New vintage 1950s dresses at Le Noire Vintage

Hello my darling bunnies... How has everyone been this week?

I am one sick momma bunny at the moment, so I've been staying close to home and working on the back log of vintage dresses I've been stockpiling .

Sorry for the spam, but I'm just so damn excited to share these dresses .

Go check them out at Le Noire Vintage

The olive green and gold Chinoiserie dress is extremely high quality and from a prestigious Canadian fashion house from the 40s-60s. It is unbelievable and I wish it fit me!!!

Both the silk and lurex wiggle dresses are 40in bust- 30 waist- 40 hips, and the white peter pan collared day dress is a 44 bust and 37 waist.

Plus sized vintage items just posted

Quick shameless plug for you curvy vintage lovers! Head on over to Le Noire Vintage for all sorts of goodies. Not just plus sized, but I'm very happy to be able to provide rare and fantastic 1940s-1980s dresses up to a size 24 in my shop .

Relaxing weekend trip to Prince Edward Island.

Hello bunnies!

Nick and I just returned from a relaxing weekend away on Prince Edward Island.

PEI is just a couple of hours away, and tourism season is officially over, so we decided to take advantage of the extremely low off-season prices and rented ourselves a darling water-front cottage. So, across one of the longest bridges in the world we traveled...

We stayed at Shaw's Inn, the oldest family-owned inn in Canada, at Brackley Beach, about 30 minutes outside of Charlottetown.

While we did not end up getting the deluxe Jacuzzi cottage we'd originally booked, we were happy with what we had. The cottage was huge, with two bedrooms, a giant living room with a fireplace, a back patio and great view of the water.

The first day was overcast and foggy, but we still wandered around the grounds of the Inn and explored.

The Inn's main building had beautiful wrap-around decks with rockers, swings, and views of the countryside and shoreline. The grounds have about 30 cottages varying in size and age. Our friends had a jacuzzi unit that we originally booked, and it was just unbelievable, with a giant jacuzzi off the living room. We will be booking that cottage for a week in November!

Later in the day we did some vintage clothing shopping, and met up with friends for dinner. We went to the PEI Preserve Company where we enjoyed the wonderful views, delicious food, and shopped in their preserves and tea shop. Oh, and took touristy photos in their parking lot...

We spent a cozy and romantic evening in , infront of the fireplace playing scrabble and drinking cocktails. I beat Nick at Scrabble somethin' fierce, thanks to practice from Words with Friends!

Luckily the next day greeted us with sunshine.

We had a lovely breakfast in the great hall of the Inn, before hitting the road to Cavendish and Summerside to do more sight seeing.

We briefly stopped by some of the most famous attractions on PEI, including Anne of Green Gables house, Avonlea and Lucy Maude Montgomery's house . Sadly, my camera batteries died.

We were also able to stop by the downtown farmer's market in Charlottetown and picked up some fresh produce. I will be writing a Fat Glam Kitchen entry in coming days!

All in all it was a lovely low-key weekend. Nick has a week of vacation in November , and we will be returning to the Shaw Inn to stay at their woodsy jacuzzi cottage, and taking along various puzzles, models and other hobbies. We will be unplugging from the internet for a week. I am very much looking forward to it!

If you're interested in seeing anymore photos from our weekend, click on over to my Flickr page.

XOXO

Lenora

An open letter to "thinspiration" blogs that follow me.

I have quite a bit of traffic on my various websites and blogs from terrible things called "Thinspiration" blogs.

For those of you not aware of the phenomena , it is a blog that posts photos of fat or overweight individuals to try and shame themselves and others into starving themselves to thinness.

It is very distressing, dangerous and disgusting.

Most of you are aware I am a very passionate and vocal advocate for body-acceptance, embracing and enjoying the body you have RIGHT NOW, and giving a big ol middle-finger to the haters.

Here is my open letter to those who follow me from these blogs:

Dear Thinspo Blogs,

Part of me wants to block you as most of you stand for and promote terribly unhealthy ideals and lifestyles.

The other part of me wants to keep you around and let you follow me, because you need to see this.

You need to see me.

You need to see a beautiful, healthy, active, loved , accepted and HAPPY human being.

You need to see a beautiful, healthy, active, loved, accepted and happy FAT PERSON.

I am not thinspiration. I am inspiration.

You could learn a thing or two, so I think I’ll keep you around.

So, reblog my photos. Give me even more hits and followers. If even just one person sees my photo and says ” Hey, maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe I’m not so bad!” then that is all the satisfaction I need. This has happened many times before, and it will continue to happen.

Sling your mud all you want. Happy wonderful people leading full and satisfying lives come in all shapes and sizes.

If you want photos of fat people to shame you into starving yourself, you won’t find them here. You will find photos that will inspire you to live, exactly as you are, right now, and be happy. So please, by all means…reblog away!

New vintage items up on Etsy

Hello my vintage-clothing loving bunnies!

Just a quick shameless plug of a post to let you know there are all sorts of fantastic new items in my etsy shop! Many plus sized items as well! Go over and check out Le Noire Vintage !

My new home office

Hello everyone!

This weekend has been wildly productive. Nick and I have been reorganizing things in our home, to allow the conversion of our guestroom into a multi-purpose space for my growing entrepreneurial endeavors.

After many hours of building desks and storage for the closet, everything is up and running, and I type to you from my new desk area. With limited space, we are able to still have a guest room, a small office space for me, and a place for me to store and display vintage clothing for when my local clients stop in. This also makes things much easier for me to stay on top of my stock, and have room to package and sort things properly.

