Ruffles Not Diets

So I haven't seen the movie yet.  As per usual I am waiting until it has been out for two weeks so I can get really cheap tickets.  I did finish the books a few weeks ago, and between that and reading a lot of commentary I have found I have a lot of thoughts.  Spoilers for probably the whole series, skip to the video to avoid.

Based on the hype and press surrounding the series, going in I thought I had a good understanding of what I was going to be reading: a post-apocalyptic novel with a scrappy girl hero who, after many trials, would overthrow her oppressive government (maybe with the help of a band of scrappy teen freedom fighters) and revolutionize the world!  That's pretty much, more or less, the template for these novels.  I was really unprepared for what actually happened (and actively fought it while reading, "No!  Katniss is the plucky girl hero!  She will not be a puppet for any government" {spoiler alert: yeah, she totally will}).which was actually a story about how incredibly hard that peppy post-apocalyptic YA story-line actually is; how those who try to change the world will find themselves co-opted, sold out, and having to make deals with the devil.  Also, PTSD, and super creepy coerced romance.  The Hunger Games series is not about a plucky girl hero saving the world, but about an admirably surly would be girl hero relentlessly ground down by the oppressive system, about surviving that system, and maybe managing to scrap together a slightly better life for you and yours.  It possibly has the most depressing happy ending in Young Adult fiction.  Once I gave into the fact that this is what the series is about, I was pretty impressed with the whole thing.  Really it subverts so much we have come to expect from YA genre fiction (including having the least interesting or relevant love triangle in fiction.  Pretty much every fan of the series is Team who-gives-a-crap).

That having been said, the quality of the writing takes a nose-dive between each book.  The third book is just rushed and poorly written.  See, by this book Katniss is supposed to be slightly unhinged, having constant flashbacks and barely able to keep it together.  Unfortunately it's written in the first person, so she can't just say "yeah, I'm totes unhinged".  If you can see into a character's mental processes they should probably not be so coherent if the character is supposed to be mentally disturbed.

Anyway, ever though it is kind of massively ironic, I am looking forward to the movie.  I just have to find someone to come with me who will put up with the inevitable gross sobbing that is going to happen when Rue dies.  I am also really excited about the soundtrack.  I am a fan of alternative country and was hoping, since the book is set in Appalachian coal country, for some good music, only to have it show up from the most unlikely source.  Taylor Swift, who has a troubled past with regards to writing songs about literature, wrote and preforms (along with The Civil Wars, who are awesome usually) a song that is actually completely perfect, appropriate to the narrative, dark and down tempo, with wisps of traditional Appalachian folk music.  The video's really beautiful too.


Also, for fans of dark YA genre fiction, my favorite series in pretty much ever, the Chaos Walking trilogy, is on sale for 99 cents each today only at amazon.
The Knife of Never Letting Go
The Ask and the Answer
Monsters of Men

I just* got back from Christmas in Salt Lake City.  It was mostly a good time.  There were pretty mountains

Mt. Olympus, which is apparently in Utah.  No word on what the Greek gods think about that.

and pretty lights:


It might have even been the perfect trip except, as happens nearly every time we visit my sister, everyone came down with some horrible illness contracted fro the small people:

The Plague rats enjoy their Christmas carnage.

*for certain quantities of "just"

Image from: IMDB

How is everyone's holiday season going?  I am in Salt Lake City having Chirstmas with my sister and having the unique Antropological experience of observing Mormons in their natural habitat (fun fact: even in Utah, you can buy beer at the grocery store, take that Pennsylvania!, but the tea selection is crap).
Christmas is pretty much my favorite holiday: I love presents, getting as much as giving, peppermint-chocolate flavored things*, light displays, and gaudily combining red and green in my outfits (currently I have black nail polish covered with green glitter on one hand and red glitter on the other). 
I've been thinking lately about how all the winter holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid, and most overtly Yule) are about the ultimate triumph of light over darkness.  While that may not inherantly seem like a very Goth-y sort of message; I would disagree.  To me, the ultimate point of gothic subculture is to acknowledge that life isn't always sunshiney and bright, but to embrace the darkness in our lives and see the beauty therein.  I think ultimately, that fits in with the winter holidays and the idea that while we may be in the darkest time of the year, that isn't permenent and within the darkness is beauty and a promise of light to come. 

So tonight, I"ll be going to see the lights in Temple Square (which promise to be appropriately stunning) and tommorow I'll be woken up too early by a horde of enthusiastic children to open presents in my silly bat pyjamas.

