The Week in LLG: a blog digest

Held over from yesterday, (I've been a bit sick), the digest of LLG posts from last week.

Emily Bond textile collection: Dachshunds, terriers, horses & more
True Blood: The Sookie Stackhouse novels
Who knew snow wear could be so glam? Gucci snow boots
The Bloggies: the 2020 Weblog Awards
Snowed in in Northamptonshire: The English countryside
Spring is Coming!: Daffodils
Reader Question: What do I wear in London in May?
Catherine Colebrook Homewares: Reader giveaway worth £102

2010 Weblog Award nominations

The Bloggies started up ten years ago, and are now the Web's most established blog awards ceremony. Nominations for the 2010 Weblog Awards have to be made by 11pm today US Eastern Time (or tomorrow at 4am GMT).

I think it's important to support our on-line community and recognise the wonderful blogs out there. Voting categories include Best Australian, Asian, Food, Travel, Fashion, Use of Photography, Humorous, Political, Music, Topical, and GLBT, so get voting. I had a great time picking out and nominating all my favourites. (You can nominate up to three in each category.)

Voters must nominate at least three different blogs, and there is no limit to the number of categories for which a single blog may be nominated. The contest is open to any blogs that existed for a period of time during the year 2009, so blogs that were discontinued during 2009 are also eligible.

ps Don't forget to go to the end to fill in yr email & captcha for yr vote to be counted

Click here to nominate your favourite blogs of 2009. Good luck everyone!

Raising Ruby: a service dog in training

Service Puppy...Or Service Bunny?



Of the hundreds and hundreds of blogs on my Google Reader, one of my favourites is Raising Ruby. It's the story of an adorable Golden Labrador puppy on her way to becoming a service dog for an individual with a disability in Colorado.

Her trainer is a puppy raiser for Canine Partners of the Rockies, who took charge of Ruby when she was 10 weeks old, and who will have her for about 18 months until she is ready to enter Advanced Training.

Ruby's trainer, The Other End of the Leash, found me first and I'm so glad she did. I particularly like reading blogs that have nothing whatsoever to do with my daily life or my career, and that teach me (without preaching) all about something entirely new.

I have experience in my family of how the companionship of dogs can help someone with a disability, and the idea that someone who may be lonely and restricted in their daily activities can benefit both from companionship and comprehensive aid from a dog is quite, quite wonderful.

ps If you'd like to see the puppies before they left for their training, click here and prepare to fall in love.

Blog Housekeeping: LLG has a new domain name

Just a quick post to say that you may have noticed that the LLG domain name has changed overnight from libertylondongirl.blogspot.com to www.libertylondongirl.com

What do you need to do?
For the moment, my blog host Blogger will automatically direct everyone to the new domain address.

However, from December (if I can can get it done by then), LLG is moving to a shiny, sparkly new site, just in time for Christmas, and the blogspot address will cease to function.

So, if you could update your links (and any links within posts too if you can be bothered) now to www.libertylondongirl.com you will experience no cessation in LLG activities. (Of course, if you are fed up to the back teeth with my inchoate ramblings, this is a great opportunity to say sayonara LLG!)

Also: some words of advice from a seasoned blogger who wishes she had known better back in 2006 when she started her blog: if you have any intention at all of growing your blog readership beyond your best friend and your mother, buy your domain name and point it towards your blog.

Fortunately no one had speculatively bought libertylondongirl as of last week & I was able to snap up both the .com & .co.uk domains, but it happens so there's another reason to cover your back.

Domain names aren't fearfully expensive, I think I paid around £40 for both for two years and Google doesn't charge you to use a custom domain, as opposed to the .blogspot address. (Wordpress.com will charge you $10.) In any case, it is well worth it if, like me, you have built up lots of lovely links & press, as Blogger won't let you transfer any of that to your new blog.

Just think of all the time (& possibly money) you'll save: I had to spend ages yesterday changing all the links to here on my work portfolio website, and I still have the blogspot address on all my business cards, which I will need to update.

