Tea time at Tiffany's

First post of 2016 whoo! One of my (many) new year's resolutions is to try to be more consistent with my photoshooting and blog-posting, so I set a small goal of at least 1 post per month.
As you can see, I'm barely managing to scrape by with January's post -- but hey! I still made it :)

I've always liked the vintage look and the idea behind this photoshoot is something I've been planning for a long long time.  However, I was missing some key pieces until not too long ago.  I'll speak to them some more in a bit, let's jump straight to the photos, shall we?

time for my close-up

I picked up this LBD last year during one of Zara's season-changing sales.  I consider it a big win and anyone who has seen the state of Zara during one of their sales knows exactly what I mean (that place is a hot mess). Sadly, I never found the right time/place to wear it and it sat in my closet for a whole year! The cute half-capped sleeves, gathered waist, and pleated skirt make this dress super girly and flirty.  If you can't tell, I'm trying my absolute hardest to be extra lady-like.

My accessories in the shoot include small pearl studs and a layered pearl necklace from Forever21, and arrow ring and bow earrings with pearl backs from Kate Spade.  My scrunchie is real vintage aka. from my mom :)   Fun fact about the scrunchie: when I started shooting, my mom was downstairs wearing her scrunchie while vacuuming.  She came in halfway through these photos and said, "you should wear my scrunchie" (I have shoulder-length hair nowadays so my bun's pretty sad looking) and so I did and it looked a million times better.  And of course that meant I had to re-shoot pretty much all the shots, now with scrunchie!  Ah, the pursuit of perfection.

pinky up!

Aside from my Burberry sunglasses, the remaining props are all real vintage pieces that I picked up at the Ottawa Vintage Clothing Show back in November.  I have pretty teeny hands (and feet) so trying to buy gloves (and shoes) is usually pretty frustrating.  So I was beyond ecstatic when I found these black vintage gloves that fit me perfectly! The patent purse with the pearl handle was an amazing steal ($14) as were my freshwater pearl bracelet ($7) and mechanical Bulova watch ($20).

These photos were all taken in my mom's bedroom at the Kingston house, and so I had to strategically hide all the bedroom furniture and random things scattered about out of frame -- including doorknobs on the closet door behind me!  Luckily, I found a decent angle from my very professional and elaborate set up aka. 2 tissue boxes stacked on top of my luggage case.  A bit on editing the photos, I originally contemplated shooting in B&W, it didn't come out nicely (my face looked too ashy in my opinion) so I decided on a vintage treatment/filter instead.

So what took me so long to get to this photoshoot?  Well, I had the dress and the idea (inspired by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's) but no other props.  I already had some of the pearl accessories on hand because I like pearls but that was it.  Then a few months ago, I found my incredibly affordable elephant teapot at a kitchen supplies store in Ottawa called Ma Cuisine, and I knew right away it had to be a prop in the shoot.  The pieces were slowly coming together and I thought a tea party theme would be perfect because 1) who doesn't like tea parties? (no politically related answers here please) and 2) I wasn't looking to replicate the iconic scenes from the movie, but rather just take the inspiration and create my own images. Unfortunately, I struggled for longer than I had hoped to find a teacup/saucer set that gave me the same "love-at-first-sight" feeling, and I refused to settle for anything less than exactly what I wanted (more on the pursuit of perfection).  I absolutely adore scallops so when I finally saw this set at Winners/Homesense after countless hours of fruitless searching, it was totally a birds-singing, clouds-parting, Hallelujah-chorus-echoing-throughout-the-land moment.

teapot and teacup

appreciation for my vintage finds

I hope you enjoyed these photos!  Fair warning, my vintage kick is far from over.  I'm already counting down the days until the next Vintage Clothing Show (April 10th!) and you should expect to see more vintage styles in February's post as well!

Thanks for reading!



BONUS PHOTOS:

I want to take the time to give a big shout-out to my mom.  In addition to giving me her scrunchie and helping set off the self-timer on my camera (so I don't have to run back and forth), she also takes these behind-the-scenes shots which would be very difficult for me to try to manage on my own.

yes, I always get this dressed up to take photos :P

She also visited me in Ottawa two weeks ago and snapped up some Instagram-worthy photos of my outfit of that day (#ootd).  I don't usually feel like posing for photos when I'm nearly freezing my butt off so major thanks to mom for insisting on these :)