I hope you all will of have had an excellent holiday and (in case I don't get back here before then) a wonderful new year!


* Here is my super-secret recipie for gluten-free chocolate mint M&M cookies

Wow has it really been nearly three weeks?  It has.  I have been thoroughly in the weeds getting ready for final projects, studying, and keeping up with the stupid f*%$#@*ing class discussion board of my most annoying class.  I am popping my head up because I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and just because.  Expect normal blogging to resume after the 17th.

I just got my first tattoo tonight to celebrate/commemorate my impending graduation from Library school.  I wanted a quote so I started looking for quotes on libraries, reading, and information.  I found a few great ones, which I still may get, but I also discovered that when it came to quotes about reading and books, when the reader was male or gender unspecific they were all exceedingly positive, but if the reader was female then they were quite negative.  There was this sense that books, especially novels, will ruin a girl for any sort of "decent" life.  Perhaps the best expression of this sense is in Charles Warnke's essay "You should date an illiterate girl", which says, among other things: "The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am.", and in this helpful Victorian infographic:

I am going to get all sorts of interesting search engine hits off of this I can tell already.

This month the fabulous Professeur Gothique gave out a homework assignment for us all to show off our unmade-up faces to the internetz.  By crazy random happenstance the very day she announced this was  the one where, inspired by her previous post on makeup removal and Ultimate Goth Guide's Amy's post on getting ready, I shot a crazy amount of pictures doing and then taking off my makeup.  I have a real homework assignment that required me to edit together a video composed of images, so I used this as practice.

This shows my sort of standard makeup look for work.  I vary what particular shades I use almost every day, although it is purple of green a lot, and yes, I do have 5 different eye-shadow brushes.

My skincare routine is pretty unorthodox, but also really cheap.  I have extremely sensitive skin and I used to have moderately bad acne.  After years of experimentation I learned that the less I messed with my skin the less and less acne I had.  Now I get maybe 1-2 zits a month (of course both when I was shooting this video) and my acne scars are starting to heal.  It's all about gentle care.  I use nothing to clean my skin but water (I like the rosewater as it smells nice and I spend 3$ every 2 month or so on it, so that seems worth it) and a microfiber cloth, and use pure oil on damp skin as a moisturizer.  The kind I use, kuki nut oil is non-comedegenic, rich in vitamin e and folklorically considered to have

My outfit for the day.  It was a school not work day.

skin healing properties yet to be confirmed or denied by empirical evidence but it seems to be working for me.  I use a tiny amount and have had the same 8 ounce bottle for over a year (kept in the fridge).  I use light flavored olive oil to remove my eye makeup.  It dissolves pretty much everything and seems to be good for my lashes and eyebrows.  I do not keep this in the fridge as olive oil hardens at lower temperatures, but use it fast enough to not matter.  The only skin care product I use that couldn't be an ingredient in a zesty salad dressing is sunscreen because it is really important.  I normally buy Clinique city Block SPF 25 as the SPF 40 has some chemical sunscreens and the SPF 25 is only titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.  I accidentally grabbed the wrong tube when shopping in the Clinique kiosk in the airport.  I only use quality mineral foundation for similar reasons.  I is a bit pricey, at least compared to drugstore stuff, but it also lasts longer.  After "mineral makeup" became a huge fad a bunch of cheap knock-offs made mostly of talc (which is a mineral, but not one that is good for your face) flooded the market.  Avoid these.  You should expect to pay at least 20$ for 1/4 of an ounce.  I can be less strict with what I use on my eyes.  So that's good, because I enjoy some pretty crazy eye-makeup.

I came back from a weekend away from the internet (or even cell service)* to discover that I had been given the Goth Blog award but none other than the fabulous Siouxsie Law whose own blog is one of my favorites. I am extremely chuffed.

The rules are that once awarded one must pass it on to three other goth blogs which one enjoys.  I had quite a time selecting only three, although the field was considerably narrowed by deciding to not re-award any of the brilliant blogs already so honored.  Anyway, my selections:

The Phantom Cat's Otherworld: The Irish Phantom Cat writes on everything from fashion and makeup to music and books, but my favorite posts are when she writes on Irish legend and history with a Gothic twist.  I loving reading about other cultures and places and her writing gives a real sense of place and mood.


Still Dark at Heart: this blog to me exemplifies the best of a personal blog, reading Sal Kaye's blog feels more like checking in with a friend. Her discussions on reclaiming goth identity as a professional are also extremely relevant to me as I enter the professional world.

