I've spent all winter rocking an eggplant-colored and eggplant-resembling shoulder bag. It’s huge, made of soft leather, and was a pretty good buy (yes—– I bought a bag I could've made; I know, I know… and I'm sorry ). Anyway, don’t get me wrong, I love the bag, but I don’t love everything I carry in it. If you give me an inch, I'll take it. If you give me 3000 cubic inches, I will fill it. So, with spring in season, I felt as though I should take a lighter approach on life. I remembered a bag I made a few years ago in college, and decided it would be the perfect bag to ring in the spring. This cloth bag with metal handles opens like a bucket, so I can still fill it with my necessities (keys, cell, iPod, even a bottle of water) but is light enough to allow me and my Air-sign (Gemini) ways to float through the spring. I made a How To that you can check out here.

If you feel you need a more utilitarian accessory, you might find my laptop bag to be a handy how to.

This time last year, I was packing my bags. I’d received a grant, a month of free food and lodging upstate and permission to do nothing but go for long walks and write, my two favorite occupations. I sublet my place, bought a new pair of sneakers, and took off for the country. It rained all month, basically, and so I didn’t do as much walking as I’d planned; neither did I write as much as I hoped, though I wrote quite a bit. But it was nice to get out of town for a while, and into some relative seclusion; my sojourn upstate punctuated what I already sensed as a time of transition for me. I was leaving behind my life of fashion, and magazines articles, and concerts, and gossip, and retreating into my art. When I returned to the City, I shot my first film. I’m only finishing it, now.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve internalized my youthful schedule of school years and holidays, but summer coming on always whispers change to me. Fall, winter, spring – life is busy, time is short, there things to do, people to see and places to be, and it’s easy to get caught up in the daily swim of it all. But summer still feels like this grand pause, to me, an opportunity to reset and reacquaint myself with me. I always leave summer a little different than I started it, more me, for lack of any better way of explaining it. And then the leaves start falling and life starts chip-chipping away again, throwing up its not unwelcome distractions. The hardest part about trying to make art, I’ve found, art of any kind, is finding the right balance of paying attention to the world around you, and sealing yourself off from it in order to create. I like to play some tennis, too, and I like to get to the beach, and hit the occasional barbeque, but mostly, summer is when I like to tune the world out for a little while. It’s time.

And so, with that said: I’m taking off. The warm weather’s official now, and with a new season around the corner, the day has come for new adventures. All of you who have invested your time in my meandering thoughts for the past few months – thank you, and I hope that every once in a while, I’ve managed to entertain or engage you. More than anything else, I hope I’ve inspired you, occasionally, to find your own balance between the world outside and the world within, the frolic of trends and the firmament of personal style. Don’t be surprised if you hear from me again now and then, but for my last column, as well as a few tips on navigating bikini season, and a few thoughts on what the summer has in store, I’d like to leave you with a last piece of advice: Don’t take mine. You can go your own way.

This week BurdaStyle says hello to summer, and goodbye.

This week BurdaStyle says hello to summer, and goodbye.

LOTTE BERK

Damn you, Lotte Berk. Damn you, I’m thinking.

I can’t remember the name of this instructor, so I’m going straight to the source with my curses in Lotte Berk class tonight. We’re catbacked over the barre, crushing a gym ball between our thighs as we squeeze and lower and lift through the last of a thousand tiptoe plies. And three, and four, and five and… Damn you. Damn you.

Lotte Berk is my icon this week not because Lotte Berk is causing me pain, but because Lotte Berk is, thanks to the pain, getting me back into my bikini this summer.

For the uninitiated, Lotte Berk was a disciple of Joseph Pilates who figured out a way to intensify his dancer’s workout by incorporating ballet class moves, variegated and repeated ad nauseum in order to strengthen and lengthen and get the heart rate pumping. The Lotte Berk Method was adopted and so-named by one or several of her devotees, who opened studios. That’s the simple version, and the Method is pretty back-to-basics, when you get right down to it. That’s what drew me to Lotte Berk in the first place, in fact – I quit my last gym in a huff about six months ago, when they canceled the first and last exercise class I ever loved to make way for another pole-dancing workout. I doubt not that strippers have great bodies, but I feel there’s a sort of cart-before-the-horse mistake going on in making, um, stripping into “exercise.” Also: I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to avoid the sorry fate of working the pole, and there’s something a little gauche to me about nice, 9-5 middle class girls fetishizing the job. It all feels porny. But I digress.

