For the past few months, I have been in a program with LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) learning about museum collections management, authentication and conservation.

This program has been breathing life into me and I am inspired.

While I have been continuing my studies in art history and will soon be pursuing a graduate degree in the subject, I am also a vintage reseller and the care and attention that is given to ancient artifacts and textiles at a museum level can be and should be applied to our vintage items. After all, these garments are pieces and fragments from the past and they will not survive without proper care and attendance.

I have found that a lot of the ways I have been able to connect firsthand with what I’ve been learning in the LACMA program come from my experience with handling vintage and antique items. Some of which that have passed through this very website=)

In an effort to implement some of the things I have learned through this program, I have decided to exclusively use archival tissue for shipping out pieces. Okay so, what is archival tissue and why is it important? Archival tissue is acid-free and pH-neutral. The acid-free aspect of this tissue is important because it helps prevent items from yellowing and breaking down over time. This applies not just to textiles but paper too! pH-neutral paper is important because it aids in preventing color transfer between materials and helps maintain an item’s vibrancy.

Aside from these important aspects of preservation, this tissue paper is eco-friendly aka reusable! I urge you to continue to use it to wrap your garments in. .

For a long time, I was sewing little muslin bags and shipping pieces out that way. While those muslin bags were reusable, there were no preservation benefits, so I am happy to pivot how I’ll be wrapping your garments.

I stepped away from uploading items to the site for an extended period and am currently still taking a hiatus from selling at markets. I was personally feeling overwhelmed with being constantly sold to whenever I logged onto social media and I was having a really hard time coming to terms with where TSL stood amongst all the chaos of capitalism. Therefore, I decided to pause because I was unsure how to approach online selling and communicate without feeling like I was contributing to the very source of my anxiety.

My break helped me clarify my intentions and approach to this special company. I want people to be happy with their items and it is important to me to offer timeless pieces that can live life with you through the many stages of your life.

The idea is to become more selective with the pieces we buy and to take care of the ones that we decide to let into our world. And with that being said, it is so important to properly take care and respect those items.

I just recently finished Isabel Allende’s novel, House of The Spirits and I am still on a high. House of The Spirits is Isabel Allende’s first novel. She wrote it when she and her family were exiled in Venezuela after having fled Chile when a military coup overthrew the government. Allende was a young journalist at the time and her political beliefs were well known, so for her life’s safety, she fled the country. During that time away she found out that her grandfather who she was extremely close to was terminally ill. She decided that she would write a letter to him and one year later that letter had turned into a manuscript. She was thirty-nine when she wrote House of the Spirits and forty when it was published in 1982.

The story unfolds the history of four generations of a family. The book has a little bit of everything in it -family history, love, lust, abuse, magic, drama drama drama, politics and revolution. The book is written in a multi-person narrative which makes all the layers of the book come alive in such a rich way. Throughout the entire journey of the book, after having been so closely connected to the characters for decades , following them them through life and death, the book really ends up being about the personal evolution of Esteban Trueba, the family patriarch and the love that he and his granddaughter Alba shared. Obviously, this conclusion is sooo overly simplified and there is so much life and adventure and heartbreak and love that fills all five-hundred pages; but that is what makes this book so groundbreaking, intense and magical. And knowing that Allende first started this book as a letter to her beloved grandfather, it makes sense.

20/10 recommend this book.

I joked with one of the Swans about quitting twitter to tweet on Tumblr. Fact of the matter is, my intention was to claim Substack as my next vice and to write blurbs & essays “seriously” *rolls eyes at myself* …well, I tried to write an essay about my grandmother dying and….fact of the matter is, I’m a shitty writer. So, I decided to properly bring back this blog to get off my thoughts and writing here.

So, whoever has found themself here, thanks for taking the time to read. Nice to meet you =)

“When we’re most intense—who’ll flinch?”
- Arthur Rimbaud, from Selected Poems & Prose; “Phrases,”

Pavielle took this of me at dinner on one of our trips. I bought those glasses earlier that day at Langunilla.

I didn’t realize how much of an impact this book would have on me when I first decided to read it. Reading through each page was like drinking an ice cold glass of water on the hottest day of year. The detailed descriptions of each character, dinner parties, setting, etc. was intoxicating to me, I couldn't get enough. I love how sophisticated and steady Nedra was. How perfect she was at hosting, how she smoked cigars and held a steady, quiet confidence about her, how she found herself in her laters years and didn’t judge herself and gave herself grace for taking so long to make real changes in her life; and how as she grew into the later years of her womanhood, younger women admired and wanted to be around her, spend time with her. I am inspired by her just like those younger women in the book. I am also inspired by James Salter's straightforward style of writing. Simple, dialogue short but profound and the romantic world but devastatingly realistic world that he created in Light Years. I am hungry for more of his work. No wonder why he has been called a "writer's writer". I feel strongly about him the way I feel about Lucia Berlin. Their words bring out a feeling in me that I don't quite know how to describe yet. When I figure it out, I'll circle back.