Black-Clad in Korea: They don't post often, but the posts here tend to be in-depth and extremely interesting, and cover such topics as teaching troubles, classic gothy TV shows, and zombie walks.  It also often makes me nostalgic for my own time as an English teacher in China, for while those are very different countries there are plenty of similarities, the experience of living in a culture radically different from your own is similar. I tend to just lurk there and rarely comment, because I am weird sometimes.

PS: Happy Halloween!  If you haven't done so yet, check out this amazing Halloween light show featuring music from Nightmare before Christmas, and read Simon Pegg discussing why fast zombies are just plain wrong.

For the curious: I was on a knitting retreat deep in rural Pennsylvania (and yes, part of the driving directions included, "turn off the paved road") and spent the weekend doing nothing but knitting, watching zany movies, having absurd conversations with friends, and drinking various mulled beverages.  We were even snowed in; it was brilliant.

So, I am sure most all of you have your Halloween costumes sorted by now, but I found this great costume resource and project that I couldn't help but share.  It is called Take Back Halloween! and offers suggestions and how to guides for making amazing costumes based on various goddesses, queens, and notable women.  Their point is that Halloween costumes for grown up women in stores tend to be pretty exclusively limited to Sexy Whatever, and while sexy is fun and good if you feel like it, that shouldn't be the sum total of Halloween costume options for ladies.  I would also point out that the version of sexiness offered up by mainstream costume shops is pretty limited and ludicrous.  There is a whole lot more to being sexy than showing as much of your breasts as possible and it's kind of a shame that this doesn't have wider cultural acknowledgement.  Also, Sexy Takeaway box? Sexy Crayon?  How about, if you want to dress in a sexy costume don't go as a crayon, can we make that rule?  Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, so Take Back Halloween has great ideas.  Here are some of my favorites:

Persephone, they even tell you where to get black roses with skulls inside, which I think I just need in general.

Pele, because what's more badass than a volcano goddess.  I also think I need those pants in general.

Josephine Baker who is fantastically glamorous and beautiful (and pretty sexy in a non-cheesy-porno kind of way).
Boudicca! Because there is no amount of fake blood that is not appropriate for this costume.

So what are you all dressing as for Halloween?  I am currently thinking of some sort of gothy Miss Fizzle, but I actually have left my costume planning to the last minute and may have to fall back on Generic Witch, since everything I need for that is already in my normal wardrobe.

Yesterday was my birthday and being a non-milestone one at the end of a work-week right before classes start again for fall I didn't really do much, but I did make delicious cupcakes, which I think is pretty much good enough.  I invented burgundy velvet cupcakes awhile ago because I was under the misapprehension that red velvet cake is basically chocolate with red food dye (it's actually a very light chocolate) and so just added red dye to a chocolate cake mix.  No you may be wondering what the point of expending a lot (seriously, a whole lot) of red food coloring if it's just a chocolate cake.  Well: 1) Red is a flavor, it legitimately takes slightly different, richer, more mysterious, now whether this is a trick of perception or the fact that you have actually used enough red food coloring to affect the flavor.... 2) It is a fun way to mess with entertain guests.  Legend was it that the inventor of red velvet cake was trying to hide the true flavor of her cake, which I believe because southern cuisine is run on secrecy.  While no one will think burgundy velvet cake isn't chocolate nearly everyone seems to believe that isn't all it is. 3)There is no bad excuse to use cream cheese frosting, and 4) The real reason - It looks awesome.

Burgundy-Velvet Cupcakes (a heart-breakingly complicated recipie)
1 batch of chocolate cake batter from scratch or from a mix (I used King Arthur Flour gluten-free chocolate cake mix which is not only delicious, but the only gluten-free chocolate cake mix that does not taste of sawdust and disappointment.)  If from scratch use dutch-processed or even some black cocoa.
1/2-3/4 of a bottle of red food coloring, enough to turn the batter basically the color of fresh blood)

Mix.  Bake as usual.
Allow to cool completely before frosting

Cream Cheese Frosting

4 oz each butter and cream cheese (softened)
2 C or more powdered sugar
1 t vanilla extract

Beat together butter and cream cheese until smooth, add vanilla and beat
Mix in powdered sugar about 1/2 cup at a time until it is a frosting consistency, smooth, not too stiff or dry, but not melty-soft.  I try to add as little sugar as possible because I want to retain that cream cheese tang.  Using the whisk attachment on my mixer seems to help stiffen it up with less sugar.