Blogger don't make it transparently simple to set up - they wld much rather you used .blogspot in your address, but it isn't complicated to change to a custom domain and, once you figure it out, it takes five minutes, tops. Hell, if I can do it, you certainly can.

So what are you waiting for?

The Sunday Times shows some blogger love

The Sunday Times is all over us bloggers this week. There's a properly excellent piece by India Knight (herself blogging here) on women bloggers, which mentions many of my blog faves including the incomparable MTFF, a piece by Belgian Waffling on her blogging addiction with a beautiful picture of a waffle BW herself, and last and very much least, a couple of acerbic comments in the Style section on Anna Wintour's mufti from Show Me Your Wardrobe & myself.

The Times online didn't run the photo we are commenting on, so I reproduce part of the piece below (I think we can all agree I am probably off La Wintou's Christmas card list now):

Blog off! What our bloggers think of Anna Wintour in dress-down shocker

Libertylondongirl.blogspot.com
Staring at Anna Wintour across the Fashion Week catwalks, I’ve always wondered what she might wear if she did normal. And now I know: she looks just like my mother. But with shinier hair.



( I would like to make it clear that my mother is the chic-est mother I know.)

The way of the blogroll

Inspired by a mea culpa blogroll post on my friend MTFF's most excellent blog, I thought that this may be a good point at which to lay out the LLG policy on blogrolls.

I have more or less stopped regularly maintaining the LLG reciprocal blog roll which lurks at the bottom of this page. It's just a bit out of control now. I do get the odd request for inclusion which I file in a dedicated folder and every two or three months I go through it and add and subtract as necessary.

Instead of using blogrolls to keep track of other blogs as I did in the days when LLG was a tiny blog, I now use an RSS reader – Google Reader in my case, Bloglines, previously, where feeds to hundreds of blogs to which I have subscribed are aggregated so that I can read all the latest blog entries in one convenient place. I have a folder for everyone that leaves comments regularly on my blog so that I can repay the favour when I can, one for other fashion blogs, one for everyday reads, one for everyday miscellany and so on. If I were to use blogrolls on LLG to do this, the lists would run pages long.

I choose not to use Blogger Following for the same reason, although I make it available for my readers who do choose to do so: the list would be too long to manage. (I will also be leaving Blogger in the near future, so it makes sense to have my blog lists held externally.)

So don’t assume that because you aren’t on a blogroll on LLG or that I haven’t ‘Followed’ you, that I don’t read you – ten to one, I’ll be voraciously reading your latest posts through my RSS reader.

I do have two blogrolls which are relatively up to date: the list of my personal friends who blog, because otherwise they’d be lost in the endless blogroll at the bottom of LLG; and the Thank you for Mentioning LLG list, which acts as a personal recommendation & thank you to those blogs or websites and an aide memoire for me of the things that have been said about LLG out there in the ether.

But there are often omissions – if you don’t use Blogger Following, adding blogs to a blogroll is a bit more complicated than a one click action and, most importantly, don’t forget that LLG is not a paid project, so money work has to take precedence over blog admin, much as I wish that wasn’t the case.

So, if you are someone with whom I have a proper two way relationship, ether or real world, and I haven’t included you, prod me – as MTFF did recently and tell me, rather than glowering away in the ether. I’ll be grateful, mortified, and do my best to rectify it immediately.

Blog Awards & Memes

I have been very remiss over the past six months in acknowledging blog awards and memes. I'm about to do a big catch-up post on LLG, so if you are one of the lovely bloggers who has been kind enough to give LLG an award that I haven't acknowledged on here, I'd be very grateful if you could leave a comment here to remind me, or drop me an email at libertylondongirl at gmail.com

Thank you! LLGxx

The Daily Telegraph: 20 Best Fashion Blogs

Well, I was thrilled to wake up yesterday to an email from Kiki telling me that LLG had been included in The Daily Telegraph's 20 Best Fashion Blogs list, alongside such luminaries as The New York Times' The Moment, The Selby, Style Bubble and Jak&Jill.