We stayed with our tropical/tiki/parrot theme, and I just love how bright everything is! Mostly all of the furniture and decorations are vintage, and I especially love my gallery style wall of vintage feather art, flamenco dancer paintings, matador on velvet and foil birds. Another favorite the use of a vintage 1950s fiberglass cafeteria tray to display some jewelry.

This is a space I feel very comfortable in, and also, the bird cage is right next to the door, so I can work to the sweet songs of my feather-babies. I am looking forward to being able to be far more productive in here. This is also the room that gets the most sun in the whole house, so it is hard to feel glum in here.

Slowly, things are taking shape, and adding to the big picture.
Small, passionate steps down this new exciting road.

Xoxo

Lenora

Hello from breezy New Brunswick

Hello bunnies,

Autumn has finally arrived in beautiful New Brunswick, and it is our favorite time of the year to get outside and enjoy the cool breezes, changing colors of foliage, and natural and historical monuments in the countryside. It is also the time of the year I always make sure to bring my camera along for our country drives and antique hunts .

This afternoon was nothing special, just a simple drive out to Hillsborough for an estate auction, and to Sawmill Creek to take a few snapshots of the covered bridge and creek.

We stopped at our favorite haunt; a 1950s greasy-spoon diner where the entire staff know us by name, and $1 gets you 12 songs in the jukebox.

The estate auction did not yield any treasure this week, so we continued on our way. About 45 minutes outside of town, through the winding country side, sits a weathered little covered bridge from 1905, where we stopped to get some fresh air.

Early Autumn is my preferred time of year, one where I can wear my vintage wool dresses with scarves, but still go bare-legged and without a jacket. Nick can break out his heavier vintage hats, and his favorite fleece-lined hoodies.

The natural beauty in New Brunswick is truly breathtaking. In a few weeks, the wide variety of color on the tree tops will coax us back to the countryside from the city, to explore the forests and hills that are preparing to sleep for many long cold months.

The landscapes of New Brunswick are what keep me here. My roots grow comfortably and passionately in our lush forests, our acres and acres of farmland, our dusty dirt roads and mountains. A country-girl heart with a city-girl shell, I will always call this province home.

I will surely share more of our Autumn adventures as they unfold.

Xoxo

Lenora

Changes on the horizon

Hello bunnies,

As always, I will start with apologizing for my lack of activity . The sweet siren song of Tumblr and the wonderfully interactive environment keep me faithful, as well, my life has been somewhat turbulent the last few months.

This weekend I have come down with a touch of a cold, and after a very slow-paced few days, I am reflective this evening.

I've been thinking quite a bit about my various online niches; this is something I'd like to elaborate on shortly, but first, I owe you all a small update.

As of August 24th I am officially no longer corporate-employed. This was an early birthday present, as I turned 26 years old on the 25th of August. After many years of office jobs and going through the motions, I was able to be honest with myself that it was not my calling. While I am thankful for the experience these jobs have given me, I am now quite happy to be going full steam in an entirely different direction: my own.

Firstly, I will be taking time for myself for a few months to prepare for this new road. I have my sights set on a fruitful entrepreneurial endeavor - however, first, I need to relax, reflect, and rebuild. I am lucky to be in a position that allows me to take some time "off", and I will be focusing on healing mentally and physically. My days have been and will be, filled with taking care of the small things you just "put off". Preserving those valuable memories in photo albums, finally reorganizing closets, get back to being more active, creating more healthy and economical meal plans, and working on various long-neglected hobbies. These things are important, and you truly forget about them when you are so very focused on just making it through another work week doing something that gives you no satisfaction.

So I return to my online footprint. As many of you know, I have various blogs and am active in different sectors of this wonderful blog-o-sphere. I use Tumbrl primarily, as I mentioned earlier, because of the intimate atmosphere, which allows me to interact with my readers. I love the fat fashion and body-acceptance circles, as well as the passionate feminist movement, the vintage lifestyler sharing, and being able to satiate my love for geeky internet memes and random photos. I use twitter hand in hand with Tumblr, and sadly, neglect my Blogger accounts, and as a result- Fat Glam Kitchen ( since FGK content feeds directly from a blogger account of mine).

My current personal project is finding a happy middle-ground. The thousands of followers I have are spread out over various social media platforms, and I think consolidating into one area is my best bet. This brings about all sorts of questions, specifically: Which platform?

So, my dear readers, I am cross-posting this to all of my social media. I need advice! I'm on the fence between combining my personal blog and Fat Glam Kitchen to contain all of my fat fashion as well as cooking. However, I also like the idea of being able to keep two passionate but separate spaces- one devoted to my cooking, and one to my fat fashion and personal life.

Before I sign off for another evening, I'd like to thank each and every one of you- from my unbelievably wonderful partner, my supportive parents, my loving friends, to those on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Fat Glam Kitchen, Etsy, Blogger and beyond, for your support, your kind messages, your witty comments, and your powerful emails, the coffee dates, the nights-off from cooking.... To my many social-media-friends- the interaction I get from you all is truly touching, and I am so honored to call many of you new friends.

I will ask for your continued patience in coming days or weeks as I streamline my online footprint, and I appreciate any messages or comments you may have.

Here's to exciting new things my darling bunnies,

xox Lenora

Recent outfits

Hello my pretties! Hope all is well with you all!

Just checking in here, to say hello, and share some recent outfits. I upload my daily outfits to my Flickr account here http://www.flickr.com/photos/lenoralenoire/ for those interested.

As usual, you can always keep up with my daily ramblings over on Tumblr www.lenoralenoire.tumblr.com

XOXOXO