Frost cupcakes once they are cooled and enjoy.  If left to sit for a bit and if you have used sufficient quantities of red food dye some of the red will bleed into the edges of the frosting.  For bonus points uses some of these spooky cupcake liners.

I made this mini-cake because the batter made more than 12 cupcakes and I only have the one muffin tin.  As you can tell I have no cake decorating skills whatsoever.



I wore mostly boring work clothes actually on my birthday and so am counting the ensemble I wore for a quick trip to Sephora.  My new "backdrop" is a super-fantastic lace curtain that my mom bought me that will decorate my closet door when not being used as a fancy stole.  The skirt
is also from my mom, but is the oldest thing (which is to say thing I have had the longest) in my wardrobe and was originally made a present/buy-off when I was put in national honor society (yes, in high school, that's how old this is).  Here is also a sneak peek of my new boots.

Because I find that outre makeup makes the people at Sephora leave me alone, and I am anti-social like that I decided to try an eye makeup tutorial that seemed fun but probably un-wearable and found it surprisingly flattering (in real life when I am not making crazy-eyes as a result of not trying to blink when the camera flashes), even despite my wobbly line drawing.  I was successfully ignored until check-out.  I am sure because they thought me just too fabulous to approach.  I get that a lot actually (I assume).

PS: If you are wanting to expand your music collection I can't recommend eMusic.com enough. They are half-priced iTunes, basically and heavily support independent and alternative artists as well as seeming to genuinely care about their customers satisfaction and privacy.

A large part of my current millinery stash

When Victorian Kitty announced her theme for August would be hats and fascinators I knew exactly what I would do.  For one thing, I don't have bunches of hats, so there wasn't much competition.  With hats I really believe in buying quality, and, since my budget is limited, buying staples that can be used in a lot of different ways.  My wool felt top hat is a perfect example.  My mom gave it to me for my birthday ages ago, actually I was a college freshman at the time.  It's from Nordstroms, and is a basic black wool topper, slightly feminine with a inward rolling brim, and detachable felt piping and flowers, and this post was going to be about all the ways I use a supply of cheap millinery supplies to dramatically change it on a daily basis.  However, when I went to the get it from the hat box it was nowhere to be seen, along with my other main winter hat.  I dug through all my winter clothes, but nothing.  Luckily in this time of mourning I still have my grandma's funeral hat (which I really need to replace the netting on).
To a Hat
Oh hat, you were a good hat
Loyal and True
You kept the me warm and the snow off my head
Even  in the truly irrational winters of Western Pennsylvania
I can only hope you have passed this veil of tears
To the great habadasher in the sky

Or are shoved farther back in my closet
Actually that would be better.


I think I may understand why I never made it into my high school literary magazine.

I obviously had too much free time at work today, and am excited about finally seeing Harry Potter this weekend (I had put it off until now, both because I didn't really have time until the end of term and because I have a free movie pass that is only good after a movie has been out ten days or more).  The result was me thinking to much about what it would look like if various characters decided to follow a form of Harajuka fashion.

Luna Lovegood would obviously follow Fairy Kei (and/or Pop Kei as I am not at all clear what the difference is and couldn't find any handy guide)



Obviously Luna is a My Little Ponies fan.  I imagine the crazy, hideous but Luna can totally work it, cardigan thing having been made for her by Hermione, because girlfriend does love her some bobble-knitting.  I am also way too excited to have found Ravenclaw Chuck Taylors.

Bellatrix Lestrange, is basically a goth style icon at this point (of course how much of that is due to being played by Helena Bonham Carter in the movies....), so my first thought was of course Elegant Gothic Aristocrat, but she's a little more off-kilter so I thought I would try something a little more Ero lolita style, of course, also gothic:

I've been a little preoccupied with a term paper, and I thought about how much I like paintings of women reading, so that's as good a theme as I am capable of.  Some of the searching for this was frankly depressing, and maybe one day when I have more time I will talk about how results for image searches using various terms and euphemisms for fat reveals deeply embedded prejudices in society, but today I need to write more about intangible heritage digitization projects, think hateful things about people who don't believe in global warming, and hope the power grid doesn't blow leaving me without air conditioning.  I live an exciting life.

Yeah, it's pretty much like this, or, exactly

Mary Cassatt -- Woman Reading in a Garden

Kuniyoshi -- Woman Reading

Finally, the video that inspired the title, probably the best example of library marketing I have ever seen:

Does anyone else desperately want to know if the BYU library cafe* actually serves something called a celestial sandwich?

