As of Friday, Sept. 30, 2011, I have retired from being a fashion writer… On College Candy that is.

Since May 2009, when my first fashion column, Fashion Porn, launched on the website, I have been constantly writing about fashion. In the past two years I have written over 100 FP columns alone. So, it’s time for a break. I’ve loved being able to share my thoughts on fashion with the readers of CC, but I’ve started to run out of things to write about. I’m coming close to graduating from university (May 2012, fingers crossed!) and writing about university fashion does get to be a little monotonous. After all, only so many people will side with my belief that you should never, EVER, wear sweats or pajamas to class.

So, rather than make you wade through the depths of my writer profile on CC, I’ve decided to post links to some of my favourite fashion posts. Enjoy!

• Spring 2010 Fashion Week All-Stars
• Golden Globe Fashion: Our Fave Bits and Pieces
• Campus Couture: Taylor, Ryerson (reposted on Glamour.com)
• A College Candy Tribute to Alexander McQueen
• Fall 2010 Fashion Week All-Stars
• Fashion: When to Spend and When to Save
• Take Off Your Clothes With the S.W.A.P. Team
• Fashion Porn: Doin’ it out West
• Spring 2011 Fashion Week All-Stars
• Shop Your Closet: Shorts
• Fashion Porn: Gettin’ It On at the Zoo
• Shop Your Closet: Leather Skirt 
• What to Wear to your Winter Internship
• Shop Your Closet: Plaid Shirt
• Fashion Porn: Put a Bow on it 
• Shop Your Closet: Boyfriend Jeans
• Budget Stylista – Dressing up Sportswear

I’m in Ghana until the beginning of August and will not be posting on this blog regularly. If you want to read about my travels check out Leah Goes to Ghana to read about my adventures.

Man's Cloth - El Anatsui (Wikimedia)

“When I last wrote to you about Africa,” an exhibit by Ghanian artist El Anatsui is showing at the Royal Ontario Museum until Feb. 27, 2011. The collection is a career retrospective, showing different mediums and techniques used by the world-renowned artist over the years.

While fashion is often inspired by works of art, many pieces in Anatsui’s collection were inspired by textiles and clothing. The “Wonder Masquerade,” a wood sculpture from 1990, was designed to look like an actual masquerade costume. The Winneba masquerade (otherwise known as the Fancy Dress masquerade) is a tradition of the Fante people in Ghana; males dress up, don masks and perform at Easter, Christmas and the New Year.

Anatsui uses colour, form and pattern to evoke themes in African history. Adinkra, traditional symbols of the Akan people, appear throughout his work. In the neighbouring exhibit, “Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashion and textiles, 18th-21st centuries,” I learned the adinkra symbols have historical, allegorical or magical meaning. They also appear in handmade ceremonial cloth. One of Ghana’s premiere fashion designers, Kofi Ansah, has also used the symbols in his designs.

Though Anatsui created these pieces over the last 40 years, using several different mediums, there is still cohesion between his pieces. He has signature colours: green, orange and blue appear in his paintings as well as his metal pieces. There are also similar shapes and patterns throughout. Much a fashion designer, Anatsui has his signature touches throughout his life’s work.

Liquor bottle caps in metal tapestry (Flickr)

One of my favourite pieces is “Open(ing) Market,” a collection of painted tin boxes with product labels inside. This installation demonstrates the emergence of local and global African markets. Anatsui’s art speaks to historical issues. The use of nails in a series of wooden sculptures symbolizes the use of guns during the Danish slave trade. In his metal tapestries, the use of bottle tops from liquor, is symbolic of the commodity brought to trade when colonial powers came to Africa.

Anatusi’s work is both beautiful and compelling. The underlying historical narrative in his pieces and the use of traditional symbols drew me to the collection, as I am working in Ghana this summer. He uses found objects; altered to fit in with a piece. The metal tapestries have an architectural structure; the waves like a tapestry moving with a breeze, drawing the eye into blocks of colour or patterns.

After closing at the ROM, “When I last wrote to you about Africa,” moves to the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. The Toronto showing is the world premiere of the exhibition.

(This is a repost of an assignment from my fashion journalism class.)