Back to Lotte and the class I like to call “psycho-lates.” What I despise about Lotte Berk is exactly the same thing I love about it: The class makes me work. The exercises are designed precisely to force you into whatever muscle group is on the schedule; it’s really hard to cheat. And even when you’re slightly out-of-form on, say, a series of Pilates-inspired crunches, you wind up working your abs anyway, if not as deep down in the core as you’d get if you were doing everything just-so. I did Pilates for years and always found it an easy discipline to cheat my way through; likewise, I never cursed any of my Pilates instructors, and on the other hand, I never saw the well-nigh instantaneous results I have from Lotte. In my world, cursing and fitness go hand in hand.

The Lotte Berk name is falling out of favor these days. People are updating her routines with yoga stretches and extra fun, like the gym ball in my class, and otherwise trending up the Method in an attempt, I presume, to steal attention from pole dancing classes and the rest of the novelty workouts out there. The semi-famous Lotte Berk studio in New York City closed a while back. But if you’ve ever taken a Bar Method class, or any class taught at the barre, it’s probably Lotte Berk moves you’re doing. And with beach season approaching, they’re the best moves you can do. Just bear in mind my maxim as you squeeze and lift and lower, or tilt your pelvis heavenward for the umpteenth unbearable time: If you’re not cursing, it’s not working. Thank you, Lotte Berk. Thank you.

This week BurdaStyle says hello to summer, and goodbye.

FREEDOM

I give up. When I was a kid, the healthiest thing I could do was a spend a day in the sunshine. I’d be sacked out waching cartoons on a Saturday morning, or playing paper dolls some afternoon with a friend, and all of a sudden my mom would burst in, and deliver the edict: “Go outside.” Then, somewhere along the line, sunshine became an axis of evil and Mom starting packing gallons of SPF 60 sunscreen into my trunk every summer when I went to camp. More recently, the harmful effects of sunlight have been deemed so nasty, doctors and SPF retailers warn us that it’s not enough to bathe in sunscreen before a day at the beach – we’d better work sun guard into our everyday routine. The daily walk from my apartment to the subway station three blocks away, under cloudy skies, apparently cumulates frightening ultra-violet damage. I was a lifeguard. In Florida. I’m totally screwed.

Last summer, I finally lost patience with the sunscreen-industrial complex. It turns out that the vast majority of sunscreens are formulated with parabens, and parabens are the new cancer bogeyman. I don’t understand exactly what parabens do, or why they show up not only in sunscreen, but in virtually all deodorants, skincare essentials, lipsticks and foundations. I’m pretty sure parabens are associated with preservatives, and thus I’ve started to think of parabens as a little bit like corn syrup, an artifact of our processed, industrialized, formulated and additivized times, one that lurks, unbidden and unsuspected, in every seemingly innocuous product beckoning to us from store shelves and counters. There are other analogues, too – the chemicals in cleaning products, the isotopes that cook off the Teflon on non-stick pans. We are living in the age “When Technology Attacks!”

There seems to me to be two ways to approach life in this era. One is to go live in a bubble somewhere, like the Julianne Moore character in the movie Safe. If you’ve ever seen that movie – and if not, you should – you know that the bubble option isn’t a good one. Option two is to throw caution to the wind and assume we’re living the end times anyway, so why not go out in a blaze of glory? Eat trans fats. Get a sunburn. Stop recycling and start smoking. Why the hell not?

Or there’s this really boring third option, which is to chart a path through the middle, and keep on doing what we’ve been doing all along: Adapt to the new science, weigh the risks and benefits, try to be an intelligent consumer. A number of skincare companies are working to meet the demand for paraben-free products, from prestige skincare brands such as skyn ICELAND, which is entirely free of parabens, to drugstore lines like Cetaphil, which has introduced a few products sans parabens. Juice Beauty isn’t quite as organic and all-natural a line as the marketing wants you to believe, but it’s pretty good, and its SPF 30 light moisturizer is the highest-rated SPF I’ve found that’s free of parabens and does convincing double-duty as a humectant for the skin. Until the next round of science comes along to tell me why I’m wrong, I think Juice’s SPF is just the thing for a cloudy day and a walk to the train.