Update: After probably too much research I determined BYU library does not have a snack bar, but rather a "snack zone" where folks can bring their own. So: a) if you want a celestial sandwich you have to make it yourself and b) BYU gets all the potential damage to books and none of the over-priced, I don't know, hot chocolate revenue from a cafe.  Also no bad library puns.  At Pitt's main library we have the Cup and Chaucer, which is just ...terrible.

*Not that I approve of cafes in libraries. Won't someone please think of the books!?

I don't really have time for a proper post, but I ran across a few things that I felt might be of interest to my lovely readers

Thing 1:



I ran across this dress and this quote on the same day and couldn't help feeling they belong together.  So here is my homage to Maggie Smith (or possibly just Professor McGonagall) and all eccentric old ladies.

 Thing 2:
"darkness calls, understanding beckons -- will you enter" on the Slacktiverse
This article talks quite eloquently about the use of the darker side of life, and how one can learn many things by not shying away from its harder path.  The article is written from a pagan perspective, which is not my particular spiritual bent, but I felt it to be potentially inspiring, especially to those of us who embrace the darker side of life, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof.  It is also prettily written.
Excerpt: "Darkness, seen as Light’s opposite, thus equates with evil, as well as complexity, obfuscation, and incomprehensibility. I think there's more to the story. A large portion of the human brain is devoted to vision, which requires light. During daylight hours, we see what we focus on, which naturally seems to be what matters most. Come nighttime, we are at the mercy of what we smell, hear, feel, and taste (or what we don't perceive until it's too late). It's no wonder we tend to prefer conditions that play to our strengths. But darkness can teach us many things, including living with uncertainty, ambiguity, weakness, failure, and death. Darkness embraces all that we fear, including ourselves."

Dancer from Russia's "Big Ballet"

Us librarian types love a good reading list.  It's right up there with shushing.  If you are new to the world of fat acceptance or just want to learn more about it, here is my carefully curated introductory reading list.  I'll also post more reading recommendations later on, and update this list when and if I find more.

Books:
Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata: In my opinion this is the ultimate, and if you don't read anything else on this list read this.  It is essentially a literature review (as written by a journalist, therefore an engaging version of  a literature review) of a battery of scientific studies that prove primarily: no one knows how to make fat people thin, no one knows how to make thin people fat and fat biological parents have fat children regardless of where they are raised and visa-versa for thin people, and that there is little to no evidence that obesity in itself (except at the very extreme end) has a negative effect on mortality.

Screw Inner Beauty (Known in most of the world as Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere but I really prefer the Australian title, more on that later): This is a more socio-political and personal take on fat acceptance, and primarily discusses both the ramifications of fat in society and how you as an individual can accept/love your body and think about eating and exercise in a post-dieting/weight loss way. That was a little scattered, but um, try it, you'll like it.

Blogs
Now I must shame-facedly admit that actually I mostly didn't read all that many FA books, I mostly just read blogs, here is a listing of canonical blog posts, without descriptions as this way I may eventually publish this shiz.

Health and Nutrition

But Isn't Fat Unhealthy?: you've seen this one before, but it bears repeating.
Health at Every Size: Choice or Coercion: this is probably the best summary of Health at Every Size I have read, even better than the HAES Manifesto, which you would think...
Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift: It's peer-reviewed!
Eat Food, Stuff you Like, As Much as You Want
Food Isn't Poison

Fatshion and Visibility

Why the Pictures Matter: This is why I *Heart* Lesley Kinzel so hard and why I post pictures too
The Fat Body (In)Visible: very cool documentary about fat visibility and fashion, NSFW in the first and last few minutes due to pictures from the Adipositivity project
I Spy with my Fat Eye; On Seeing and Being Seen

Other



The Awesome Power of No
Why are you so Fat? It was Gnomes.

Other Stuff

From: Fatpocalypse

BMI Project: Pictures of different people and what their BMI.  It is incredibly revelatory, especially the "overweight" category.

The Museum of Fat Love: because it's adorable.

Shapely Women (which is where I got the image on the banner): an interesting blog of art depicting women of all sizes from many different periods.

As I sit here it is fully 90 degrees outside, yet I am still expected to go to work (were the air-conditioning is most egregiously on the fritz) and class and absolutely no one has offered to draw me cool baths periodically throughout the day, add my apartment's shocking lack of a claw-foot tub and you begin to see the terrible cross I am forced to bear.  What's an extravagantly southern* girl to do in these times of trial?

"As God as my witness, there had better be a glass of sweet tea waiting for me when I am done picking these stupid turnips or heads will roll."

