Business Sass!!

So one of my bestest friends Miss Ashley Ash has a GREAT fashion blog called Thrifty Little Pretties. She is always posting some of the great outfits she wears and enticing outfits she is inspired by and desires!! So in honor of my fashionista BFF I have been inspired to post an outfit that I wore to a business meeting that I had with her the other day! What business did we attend to?! Well she has been in the process of starting a proposal planning business called Those Four Words and I have joined in on the venture!! Check out her blog and our blog on our business adventure!!

 Hair: My hair is about shoulder length for this outfit I curled my hair and pinned it back twisting the sides in front at first and then using a barette to secure the rest of the curls in back. I also pinned my bangs back.

Yes I know I am a photographer but I take horrible camera phone photographs because my phone is so bulky and ginormous (I'm surprised that is an actual word!) So this is the best I could do to get some sort of effect of the outfit...Don't mind the messy Sass Station.                        

Black Dress Pants: Vanity $19.99

Black Blazer: H&M $19.99

B&W Corset Top: Vanity $24.99

V-Neck Black T-Shirt: I really don't know where I got this shirt but I wore it under the corset top to give it a slight casual feel. 

Jewelry: Forever Love

I Love the necklace it reminds me of a curtain tassle. It is made of longer cylindrical black beads. Rhinestone hoop earings. 

I love the details of this corset top. Ruffled back and button accents going down the middle and on each side.

Shoes: SE Boutique Olaf Bootie from DSW originally $79,99 I got them for $49.99 LOVE LOVE LOVE these booties!! I love the military-esque detailing. 

Stay Sassy!!

XOXOXLADYXOXOX

Down the Rabbit Hole...

 When I was a little girl my Grandfather (who was not a blood relative just a man that happened to cross my path and earn the name of Grandpa Gene) would always tease me about the little girl that fell down the rabbit hole. At the age of 5 I knew that it was Alice that chased the rabbit that would send her on an adventure to Wonderland after tumbling down into a fall injected with imagination. My Grandpa Gene would insist that it was some other Disney character that daydreamed their way into nonsense. I think this game of trying to convince me that everyone BUT Alice really fell down the rabbit hole would be the first ingredient for my fantasy land that I escape to when reality is just too real. This place is called LoveLand and ever since my debates with Grandpa Gene I’ve been adding the ingredients to the recipe of my very own Wonderland. Like Alice there is only one way to get to our created mirage, the land of my daydreams, LoveLand and that is to fall down the rabbit hole.

Falling down the rabbit hole feels as if you have taken an overdose of imagination. Your mind whirls so fast with ideas, images, and reflections of the creativity that lies within yourself. It’s as if your Muse just walked in the door and injected you with her inspiration flooding your bloodstream with ingenuity. And keeping Alice in mind you, “Think of six impossible things before breakfast.”  You fall with grace as your umbrella that you use to slow your fall. It gives you comfort that you won’t ever fall too hard when your falling down the rabbit hole. Ideas are born as you cascade. Possibilities are endless as you stumble. Impossibilities disintegrate the further down you fall. When you hit rock bottom you’re dizzied with innovative passion and you’re one step closer to LoveLand. 

XOXOXLADYXOXOX

InnerSass

The heart of LadyLove is a positive self image of oneself or what I like to call a Lady’s InnerSass.  It is my vision to promote Ladies to find their InnerSass and capture that essence with my photography. To achieve a positive self image of oneself is just one part to finding your InnerSass. 

You can also look at this embodiment of self confidence as an alter ego. Mae West applied her InnerSass by creating for herself a character named, Diamond Lil in which she turned into a playwright.

Another part to finding your InnerSass is to know what you love about yourself and emphasize on those characteristics. And for the areas within yourself you would like to improve you must set healthy goals necessary to strengthen your value.  This is no easy process but the reward is most beneficial once you find that buried treasure and exhibit the precious jewel of poised reliance I call InnerSass. 

XOXOXLADYXOXOX

What is LadyLove?!?

LadyLove

A versatile word: a noun, a verb, an adjective. LadyLove is a creation of my incessant imagination, a state of being, and ever evolving.  LadyLove is loving the essence of being a Lady. There are many different definitions of what being a Lady embodies, so let me explain a couple of the vital organs that bring LadyLove to life.