Photo Credit

Originally I was going to do a recap of 2010, but never got around to it. I decided for my birthday post to recap what has happened in the last year, from my birthday, Jan. 22. Last year I turned 21. To wrap up the past year I am presenting some of the highlights from the last year. The events are in a somewhat chronological order.

1. I got my first tattoo in February, as a belated birthday present to myself. I chose a portion of Kurt Halsey’s “Words,” which I got tattooed on my right ribs. My tattoo is the three fireflies, a few stars, and the line “the stars are the constant.”
2. Went to New York City by myself in April. Stayed in a hostel on the Upper West side for six nights. Highlights of my trip include museum hopping, cherry blossoms in Central Park, the Zac Posen for Target launch party & seeing The Like, watching Avenue Q and lots of shopping.
3. Had tea at the Lake Agnes Tea House at Lake Louise with my parents. My mom “ordered” the perfect day, and we enjoyed tea, soup and cookies on the corner of the patio. Prime real estate.
4. Saw Stars and OK Go while in Calgary. Went to Folk Festival for the first time for Stars, and braved the rain to see OK Go at the Coca Cola stage at Stampede. I also went to go see Wicked in the fall, as well as Motion City Soundtrack and Say Anything.
5. Family wedding! My cousin Courtney got married during the September long weekend in Ottawa. All the cousins were together for only the third time ever, and we tore up the dance floor.
6. Reconnecting with old friends from my time in Ottawa. In the last year I’ve spent time with three of my friends from my time at Carleton. I met up with my friend Chelsey when I was in Montreal, and we had not seen each other since the end of first year.
7. Visiting Montreal! It’s been on my list of cities to visit since I moved to Ontario. Prior to my October visit, I had only spent time in the train station here. As I was in a conference for much of the weekend I didn’t get to see much, but I did see a bit. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to really check out the city sometime.
8. Cousin reconnection! The day after I got back from Montreal my cousin Eddy who lives in Australia stopped by for a quick visit. She’s from New Zealand, and had not been in Canada since I was in grade three. We had just over a day together, so I took her to see a couple parts of the city.
9. Speers cousin bonding. I went down to London again for Thanksgiving this year, to spend the weekend with my cousins. Five of us cooked a pescetarian Thanksgiving Dinner, and had a lot of laughs. We decided to plan a cousin’s weekend for the start of January, though there was only four of us, we managed to have a blast bar-hopping and rating wines (details of our wine game to come!) in my neighbourhood.
10. jhr – I’ve been involved with Journalists for Human Rights since first-year university, but this year has been my most active. At the start of March I worked to organize a fundraiser, and then attended jhr’s Nights for Rights at the end of the month. I attended my second Train the Trainer in Montreal. I applied, and got chosen for the upcoming summer’s Ghana internship! Last but not least, I was the Editor-in-Chief for this year’s issue of Speak magazine which is coming out in a few weeks!

Photo Credit

I’m really looking forward to the coming year. The last year was so amazing, and I have lots of new adventures planned for the upcoming year. I have a plane ticket booked to go to London next month to visit my friend Carly, which will be my first time in Europe! I am going to Ghana for three months sometime in May. I’ll start my final year of university (finally!) Lots to look forward to, with several items getting crossed off my 20 things in my 20s list.

While I mostly review cupcakes, on the odd occasion I do actually make them myself. After one of my friends introduced me to Bake it In a Cake I have been wanting to try this for myself. Finally slightly unambitious I decided rather than making my own mini-pies or cookies to bake in a cupcake, I would instead go for a store bought cookie – I chose the Oreo. My bake it in a cake is a chocolate cupcake with cream-cheese oreo icing and an oreo in the centre.

To make the cupcakes, I started my trimming down individual chocolate wafers and putting them in the bottom of a paper cupcake liner. You could technically do this with half an Oreo, but twisting apart Oreos seems to have too high a risk of failure to me. I then filled up the liner halfway with a chocolate cake batter – I just used a basic, by scratch recipe. Then I put an Oreo into the batter, before topping it off. I followed the baking instructions for chocolate cupcakes, testing them after the initial time. For the icing, I made a cream cheese icing, using half the recommended icing sugar and then put the crumbs from cutting the chocolate wafers into the icing.

The icing was probably my favourite part of this cupcake. I only had whole wheat flour on hand, so the cupcakes were quite dense, but still very tasty.