Iced tea is really the only solution.  It has mystical powers of cooling far beyond that of ordinary cold beverages.  I couldn't survive my mile-long walking commute without it.  Should you find yourself in a restaurant in the south, iced tea is categorically unsweet, "sweet tea" is sweetened -- usually quite overly -- iced tea.

How to Make Perfect Sweet Tea

In coding as in life: garbage in, garbage out.  First you need good quality tea, bagged tea is okay if from a quality producer but under no circumstances should "instant" or "cold brew" tea be regarded as anything but the abominations that they are.  Unless you are buying Imperial first-flush lung jing (which if you make into iced tea I will personally come over and punch you in the face), tea is an affordable luxury, much cheaper per serving than soda, go ahead and buy top quality. See below for some recommendations on specifics.  You also need a brewing mechanism that allows the tea leaves enough room to expand and to be removed from the tea the very moment brewing is done.  I favor this, or just a small pot with a good sized fine mesh brewing basket, for individual or double servings and this for making a pitcher.

1. Set freshly drawn water to boil
2. In your brewing mechanism put twice as much tea leaves as necessary to make the amount of tea you are brewing (unless you are making a pitcher, in which case use the normal amount of leaves)
3. Add sugar to taste to the pot, before adding water (even though I take hot tea completely unsweetened, since cold dampens taste I find I want a little sugar, maybe 1 tsp per cup of finished tea)
4. When the water has reached the correct temperature for type (boiling for black and just simmering for green or herbals) pour it over leaves and sugar.
5. Leave to brew for the correct amount of time, slightly longer than you would for hot tea (about 5 minutes for black, 2 for green, and 7+ for herbals)
6. If making 1-2 servings: immediately pour over ice, diluting it by half.  If making a pitcher: leave the pitcher to cool completely (that's why you didn't make it double strength), then refrigerate.  This will keep most teas from clouding, but some varieties of black are especially prone.  Clouding doesn't actually alter taste so don't get your bloomers in a bunch about it in any case.
7.  If serving a party I suggest making the tea unsweetened and providing simple syrup adjacent, as people's tastes very significantly.  The entire American South seems to think tea ought to be syrupy sweet.  I disagree.

Also, try not to go crazy with the garnishes

Suggested Teas for Icing

Blacks
A good basic Ceylon or Keemun: These are the varieties of black tea least given to clouding and thus the best for iced tea.  I do not believe non-black teas ever cloud.  I keep a combination as my basic sweet tea, or as a base for chai.

Lady Grey: This is probably my favorite.  It is delicately aromatic and citrus-y, refreshing and light.  It's flavor holds up well in iced tea and needs just a hint of sugar.

Orange Spice: When you are in more of a "go big or go home" sort of mood this is just the thing.

Greens & Whites
Jasmine: Yummy, aromatic, and delicately floral tasting, a quality version can be picked up at any good Asian food market.  Note that jasmine can be made from green tea or oolong, and in my opinion the green version is much superior for iced tea.  This is also lovely with dried rose petals.

Spiced Green: This is a nice, lightly spiced green blend, which I especially like (and find especially cooling) with a bit of peppermint thrown in.

Snow Geisha White: Ohmigosh this is my very favorite iced tea.  It is white mixed with dried cherries and rose petals , mixed with a little pure cane sugar it is perfect, a little pricey so I save it for special occasions.

Herbals
Christmas Eve: This is sort of an herbal version of Orange Spice, but it has the addition of some subtle peppermint.  I am a big fan of peppermint with spice.

I'll admit to being not that much of an herbal tea person, but if you are, I recommend Mountain Rose Herbs for sourcing, and for some good blends.
Peppermint: This is sort of a classic childhood taste for me, but with honey is amazingly refreshing on the very hottest days.

Midsummer Night: I invented this one for a midsummer picnic a few years back: equal parts spearmint, lemon balm, and lavender

 Iced Chai

• 1qt water
• 1/2 C basic black tea
• 4 star anise
• 1 tsp cloves 
• 1/4 tsp. each: ground cinnamon and ground ginger
• 1/2-1 cup sugar
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Tomorrow I will post outfits appropriate for sipping tea on the veranda, possibly during a Junior League meeting.

*My Momma-and-them are from Alabama and Northern Florida and my Daddy's people are from East Texas/Louisiana, and I am named, by tradition, after the first lady of the Confederacy (who it turns out was actually kind of cool.  Apparently after the war and as soon as her husband kicked she scandalized everyone by moving to New York City and becoming, like total bff with Ulysses S. Grant's daughter).