Quick edit: Just received an email here in America to say that the list ran in print in The Sunday Telegraph's Stella magazine today: a magazine I love. I am thrilled!

So, thank you all my current readers for continuing to read LLG: I still find it hard to believe that this blog, which was originally my letters home to London from New York, has grown into something more.

If this is your first visit here: thank you so much for stopping by. Feel free to enter the wonderful Ormonde Jayne Bathing Oil giveaway in the post below, and to take a look at the links to various LLG posts here to give you an idea of the random things about which I write:

A Manhattan Birthday : Misbehaving in style
Breasts vs The Fashion Industry
My Favourite Christmas Present : the perfect heirloom handbag
Dating: Why Do I Bother?
Mushrooms & Mozzarella: LLG's guide to weight gain
Cooking in the English Countryside
The Ivy in Los Angeles (Gratuitous celeb spotting)
How to Make Exercise Pleasurable
Maelstrom at The Met: New York at its Best
What Fashion Editors Wear (when no one is looking)

that's a first

I've just suspended all comments for a post I wrote yesterday. I haven't done this before but I was starting to get a whole load of missing the point comments &, in one case, a really rather nasty remark. I don't like personal nastiness seeping onto LLG, (ah hello my old friend Anonymous), and nor do I want people getting their knickers in a twist, so it was just easier to suspend that particular forum.

Some people seemed to take it extremely personally that I was recommending a site that ran photographs of uber stylish, magazine quality (but not always lavish) weddings, and went into extended riffs about how emotions and family were more important etc etc.

I agree completely with them that those things are more important than colour co-ordinating your favours, or whatever.

And if the post was about weddings, bring it on. But it wasn't.

I was recommending Style Me Pretty as one of many sources of inspiration for throwing parties, for beautifully designed letterpress for any occasion, for ravishing flowers and for clever Etsy & vintage finds. They promote young designers, great photographers and interesting vendors, many of whom have flourishing businesses outside of the nuptial world. That's it.

There are many sources of entertainment inspiration out there, and I would hope that everyone is clever enough to take what they need from them and ignore the hyperbole and excess, in the same way that we ignore much of what happens on the fashion runway when it comes to actually getting dressed.

Style Me Pretty wedding blog

I read a lot of blogs. And I know I have several memes to which I need to reply, but I wanted to write about the wedding website Style Me Pretty in the meantime.

I'm not getting married, have no plans to get married, am not even sure I really get the whole dressing up in a white frock/spending thousands of pounds celebrating a union that has a 40% chance of failure thing, but I do love me a good party. And I love even more the throwing of a good party.

And goodness these women know how to throw a party: the wonderful typography, letterpress invitations & printed brilliance,


Photograph: Heidi Ryder Photography

the always sensational flowers with never a hint of Interflora horridness,


Photograph: Kate Headley Photography

the Etsy & vintage finds, the pretty dresses, the strings of twinkle lights & Japanese lanterns. It's just glorious.

Go on take a look. It's all just ravishing.

Surely newspapers know what they are talking about? Right?

I am confused. The Wall Street Journal (on Friday) and The New York Times (Sunday) ran stories on fashion bloggers, both of which made glaring factual errors. Both newspapers are known to have rigorous fact checking policies. So how could such basic mistakes have been made?

The errors were as follows: The New York Times piece by Alice Pfeiffer said that Susanna Lau of Style Bubble was designing for Urban Outfitters. Ms Lau confirmed that this was untrue on her Twitter feed this evening. (Maybe they were confusing her with Jane Aldridge of Sea of Shoes who has designed for UO?)

In addition her blog was misnamed at first mention: it was called Susie Bubble instead of the correct Style Bubble, although later on in the piece it was called by the correct title.