                The heart of LadyLove is a positive self image of herself. When a Lady appraises her worth at a high market value and loves herself she pumps respect, passion, and bliss to every cell of her being. With each loving heartbeat the Lady begins to radiate LadyLove like a ray of sunshine. This may be one of the hardest steps to becoming a Lady when we live in a world filled with self doubt and unreasonable body image expectations. I have an 11 year old sister who is already feeling the pressures of society to maintain an unhealthy physique. No matter the shape or size of a Lady’s silhouette, she must learn that it is the beauty that lies within and respect for oneself that illuminates the exquisite elegance of a Lady. If someone is not happy with the way they see themselves reflected in the mirror they must seek out the love and value to make successful changes which leads me to the power source of LadyLove…the brain!

                The mastermind of what gives LadyLove vitality is drive. When a Lady is determined to always improve and better oneself she pumps passionate signals throughout the body enabling LadyLove to exist within. The saying, “Everything happens for a reason,” Comes into play with this vital brain force of LadyLove. When you come to accept this fact you perceive life as it happens, the good and the bad. You celebrate the good and strive to become better. You learn from the bad and apply those lessons learned to experience the good. This positive perception brings LadyLove to life charging the communication to the trillions of connections that harmonize drive, determination, and ambition that makeup the LadyLove intelligence.  

                LadyLove also internalizes kindness, respect, grace, and those are just to list a few characteristics that animate LadyLove. It is my goal to awaken the LadyLove that is hiding within every Lady whether they know it or not and then capture it within a photograph so Ladies can cherish that moment when they first discovered LadyLove for years to come!

LadyLove Photography

So I created this blog because I was inspired by my business LadyLove Photography. As the owner I have assumed the alter ego of LadyLove and this blog is to share MY InnerSass since I am usually capturing other Lady's InnerSass'. I haven't been doing a very good job on keeping up to date with  posting and revealing my InnerSass as time is of the essence and so very limited in my LoveLand. (Yes, along with my "main" alter ego I have created an alter world that I escape to in order to keep my sanity. Or keep my insanity. ) So I would LOVE to share with you my baby. My love. My EVERYTHING. And promise to offer more shimmers into my InnerSass glimmer by glimmer.

LadyLove Photography 

XOXOXLADYLOVEXOXOX

True Beauty

 Life is difficult, however once we realize this fact and accept it life becomes less and less difficult. I read this fact in a book I had borrowed from a friend. The book: The Road Less Traveled. The friend: Ocoy Pearson. I feel that this friend of mine has been placed into my life by God as a catalyst of my own transformation. She is a bright spirit that like us all have our own struggles but the weight of her struggles brightens the light that no matter what we are going through we must push through. Be strong. Be courageous. The Lord said this to Joshua three times before he went to battle to claim the land for Israel and those four words are a key element in the book of Joshua as well as our outlook on life.

I use to work at a group home and was blessed to have my path cross  with a struggling girl not too much younger than myself. She was like the older little sister I had always wanted but never had. We would laugh and talk about serious life issues and grow from each other. She had been going through some pretty intense family issues and a Lady had given her the following story to her,

"You are going through a transformation in your life right now. It’s not what you think .It’s what you see and it’s inside you. Consider for a moment the life of a butterfly .Long before it ever takes to flight long before it even became a caterpillar it was an egg. Programmed into the egg is a secret code that will someday transform that egg  into something miraculous. The egg knows nothing about the secret it carries. The caterpillar knows nothing about what it will become. Everything it does is instinctive. It doesn’t have to think about it. It just does what it has been programmed to do.

Over the course of its life it will go through several transformations before it becomes what it was ultimately created to be. Who its parents were doesn’t matter. How it was treated as a young caterpillar cannot stop the process. Who its friends are, who its enemies were, how many mistakes it made, or how much money it earned does not change the code. It was ultimately created to become something wonderful.

Now for a moment, consider your own life. Take away every outside influence, including your parents, your childhood, your family, your friends, your past (good or bad). Your present and your future. What do you have left? Anything?

If your answer is a giant “I don’t know” You will soon discover the secret that will change everything you believe about your life so far. The secret really isn’t a secret, because it’s yourself, you still have YOURSELF and you always will! That’s why I want you to discover what you have inside. You can only do that by transforming yourself from a caterpillar into the beautiful butterfly you have waiting to emerge within you.

The butterfly must struggle to escape the cocoon all by itself. It can’t be helped to escape the caterpillar shell because if that is done in nature the butterfly will die, because it will not gain the strength it needs to emerge from within itself and then fly free. Our wish for you is to become the butterfly you are meant to be!"

