Hot Hot Hot Hot

Lately I've had the pleasure of doing wardrobe styling for some commercial work. The most recent one I did was for Hot Pockets featuring the very very funny Toby Turner.

Although they are always a pretty fun experience, I especially enjoyed working on this one. Not only did I get to put together outfits for a luchador and a rodeo cowboy, but I spent some quality time with a blow torch burning holes in a silk shirt to simulate an explosion. So, that's my idea of fun anyways.

We shot this commercial at a lovely house on a sunny day, and Toby had the entire crew in tears with his improvisation. Check out his YouTube channel here for some more funnies.

alright, later kittens!-Misty

UNIQUE LA

Holy cow, I have been sewing non-stop for 3 weeks straight. It's so satisfying to finish a garment and hang it on the rack next to it's color coordinated sisters. Even more satisfying is carefully packaging it up, tying it up with a bow, and shipping it out to some eagerly awaiting fashionista in an exotic locale like Moscow or Spain. I hope it becomes their new favorite dress, and I wish wish wish they would all send me pictures!

Last week I sent out a shipment to a lovely new boutique in Chicago named Milk Handmade. While maybe not exotic per say, Chicago does happen to one of my favorite cities in the US so I am super happy to have Mena available in the windy city. Chicago friends, go check it out for me! :-)

The rest of the garments created on this most recent sewing spree are all for this weekends big show: Unique LA. If you've ever wanted to own a mena item but were worried about ordering online without trying it on, nows your chance! I have sizes from extra small to large, AND I have a dressing room. AND there are free drinks. AND besides myself there are over 300 amazing artists and indie designers setting up shop who are are local-made-in-the-USA.  Tickets are $10 each but I have two to give away. If you want one leave a comment!

Please excuse the instagram photos again, but it's difficult to find the nice camera under all these fabric scraps:

Along with most of the items I've shown here in the past I'll have a selection of brand new things that I havent had a chance to blog about.

Every gal needs a neon lace top right?

Unfortunately those are all the pics I took and all the garments are hung up at the show waiting for the doors to open tomorrow, But I swear there are tons more.

Meanwhile the house is started to get buried under rapidly growing piles of fabric scraps:

I hope to see all your beautiful faces this weekend!

Ooh ooh ooh, Caine and his arcade are going to be there as well. If you havent seen that video yet I suggest you do.

Toodles kittens,

-MISTY

It's my party

My birthday happened. I threw a party. It was a rooftop garden brunch complete with free massages, a mani/pedi station, mimosas and a bloody mary bar.  Hours before the event I was having a pre-party meltdown(!!!!) on the rooftop when a hummingbird zoomed by, it's iridescent green feathers sparkling in the sunlight. It caught me off guard, mid-tantrum. I guess it got the flier about the brunch, because it immediately started snacking on the nectar of my freshly planted flowers. Sure, it was a few hours early, but hummingbirds dont need to be fashionably late to look cool. I decided that if my little bourgeois-ghetto rooftop garden is good enough for the hummingbirds, its good enough for me and my guests. That's when I decided to take a xanax chill out; que sera sera. 

I decorated the house and the stairway up to the roof with some crepe paper flowers i made.  I do apologize for the cat photo but they are the stars of the interwebs; everyone knows that. 

If you want to make your own crepe paper flowers, the DIY i followed is right here.  I'm also willing to sell mine for $300 dollars a piece which is a bargain. Seriously, they took so much longer to make than I thought they would. 

To round out the whole flower theme I made some party hats with the leftover crepe paper scraps. I found some inexpensive headbands and sort of followed this easy DIY. The paper I used was much thicker than the paper they used, but I think they turned out lovely.

It helps to have gorgeous friends.

From the looks of it, there were no men at this party, nor was I wearing anything but my party hat and a necklace. That is entirely not true. There were plenty of fellows, and I love fashion too much to show up nude to my own party. I save that for the after-party.

I'd like to end this post by showing you where it all began:

This is the truly awesome flier that my boyfriend made for me. The ram made from flowers is by artist Kristi Malakoff. I absolutely love her work, check it out.

It turned out to be a fantastic birthday, and in all honesty, constructing all of the flowers in the weeks before was (almost) just as fun.

XO-Misty

Protein packed Goji Sugar Bombs and a week in review

Here's what I've been working on this week:

left to right: 1~new dress in the works/2~gardening/3~asparagus gouda galette/4~mena gift certificates

Here's what I've been thinking about this week:

Dear food bloggers,

Stop putting beans in cake. I don't want kale in my ice cream, and if I ever see brown sugar quinoa cupcakes with spirulina merengue I'm staging an all out revolt with Paula Deen as my Joan of Arc. I'm even wary of flax seed, but I'm gonna let that one slide, hippies.

The fact that you can not taste a certain ingredient should not be its selling point. Just because soylent green doesn’t taste like people does not mean I want it in my smoothies. If you are going to add a savory or unique ingredient to your bundt cake, you better fucking feature it not hide its flavor like a low budget masquerade ball. 

NEWS FLASH!!! Cake is dessert, whether you add a can of kidney beans or not. Eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner if you will, but don’t delude yourself, it’s still just a mountain of sugar making love to that dirty gigolo known as carbs. You can break it in chunks and douse it in kombucha, or roll it up in a slice of low sodium nori. That doesn't prove that you're healthy, that just proves that you have an eating disorder. 

Fat free does not mean guilt free. OMG are people still on the fat free diet? How quaint. 