The journalist also seemed unable to make up her mind about the location of the blogger The Cherry Blossom Girl. In one paragraph, she call her, "a blogger and designer from London", and in a succeeding paragraph she becomes,"the Paris-based creator of the Cherry Blossom Girl blog". If the writer couldn't be bothered to check with her personally, a simple wiki search would elicit the information that she is French, and based in Paris.

So, piss-poor copy editing (failing to weed out repetition, errors, incoherency & structure problems) throughout the piece in addition to the lack of fact-checking.

The Wall Street Journal's piece by Katherine Rosman asserted that Jane Aldridge had, "decided not to return for her senior year of high school." On her blog today Ms Aldridge issued a rebuttal: “This is untrue...I am currently finishing up my English credit and will graduate with the rest of my class in 2010...I didn't drop out of school."

It’s common for the print media to bash the blog world. Common criticisms & mutterings run along well-worn tracks: bloggers are amateurs, they don’t fact check, they peddle rumour for truth, they are loose cannons in the news world, they shouldn't be allowed to play with the grown-ups.

So how can two of the most famous, venerable newspapers in the world run copy that has basic mistakes of exactly the type for which bloggers are lambasted? There is a certain irony in the knowledge that when the so-called bastions of proper journalism attempt to cover the blog world rigorous fact checking flies out of the window.

As a print journalist, I‘m unusual in the fashion blogosphere: most independent bloggers aren't hacks. And, in this case, my print experience makes me particularly well placed to comment on this story, as I’ve worked on one of the newspapers that ran the inaccurate stories. I know just how much they pride themselves on their fact checking. Certainly, when I was in my old position, anyone mentioned in an article I wrote had to be rung up to get the facts about them verified. So God knows what went wrong here. Surely they don't believe that the blog world should be treated to lower standards of journalism?

It's also worth noting that The Wall Street Journal piece, whilst mentioning the bloggers' real names, failed to mention the names of their blogs, (bloggers are usually identified by their blog names; even regular readers would be hard put to identify a blogger's real name), thereby rubbing in the fact that they just don't get it.

Would it be too hard to commission journalists who comprehend their subject matter?

Blog Housekeeping

F.Tape, the London-based industry directory, asked me to participate in this Blogger Vision feature – Q&As with, ahem, leading fashion bloggers, amongst whom were my long time blog friends Kingdom of Style, Disney Roller Girl, Jeanine Tam of The Coveted and Rebekah Roy of Stylist Stuff.

I've been given an I Love Your Blog award by sweet Westendmum, who writes an enchanting blog about living in Central London. Very kindly she has absolved me of any need to pass it on, but I shall give it to So Lovely, in the hope that she blogs more. Her thoughts are always engaging and I love her style.

Liberty London Girl now has a Facebook page! If you don't Twitter or use an RSS feed, it can a useful way to keep up with new posts, as well as LLG news. There's a Facebook click through box on the sidebar to the right which will take you there.

Speaking of which, if you put your email address in the little box to the right hand side, once a day you will receive all that day's LLG posts straight to your inbox.

A kind commentator thought that my email address had disappeared. It hasn't: it's on my Blogger profile. For future reference, it's libertylondongirl@gmail.com

I do try to keep on top of all my blog email, but I do get a huge volume in my inbox. To make life simpler, please could you give emails a subject so I can find them easily?

Blogroll requests: please can you email these, with 'Blogroll' in the subject line? I know I've had a lot recently through comments, but I just haven't been able to keep up, and am no longer able to accept requests through comments.

Sign of the times

Five years ago, if the three of us (Muv, Lil's sis, me) had walked into the house after a long day out together, Muv would have gone to the kitchen to make some tea & talk to the hounds, and lil'sis & I would have gone upstairs to our rooms to slump on our beds, read, stare at the ceiling. (Doesn't everyone revert to teenage behaviour at their parent's homes?)

I rather like that we all now head to the kitchen together to check our email, (the walls of the house are too thick to get wi-fi reception elsewhere), and hang out.