This week BurdaStyle says hello to summer, and goodbye.

SWIMWARES

Bathing suit season invites so many fitting room anxieties, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact, amid the skimpy butts and sagging tops, that bathing suits are clothes, too. They ought not be exempt from fashion, but as a general matter, they are. The only designers to think outside the box, swimwear-wise, are usually Brazilians like Rosa Cha, whose cut-out maillots and barely-there bikinis could strike fear in the heart of even the buffest, Bundchen-esque glamazon.

But there’s a new wave of swimwear arriving this summer, one that ought to bring some style poolside. Norma Kamai and Aussie line Zambesi are both offering retro-style stunners suitable for Esther Williams, while American Apparel, Abaete and recent Parsons grad Brette Sandler aim for a more ‘70s beachwear vibe. Even the basic bikini is getting an update, thanks to established designers such as Alice + Oliva and Ella Moss’s new swimwear collections, and the inventive prints seen on suits from newbies SYLA and Elissa Dunlop, who works with vintage fabrics.

Hard to find but well worth the effort, meanwhile, is Anna & Boy, an antipodean swimwear line launched by two former VOGUE Australia editors. The designers obviously love swimwear, and exploit the medium’s erstwhile design limitations by spraying counterintuitive color and patterns on stand-by bikinis, and bringing a high-fashion sense of proportion and line to one-piece suits. You can even wear them when you aren’t planning to get wet: Along with a pair of high-waisted jeans, the Anna & Boy suits are all you need for this summer’s late-era Summer of Love vibe.

This week BurdaStyle says hello to summer, and goodbye.

THIS BITES

I like naps. Over the past few years, I’ve developed my own little napping ritual, which involves catching up on the first ten or so minutes of my favorite NPR podcasts before I doze off, and then waking up to the familiar closing credits of shows such as Studio 360 and This American Life. A few months ago, I fell asleep to Fresh Air – Terri Gross’s soft, dulcet voice makes for a particularly good send-off to sleep – and woke up again a little later with the audio still going and my head spinning. Was that Alex Kapranos, the singer from Franz Ferdinand, on Fresh Air talking about food? Or was I dreaming? This had to be some kind of weird alternastate – rock dudes do not, as a general matter, go on NPR to regale high-minded interlocutors with tales of the road, and they certainly don’t go foodie. Tour dining is Taco Bell and backstage riders of vodka and Cheetos, yes?. But, no: I was definitely awake, and Alex Kapranos was definitely on Fresh Air, talking to Terri Gross about his punk-pop palate, promoting his book on that subject, Sound Bites. It was weird.

The indie-foodie fusion has blossomed into a full-bore trend. There are DJs with an online cooking show, and just in case you couldn’t make Coachella, or missed out Meltdown, Kara Zuaro can provide you with a taste of the summer music scene by means of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands. Comprised of over 100 hundred recipes from artists such as Devendra Banhart, Death Cab and the Decemberists, the cookbook puts paid to the myth that rockers subsist on a diet of pizza and beer. They also eat ramen, cf. Silkworm’s gourmand suggestion that combining ramen noodle flavors = culinary delight. On a more upscale note, Camera Obscura chimes in with a recipe for vegetarian paella and The Bad Plus offers up orecchiette with broccoli rabe. It’s hard to know what to make, musically, of a few contributions – Violent Femmes’ Wild Boar Ragu, for example – but others jibe nicely with the band’s albums, such as folksy Okkervil River’s recipe for homespun buttermilk pie. Turn on the stove, get cooking with a glass of sparkling red, summer’s grooviest drink, by your side, and while the rice is boiling, pause to wonder when the indie fitness book is coming out, because after a summer of Devendra’s bananas and graham crackers, trust me, we’re all going to be rocking the gym.