In the fall, I stopped into the Rosedale Petite Thuet (1162 Yonge St.) while out running errands with my roommate and her boyfriend.  This boulangerie sells a wide variety of canned goods, pre-prepared foods and baked goods.  I had a raspberry and custard danish. Roommate’s boyfriend had the coffee. Keep meaning to go back, but haven’t had the chance yet.

This fall, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about food. There are three articles I’ve been working on this semester that are related to food or the food system. On the side, I’ve been doing a lot more cooking – and more specifically, a lot more elaborate cooking. I’ve been trying to utilize the wonderful produce that is seasonal in the fall – pumpkins and lots of squash – in my cooking.

College Vegetarian Cooking (Amazon)

This is currently my most used cookbook. The recipes are easy to follow, require ingredients that I can find at my urban grocery stores and have beautiful pictures to go alongside them. I’ve made a lot of the dishes in here, most with great success. This book has lots of healthy recipes in them that are great for the vegetarian diet – they often have either faux-meat products or beans for protein. What I’ve made so far and what I think of the recipes:

• Spinach-mushroom crepes – I don’t have a crepe pan in Toronto, but I used my mom’s when I was home this summer. I’d never made crepes before, and I found it so simple to make them following this recipe. I’ll definitely be taking advantage of the crepe pan when I’m back in Calgary at Christmas.
• Penne with pan-roasted tomatoes and white beans – very simple recipe with few ingredients. I love fresh basil, which is the main seasoning in this dish.
• Butternut squash soup – This recipe was the first time I’d ever cut a squash. I had to look it up, because I had no idea – this is the one instruction I wish they had in the book.
• Oven-fried zucchini sticks with honey mustard sauce – this was one of my favourite things to make this summer. I could probably drink the sauce that goes with these.
• Butternut squash risotto – I made this earlier in the week and it. is. to. die. for. seriously. It is one of the best things I have ever made. My main issue with the recipe is that it calls for “small butternut squash” – and then gives a measurement in pounds. I don’t have a kitchen scale, and I have no idea what a constitutes a small squash. I ended up doubling the amount of risotto and water/broth in this recipe – I’m glad I did so I can enjoy the dish longer.
• Vegan chocolate pudding – This was another keeper recipe, unfortunately I had the heat on too high and burnt a bit on the bottom of the pot. While there was no noticeable change in taste, it did make for a lot of scrubbing.

In making this list I realized I haven’t made as many things from this book as I’d thought. Overall I’ve been pretty impressed with most recipes – since they’re so simple it’s pretty easy to make adjustments based on my own preferences or what I have in the fridge.

So this is the new year
And I have no resolutions
For self assigned penance
For problems with easy solutions
“The New Year” – Death Cab for Cutie

This year I have opted not to make new years resolutions as I know that the majority of them I will end up breaking.  I arrived back in Toronto yesterday, after spending two and a half weeks in Calgary.  Of course on my visit to Calgary I stopped into Crave Cupcakes.  In December, they were making both gingerbread and eggnog cupcakes as their “craving” of the month.  As I am not a fan of eggnog, I opted to try the gingerbread cupcake.  I did not manage to get a picture of it as it was too delicious!  I also enjoyed my favourite Crave-O-Licious and a Black Angel while I was home.

I am now back in Toronto and ready to start my Cupcake Quest once again.  It will take a few days for me to get re-settled into my apartment, but hopefully by the weekend I will have another review up!

I hope everyone is enjoying their Christmas.  I am spending the day with my family, finished off with a big feast.  While I usually just opt out of eating turkey, this year I decided I wanted my own Christmas dinner so I am making portobello mushrooms with chestnut stuffing.  Hope it turns out! My family has done our first round of gift opening.  My immediate family had a very minimal gift exchange which we all prefer.  I received a very cute cupcake holder which I will be using to cart cupcakes around to review.  Anyways back to the kitchen for me, have a Happy Christmas!

I know I’ve taken a long break from this list, but I think it’s time to finish it once and for all!

Number 6: Learn to fluently speak another language

For anyone that knows me, they know that I studied both Cantonese and French.  A sad fact, is that I can barely speak either anymore – I never use them and I’m beginning to lose them both.  I want to be able to speak another language fluently, something I figure I’ll do once I travel.