I also feel rather vindicated that, after years of my mother telling me that I spend too much time on my laptop, she has landed in the information age with a bang.

Yup, this woman of sixty-four has not only worked out how to email and to play on the internets, but she has started a blog. I set it up for her remotely from New York one rainy Sunday afternoon and, after a little trial and error, and quite a lot of shouting at each other, she took to writing blog posts like the proverbial duck.

She's still a little shaky in the whole replying to comments/leaving comments on other blogs arena, but she's getting the hang of it day by day.

And, most exciting of all, she turns out to be a really good writer. Properly good. If you like stories about delicious food, country kitchens, the English countryside, gardens, friendship and dogs, do check out A Life Reclaimed.

RSS Feed changes

I've had to change my RSS feed due to problems beyond my control. So, if you have subscribed to LLG in a reader, (such as Google Reader or Bloglines) or via the email form to the right, you will almost certainly need to re-subscribe. I've added an RSS subscription box there too for ease of use.

I do apologise for any hassle, LLGxx

Blog Housekeeping

In preparation for some changes here at LLG, I'm starting to go through all my linkage blogrolls to check for reciprocity. (These were the links I added in response to linkage requests or in return for being linked on other blogs.)

If a blog to which I currently link is defunct or has no reciprocal link to LLG then the blogroll link on here will be removed this weekend. If you think I've made a mistake in removing you or, equally if you would like to exchange links, then please leave me a comment or email me at libertylondongirl@blogspot.com LLGxx

Blimey! Liberty London Girl in French Vogue!

I was beyond thrilled to see a Tweet from lovely July Stars alerting me to LLG's inclusion at no3 in French Vogue's list of Twelve Twitters & bloggers to follow.

"Pointus, originaux et souvent très personnels, informatifs mais aussi amusants, intimes et décalés, voici 12 comptes Twitter à suivre, surtout lorsqu'on est accro de mode."

I'm included, along with The Sartorialist, Garance Doré, Dior, Colette, DvF, Maison Kitsune, Chanel Iman & Dita von Teese.

Here's what they said: "Très pointue et calée sur la mode, elle assiste à toutes les soirées, les défilés et les événements dignes d'être mentionnée. Le tout est commenté avec une assiduité qui permet d'être à la page à chaque instant. Une bible!"

Toxic commentators

I woke this morning to find a particularly toxic comment on the blog. I don’t get that many & usually I just hit reject as they are always from our dear friend Anonymous. I figure why give them the oxygen if they don’t have the balls to leave their vitriol attached to an actual identity?

But this comment was hilarious. According to my new un-friend this blog comes straight from the realm of my imagination. An imagination, apparently, that aspires to a particular fantasy lifestyle it could never achieve as an ‘unemployed hack’.

I didn't really want to respond, but it occurred to me that other people might be laboring under the misapprehension that this blog is fiction. So this seems a good point at which to make it clear to you all, for the record, that this blog, which started out as my letters home to England, is a work of non-fiction in its entirety.

And that’s quite apart from the fact that I am far too lazy to invent & document an entire life. That’s for novel writing, not for a blog. Everything about which I write I have done. But, equally, I am no Dooce. Not everything I have done I write about: my sex life, my family’s problems, a few well-known friends, some private events all remain off record.

This also seems the place to make it clear that whilst I have been lucky enough to do some amazing things in my private life, as a style writer & editor in the real world for some ten years or more, I do get offered complimentary experiences, some of which I write about on here. But I’d like to make it clear that I use the same parameters on the blog that I do in real life: if I'm comped & I like it, well & good, but if I'm comped & I don’t, then expect me to say so.

Anonymous also picks up on a typo and uses it to try to crucify me (&, by extension, the entire fashion industry). May I point out that this is a blog? I don’t have the benefit of sub-editors or production people to hone my copy for me. I type straight onto the screen, often late at night; spelling mistakes & errors happen occasionally. And, please, readers, I absolutely want to be told (politely) when I make them, so that I can correct them immediately.