Playlist’s Best of the Rest, Summer Preview Edition:

1. Pop Werner 2007 promises a summer blockbuster season like none other: Spiderman, Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Fantastic Four and the Danny Ocean crew are all returning, sequel-style; meanwhile, sure-to-be behemoth films such as Transformers and The Simpsons Movie will be taking a loud crack at the opening weekend B.O. this summer, as well. Hollywood execs are ginned up for tough competition, and what with all the must-sees lined up, it’s easy to imagine that none of us will catch much sunshine between May and September. But one potential blockbuster stands out from the crowd: Werner Herzog’s Recue Dawn, starring Christian Slater. Largely a remake of Herzog’s seminal early film Little Dieter Learns to Fly, Rescue Dawn tells the story of an American pilot trapped in Vietnam, and if that dark plotline wasn’t strange enough in the season of popcorn flicks, stranger yet is the fact that Hollywood has hired Herzog to direct anything at all. Herzog is legendarily nutty, as well as a cinematic genius; the behind-the-scenes hijinks on his ‘70s Klaus Kinski pictures, such as Aguirre: The Wrath of God, put to shame any travels into the heart of darkness that happened on the set of Apocalypse Now. His doc Grizzly Man proved Herzog could play commercially – the film was a surprise success – but it’s hard to imagine the great director taking development notes from the studio’s MBAs. Advance word is that the movie is pretty amazing, and well worth a side-trip from sequeldom.

1. Pop Tarts This summer, the ladies have it. Hot on the heels of Lily Allen’s breakthrough record came Amy Winehouse, with her dirty R&B odes to rehab and romance, and early summer sees the bow of the sophomore LP by Feist, Sade for the smart set. But the girl who’s going to rock your world this summer is Nicole Atkins: Along with her band, The Sea, Atkins is set to conquer on the strength of ballads “Neptune City” and “The Way It Is,” earth-shakers that’ll break your heart. Get a sneak peek on Myspace.
2. Popsicles Ice cream’s fatty. Fro-yo’s second-rate. Get your licks off popsicle sticks this summer. You can make ‘em at home, and make ‘em however you want. And when that gets boring, bring back the frozen banana.

This week BurdaStyle says hello to summer, and goodbye.

YOU STUD

Conjure summer style and the pictures in your head are invariably the same: Frothy, airy, breezy on the one hand, short, sexy, punchy on the other. There’s not a lot of room in the summer wardrobe for tough-girl chic, functional and urbane fashion with a touch of baditude. Last summer, girls in New York walked around town in slouchy boots, barely conceding the look to July’s weeklong, 100 degree heat wave; behind that look, I suspect, was the urge to toughen up last summer’s gossamer shifts. We’ve got more shifts in store this coming heat wave season, as well as a summer due, as the last ones have, to break all kinds of temperature records. Boots are out. Instead, look to smart designers like Tiffany Tuttle to fill the void: The Chaconne sandal in her LD Tuttle line beats the heat with some punkish panache, courtesy of the black studs poking out of the leather. If flip-flops bleat, these sandals snarl. Midnight-blue pedicure optional.

The next time you find yourself with nothing to wear, and perhaps, a few extra hours in the morning, try making this simple and easy dress! This dolman sleeve dress is made by folding a piece of fabric a few times, cutting two curves, and stitching! It could be described as fashion origami! The greatest thing about this technique is not just how easy it is to make, but how easy it is to alter. You can make turn this into a jacket, a blouse, or simply just a longer dress, which, as the picture shows, I did NOT choose to do. Oh well, it’s the spring time. I've got legs and sewing skills to show off!

Some of you might have wondered what went on lately, not hearing from us. Some of you heard it already, and now it’s official: We will have a new design! And of course, it’s about time to give you a little preview.

We've stayed up long hours, worked on weekends, and skipped quite a bit of social life to be able to improve the structure and launch new tools. We've read your comments and made sure to incorporate your feedback. E.g. we will offer you to search patterns by the amount of fabric you have. Also, forum threads will indicate where new posts are made, and you will be notified when comments are left on your thread. Very exciting is a highly flexible user profile. On your personal page, you can share pictures of anything, your dog, your cat, your sewing place, your family, anything you like.

With our new Category “BurdaStyle Backstage” we will also keep you in the loop with what’s going on behind the scenes: New patterns in progress, design and site feature updates, photo shoot insights and and and.

So, stay tuned for our new Backstage Report!

Benedikta and Nora

We are right now working on the new creations to get them ready for the photo shoot beginning of June. On the picture you see Benedikta sewing shorts and in the background you find a shirt that is being prepared by Nayantara!