How truly amazing this story is to life and all of its creation. We are all programmed for something beautiful.  Everyone contains beauty within and it is up to us to have faith in that fact and the knowledge to keep striving in life for that beauty. No matter the struggle someone else always has it worse and someone will always have it better. If we accept the life we have and strive for positive transformation then isn't that in itself the "True Beauty"?

Kiss my SASS!!

When you see a beautiful 11 year old little girl crying about self body image you can't help but feel your heart break. At 11 years old my little sister broke down crying last night and was very hesitant in telling me what was wrong. After this big sister (a role I take to heart) applied some intricate prying techniques to get to the root of my little Lady's affliction, I found the cancer that had dimmed her light. Two little girls that my sister goes to school with have assumed the roles of bullies and whisper about her and give her dirty looks all the while staring at her stomach. Which in turn has planted the tumor of a distorted body image into my little Lady's thoughts having her think that she is fat. Now my little Tiki Kiki (a nickname for my sister from when she was a very little Lady!) is so far from fat that in fact she is the complete opposite. She practices mixed martial arts (MMA) at least three times a week, flips boys twice her size over her back and is a very active child. So as I listened to the hateful things that little kids do to each other I assumed the role of doctor to begin my very own treatments to remove the malice tumor that has planted itself into the thoughts of this little girl too young to be hurting over how she looks. 

With precision and the technique of Sass on hand I think I began my first successful round of chemo on the tumor of negative self body image. When I was about 12 years old I was definitely bigger than the other kids. At the age of 12 wearing a size 13, I was the fat girl. Teased by kids in my class wasn't a regular occurrence however the one time it did happen left scars in my memory to last to this day. I overheard two boys talking about how when I walked it sounded like Jello. I was heartbroken. I cried and the teacher somehow caught wind of the incident and mediated the situation. The memory was forgiven but the pain never forgotten. As the years progressed I only got bigger. At the age of 13 I weighed 150 pounds. At the age of 14 the scale read 170. There was a group of boys that always sat at the same lunch table together, some of which I thought were friends. Somehow my body image had become their target. I remember walking by them and they would call me the name, "Tafruoy". They were a rambunctious group of boys so I always thought that it was just some stupid name that they made up to be annoying. Never had I imagined how much hurt that word would cause, how much hate that word was saturated with, how much ignorance that word contained. I remember some would call me that name individually and sometimes if 2-3 of them were together. Then one time I remember walking up the stairs and their entire lunch table shouting "Tafruoy" at me. Frustrated the next morning before school as I was getting ready I decided to write down this word and try to make some sort of sense out of this word. So on a piece of paper I started writing.... "Tafrowy" "Taphrowy" Taphrouy" until I finally came to "Tafruoy" as soon as those letters were sprawled out on that piece of paper I had reversed those words to their true meaning, Y-O-U-R-F-A-T. A dagger to the heart, the tears became unstoppable, and I still had to face the day ahead filled with my tormentors and a heart full of hurt. Another deeply wounded scar that has been forgiven yet the pain still sits in a little piece of my heart. By the age of 17 I tipped the scales at 230lbs. Depressed and unhealthy physically, emotionally, and mentally my personal battle with my own self image tumor had poisoned my thoughts with suicide. I made an attempt by swallowing almost an entire bottle of diet pills. My cancer had become out of control. As years passed I lost weight and shrank my cancerous thoughts of self hatred and got down to the size I was at the age of 12. 

Using my experience as Dr. LadyLove's scalpel  to remove my Tiki's own painful tumor made the operation a success. Helping to heal my little sister's painful circumstances has empowered and inspired me to want to help others in the advocacy of Ladies positive self body image everywhere. Doing some research I have realized that their are quite a few people entering into raising people's self esteem movement. The media has served as a positive influence however, has had more of a negative impact on Little Ladies self image by plastering size 0's all over their highly viewed visual outlets. 

So with this I make my promise to raise awareness of how we must embrace everyone's body types and support a healthy lifestyle and not a size 0 or unrealistic body images. I promise to incorporate my new found self image activist role within the LadyLove movement and as always encouraging Ladies & Gents everywhere to find their inner SASS!! So that one day we can tell all of our haters to KISS MY SASS!!

 Lots of LadyLove,

XOXOXLADYXOXOX