bunnyshop shopping fashion blog

Road Test: Cut + Paste

Today we realized that the smile we often smile at passersby who have, for some reason, smiled at us, is actually a horrible grimace. We only realized this because we happened to be walking past a mirrored door after smiling [sic] back at someone we recognized in our neighborhood. Honestly, it was sort of that look you might get after seeing Medusa's head, Clash of the Titans style. Horrifying. Really. Maybe, with just a little more energy, we could use it ourselves, to freeze unicorns into rock. Now that we think about it, Andromeda in that movie was our very first fashion idol, with her gold arm band.

OK, now that we've lost anyone over the age of 15, we move on. To Cut + Paste, this week's road-tested website. And one of our new favorites. It's like that adorable design store on your street (ours is called Loom, and it is in Park Slope, yet we are in San Francisco. Tragically, this means we were completely unavailable for John "Artie Bucco" Ventimiglia's coke-fueled cannonball run down Seventh Avenue.) Lacking Loom, we have Cut + Paste, and they have loads of those new designers we just love, love, love.

Site: cutxpaste.com
Vibe: Indie! Crafty! Fun!
Our favorites: Ooh, so many. Now, we are just suckers for shit like this, but we adore this wallet of hugging bears. Seriously. It makes us a little weepy. It almost makes up for that toilet paper commercial with those poor bears. From Frozen Peas, $26. Also, from B. Kao, fun applique \ embroidery hobo. With planes! $50. Also totally into the embroidery patterns from Sublime Stitching, which are very cheap. Did we much fun! Indie! And crafty! And to wrap up the Parade of Praise, we're also totally into this RIP MUTHA halter top, and the love birds cards from Foxy & Winston.
Ease of Use: We're going to cut out this category next week, because if it weren't easy to use, we'd be cursing it, and not writing about it.
Love of Wares: We always feel exceptionally smart buying new designers, and braggy about it. Cut + Paste allows us to feel smart and brag more often, and that is a good thing. Plus: We are just totally in love with those bear wallets.

Now, please suggest a site, and we will buy something there, and discuss our feelings for it. Just let us know.

The Road Test: Fred Flare

Today we were on a plane, and we sat next to an 11-year-old, the kind of 11-year-old who makes you text things like "You know who's [our] favorite person to sit next to on the plane? An 11-year-old with sharp elbows and a sugar addiction." She knocked a Diet Pepsi into our magazine pouch; she laughed at us when we wrapped a jacket around our head so we could hear our Dashboard Confessional (we know: it's practically retro at this point) over the engines. But then her grandmother yelled at her, which in principle we would not have minded if the yelling had been about harassing her seatmate instead of her general level of intelligence, and then we let her plug her earphones into our laptop and go through our iTunes library.

"Er, Arcade Fire?" we said.

"Do you have any 50 Cent?" she said.

We did not. Or we did, but we did not let her know this. We did, however, have an Eminem CD we'd been forced to purchase at Wal-Mart and, thus, without explicit lyrics. We enjoyed when she asked us how old she we were, and when we told her, screamed "You're 30!" down the aisle. We also enjoyed it when her grandmother said we were lying to her. We were surprised, and pleased, when she hugged us goodbye.

Kids are weird, is all we're saying. This post has nothing to do with kids. The problem is that fucking fucking fucking American Airlines is run by a collection of mice and hamsters, and the bag-handling skills of mice and hamsters is so poor that it kept us in the airport until it was too late to call anyone we know and tell them how despite knowing better, we let a sugar-addled 11-year-old listen to rap music so that she would think we were "cool."

"So anyway," is the only way we know how to get out of that story. So anyway, this is the debut of a new column here, which we will probably do once and forget, like le pauvre Extreme Makeover: Home Edition live blog. This is where we pick a website, order something from it, and then tell you what that is like. Unbelievably, we were once paid a dollar a word to do this. Now we are paid in love. We dream about the money.

Moving forward! For our inaugural purchases, we went with Fred Flare. To be honest, there was so much we wanted to buy, we had to make up a little slide show. You can see how this column is nothing more than an excuse for us to buy shit online.

Anyhoo:

Site: fredflare.com
Vibe: Urbn [sic] but cheaper
What We Bought: The DIY Handbook ($19.95), the daisy tote, ($12), and the lamb tee ($9.99) (see t-shirt of the week)
What We Spent: $41.94, plus $6.95 shipping for UPS ground. Next-day is $30.95
Our Favorite Thing: Besides the stock: Pick up your order for free in Willamsburg. That is so random. N. 10th Street between Driggs and Bedford. Honestly, that just amazes us.
Ease of Use: Occasionally we find ourselves screaming in frustration at website. This was not one of those times.
Love of Wares: High. The, er, conceit of this piece only necessitates that we buy one thing, but there was so much to love, and most of it cost less than a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, which, by the way, have been absent from our Safeway for the last two weeks. Bizarre. We loved it so much, we made up this little photo album of all the things we liked. We did not anticipate doing this, and then it was a huge failure. So now, we will just say that we will feature a different item every day, or reasonably close to that. You know it'll be like every ninth day. But: we will try.

Now. Do you have somewhere to recommend, or an e-commerce site you'd like us to try? Just let us know.