry VII, who preceded the more famous Henry VIII of the 6 wives. I wore yellow, green, white and red, mostly yellow and green. I hunted all over the web for yellow, then decided to check my own wardrobe.  Yellow Wrap 'Dress' I had a yellow wrap dressing gown. I never wear it because it is too long. Time to stop leaving it hanging up doing nothing. Time to start thinking, live every day as if it were your last.  I am also getting more ruthless about taking out the scissors and altering clothes to fit whatever my size is now. I could not go out in the garment. It would get dirty, and trip m...