I know you want to stay skinny. So do I. It's called moderation. Get with it. One chewy buttery sweet chocolate chip cookie made the way the gods intended is more satisfying than 10 protein packed tofu chard eclairs. I would even go so far as to say 10,000 tofu chard eclairs, but I don’t want to seem sensationalistic when this is a true crisis crippling the nation. 


If you want to eat cake, eat cake. If you want to eat something healthy, full of fiber, nutrients and anti-oxidants you can start by not eating cake.
 

keep in mind that I had an earlybird gin and tonic at 7am this morning, so clearly I’m no nutritionist.

I’m going to leave you with this simple recipe for brownies. We’ve been making this recipe in my family for years. It has no healthy pretense, added fiber or omega 3’s. You will not find any trendy superfoods in its ingredient list. The gluten content is out of control. It’s a crowd pleaser, so for godsake make it for a crowd. If you end up eating the whole tray; (wo)man up and take some responsibility for your actions.

See you allz at the gym.

Fudgey Brownies

3/4 cup cocoa

1/2 tsp. baking soda

2/3 cup oil

1/2 cup boiling water

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 1/3 cup flour

1 tsp. vanilla

1/4 tsp. salt

Stir together cocoa and soda. Blend in oil. Add boiling water. Stir until thickened. Science rocks. Stir in sugar and egg until smooth. Add flour, vanilla and salt. Blend completely. 

Bake in lightly greased 13X9 inch pan. Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes. Let cool and dust it with powdered sugar. 

In Wonderland

Woman Leaving the PsychoAnalysts Office, Remedios Varo

I need to trasport my studio to a dark and quiet cave with no internet connection. Maybe I shouldn't even take a computer, just a rusty old typewriter that's missing a few keys. Then and maybe then I could focus and formulate one single complete thought. I'm in the middle of ten different projects right now, and instead of finishing them off one by one, I'm constantly trolling the horizon for a new one to start.

Saturday night a few lady friends and I went to a lovely exhibit at the LACMA. It was called In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. I didn't know much about the artists other than Frida Kahlo and I was so pleased to leave the museum with a few new favorites. The majority of the work was dated between 1931-1968. Much of the work was self-referential with portraits and studies relating to the struggle between traditional and rapidly changing gender roles, or commenting on the one-dimensional portrayal of women by their male colleagues in the art world.

Family Portrait by Dorothea Tanning

We left the exhibit thoughtful, thankful and inspired. Inspired to make a self portrait, that is. Which is perfect. I was looking for a new project to start anyways.

Here are a few of my other favorites from the show:

Creation of the Birds, Remedios Varo

Mimesis, Remedios Varo

Self Portrait, Rosa Rolanda

Double Portrait of the Artist in Time, Helen Lundeberg

Birthday, Dorothea Tanning

The Seven Spectral Perils~ Fifth Peril, Dorothea Tanning

The Exhibit ends May 8th, so get on it.

Mena Paper Dolls: Garden Party Essentials

I spent last week in illustrator making flat sketches of my entire collection. Often times the finished collection looks a little different from the sketches you started with, so once the collection is finalized and the samples approved they need to be revised in detail. That means every topstitch, rivet, zipper, etc. needs to be drawn and accounted for.  These technical sketches then go to the production company along with a very detailed packet explaining the construction of the garment. This is what we in the "biz" call a tech pack. Since I am my own production company, when I'm done I take them from one side of my desk and place them on the other side.  I'll use them mainly for quality control purposes, and to add to my lil portfolio.

Whenever I'm working on flats I'm always reminded how closely they resemble paper dolls. They're just so darn cute all lined up together with teeny tiny zippers and perfectly rendered topstitching... 

So. Naturally I had to turn them in to paper dolls for realz.



 It's been awhile since I've played around with markers. Half of them are all dried out, but it was fun anyways and now I want to do the whole collection as paper dolls.

I could make paper dolls for a living. I'm easy.
Thanks for indulging me.
-Misty

In Your Dreams.

Last night I dreamt that I rearranged the furniture. Actual real furniture that I own, not dreamland furniture where the chairs are made of fluffy pink cotton candy and the armoire opens to reveal a tangle of slithering snakes. I've had that dream before. This wasn't that. This dream was all about organization. In fact, if I HAD found a mass of reptiles in the dresser while dream-cleaning I would've immediately gone to work sorting and organizing; categorizing them by color with subcategories of length, scale size, and venom.

 In this dream not only did I artfully arrange and make over the entire 3rd floor without spending a dime, but I carried all the furniture upstairs and/or downstairs by myself without breaking a sweat. I was like a cross between Wonder Woman and Martha Stewart. Super strength in a wrinkle free pantsuit.

What it comes down to is that there aren't enough hours in the day. I can't even chill out in my dreams.

 Every single day includes some combination if not all of these tasks: make a new collection, fill orders, work on freelance projects, look for new freelance projects, write blog posts, take photos, stress about money, promote my business, clean the house, home improvements, be a good friend/lover/room mate....yadda yadda yadda...

Like a snarl of mismatched snakes our days can all be a little overwhelming; but just know that your brain is working shit out behind the scenes while your body rests. Now THAT is multi-tasking.

skirt by Mena (15%off at checkout with coupon code wearmena15)
bodysuit by american apparel
shoes 
necklace by Armani Exchange

So tonight I hope to dream-talk Anna Wintour into doing an editorial in Vogue featuring Mena. Then I'll put a couple of protective coats of polyurethane on the cotton candy chair, just for fun; but in the meantime I'm going downstairs to see if one of the boys are home. I have a great idea on how to make my studio more feng shui but I need some muscle to move this leaden desk, and lord knows I don't want to wrinkle my dress. 

Wrinkle free pantsuit? Dream on.