She Who Staples

Grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

I answered a couple of requests for recommendations, and am copying my answers here for reference.

1. for someone who wanted to hear from people forty and up about shopping for clothes:

I hit forty last year, and what I've done is to keep on experimenting until I find something that works - whether that's a shape, a colour, a manufacturer - and then keep on experimenting with that. What that looks like depends very much on circumstances - at the moment I have quite a lot of unscheduled time and my small town has a lot of charity shops, so I'm mostly buying things second-hand and donating them back if they don't end up working. But when I was working full-time I did a lot more internet shopping. (Svaha and Joanie were what worked for me then, for what it's worth.)

I had a most illuminating conversation recently with a group of friends, most of whom like Seasalt. I said that Seasalt ought to work for me but never quite does, but that Fat Face is pretty reliable. Interestingly, most of the Seasalt fans said that Fat Face never quite works for them. I take from this the lesson that even makes that appear very similar at first glance will be more or less suited to different groups of people, so it's worth keeping on looking.

I also like the Who Wears Who blog for thoughtful prompts on style and experimentation with same.


2. replying to someone who wanted to talk about femslash

Femslash! Here are three of my favourite books with canon femslash ships:

- my oldest - The Count of Monte Cristo, a rambling but enjoyable French doorstopper tale of revenge, appeared from 1844 to 1846 and has canon femslash. And no bury your gays! (Obvious warning: it is, of course, very much Of Its Time.)
- my newest - I've just finished The Priory of the Orange Tree. Will it be one of my favourites of all time? Probably not, but it was a lot of fun - an ambitious fantasy novel that attempts to put a valiant number of belief systems and all the dragon lore on the page. And yes, canon femslash.
- the one that feels like it was written just for me - the Alpennia series by Heather Rose Jones. It includes many of my favourite tropes (fictional European country, swashbuckling, complicated power dynamics) and weaves religious practice into the way the magic works in a way that I've rarely seen done so effectively. And, for a third time, canon femslash.