All I have left to say to Anonymous is that aspiring to be ‘a genuinely cool cruiser’ is so far from my list of ambitions as to be risible. Off you go Anonymous and cruise elsewhere. You are not wanted on here. (Or anywhere else I suspect.)


The comment below: (with its own typing errors faithfully recorded)

ah dear Liberty Girl,
if only it were all true and not the fantasy of an unemployed hack. A genuinely cool cruiser would KNOW that C. Still is spelled with a Y (Clyfford)- but then again, standards are pretty low in the fashion business.
keep on dreamin' > London Spy


Me in the Ritz Carlton San Francisco bathroom in case anyone doubts I was there!

The Times Top 20 Fashion Twitterers

There's been much debate about Twitter with non-users writing users off as loony tunes. I'm not going to defend the nation of 'craven solipsists' that lurk on Twitter, but instead direct you to the utterly brilliant Tania Kindersley's* blog piece on the subject here. Oh and Miss Whistle nailed it here too

Anyway, that was by way of a justification intro to thank The Times fashion team for popping Liberty London Girl in at no 6 on their Top 20 Fashion Twitterers list today. Being included is pretty thrilling (Really? these people want to know what I am up to? Okay then), especially when I am rubbing shoulders with the likes of French Vogue, The New York Times & WWD. And when, frankly, I've gone off the boil a bit on the fashion front of late. (Too much eating, drinking, exploring & lunacy in California.)

But, best of all, discovering that the LLG Twitter feed received the most nominations from @Timesfashion followers on Twitter was most heart-warming. Thank you everyone.

If you haven't yet been sucked into the Twitter universe, my feed runs on the column to the right, and you can click through to the main Twitter site from there.

*Tania & Sarah Vine's book Backwards in High Heels is so good that I have bought it for all my girlfriends. Read India Knight's rave review here, and BUY it immediately here.

A Tiger In The Kitchen: My Year of Eating Ferociously

From the moment I arrived in South East Asia aged nineteen, I didn't stop eating and could happily spend the entire day eating from all the different food carts in the Singapore hawker centres. Then I needed to learn how to cook laksa and roti canai and all the rest, so headed to the kitchens of the childrens homes in Singapore and in Malaysia where I volunteered. Leaning over the shoulders of the long-suffering chefs, I stuck spoons in soups and asked hundreds of questions

Cheryl Tan, an old fashion writer colleague of mine in New York, grew up in Singapore, & is similarly obsessive about the food of her youth. And, also like me, spends her time in New York eating her way around the city's restaurants and cooking up a storm at home.

She's just started up her first blog A Tiger In The Kitchen: My Year of Eating Ferociously where she intends to document her food adventures. She writes beautifully, so do go take a look.

Liberty London Girl news: Inclusion in The Online Fashion 100

Well, this is exciting! I've just received an email to say that Liberty London Girl has been included as one of just four independent bloggers in The Online Fashion 100, an ebook list of the 100 most inspirational, interesting and influential people behind the UK's online fashion industry, which is featured today in The Independent (UK).

Vogue.co.uk describes it thus: "The Online Fashion 100 features entrepreneurs, bloggers, marketers, photographers, ecommerce managers and the most powerful online editors working today"

I do feel a bit of a fraud being on a UK fashion list as, although I am a gen-u-wine fashion editor & writer, since LLG started up in 2007, it has always strayed from the fashion path, being a repository for my thoughts on everything from food to hotel reviews as well as giving a window into the world of the fashion editor. And, of course, although I am English through & through, I do live in America.

Still I'd like to give a big thank you to Leon Bailey Green who complied the list, and congratulations to the three other independent bloggers who have been included. It can be hard getting your voice heard as an independent blogger, and I am mighty proud to be keeping company with these superstars:
My beloved Queen Michelle of Kingdom of Style
Rebekah Roy of Stylist Stuff
The UK's biggest supporter of emerging designers: Susannah Lau of Style Bubble