Michelle L. Rusk's Blog, page 15

Waxing Nostalgic

Seven years. Seven years of Chelle Summer.

It’s hard to believe. On days where I feel frustrated that things aren’t moving fast enough, i should spend a few extra minutes looking at how far I come, how much I have created in the past seven years, and how I’ve made my sewing and designing skills even better.

This photo remains one of my favorites– taken in 2016 at Bolsa Chica State Park just north of Huntington Beach. I don’t know how many bags, dresses, swimsuits, and coverups Greg and I have schlepped from the car across the sand to an open spot on the beach. We’ve done it everywhere, more now than before, and we’ll continue to do it to make Chelle Summer what I want it to be, and what I know it can be.

It started with a bucket bag made from a vintage dress and morphed into much more than that. It started because I decided to start creating what I wanted and didn’t see in the stores. Now there’s very little you’ll find me shopping for (mostly shoes and sunglasses) because I can make so much of it.

Chelle Summer isn’t just a clothing brand, it never really was, because I have too many baskets of eggs I’m working on. Chelle Summer isa a lifestyle, it’s about being true to yourself and what makes you happy, what inspires you.

My hope is that each year, while maybe the climb is taking longer than I thought, that I do continue this journey forward. There is still much to share and much to create.

Thank you for coming along for the ride.

July Inspiration

It’s supposed to be July inspiration about avoiding distractions, some new handbags I made, and recent vintage fabric I bought….but I think it’s really about videobombing Lilly and her new partner Goose.

Peace in the Water

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve become aware of it recently more than ever– when I step into the pool to for a swim, it’s like everything that worries me falls away.

While I don’t profess to be any great swimmer (I never could get the breathing right no matter how many times I tried), I just love to be in the water. Maybe it’s because there’s something about taking the stress off my feet and legs that get tired of holding me up.

Or maybe the water is filled with hope.

I have written and talked before how family vacations were the happiest times for me and all about the Holiday Inn or other motel swimming pool. My husband Greg will say that you just need to give me a motel with a pool in the parking lot and I’m set. But I also spent summers with my friends at a swimming pool that had once been a quarry in my hometown of Naperville, IL. Or maybe it’s just because we’re taught that to have a swimming pool, is status, it’s prestige.

It’s more than that. My pool guy will say that no one uses a pool more than I do. Sure, I like to look out the window and see it but I really like to be in it. That’s what makes not being able to surf so frustrating– I miss laying on my board as the waves lapped below me. It was a connection to the water that I don’t get to experience right now because of my arm injury. I connect via swimming but I still miss that ocean connection the surfboard.

We all have places we find peace and hope. While I didn’t really understand it, I learned mine early, hung on it, and integrated it into my daily life. And that’s partly what helps keep me going even when life tries to distract me and hold me back.

Hearing God

I will be the first to tell you that going to mass at 4:00 pm on Saturday drives me up a wall.

It feels like smack in the middle of the afternoon and on Saturday it was 100 degrees outside when I left my house. But there’s a reason I do it and this weekend I had quite the reminder of what that reason was.

When I go to church, I’m forced away from the many distractions at my house– there are always a million things I want and need to do. But at church, I’m a captive audience except for maybe my overflowing brain activity.

Four years ago, my friend Ann gave me the journal in the photo for my birthday because she knew I had been writing homily quotes on the weekly church bulletins. She thought this way I could keep them in once place and she was right. But that book has morphed into more than homily quotes. What you don’t see in the photo– because I took the photo first– is that I filled two pages with ideas. Part of it was the idea for this blog and the lines I didn’t want to forget. There also was a caption for a photo that I wanted to post.

And sometimes there are color ideas– even the order and colors of a women’s shirt stripes some weeks ago.

I remember sitting in my hometown church, Sts. Pete and Paul, some years ago. It was a hot afternoon and I was the only person in the church. It was so quiet and I felt like I could stay there forever, to write sitting there, to hear God so well.

But what I realized later was that we have to venture into the world because part of our task is to learn to hear God with all the distractions around us. Life isn’t meant to be a cake walk (why would we be here if we had nothing to learn?) and I see part of my path is to learn to hear God even when the voices and distractions surround me.

By the time I leave mass on Saturdays, I feel as though I’ve had a reward because so many ideas have come to me. It’s as if God is saying, “I know you were trying to listen all week, but this is what I think you missed.”

Paying Homage to the Inspiration

While we had been to Palm Springs before, we hadn’t spent much time walking into any stores so this time we put more effort into that, especially because we were spending the night. And that meant stopping at the Trina Turk flagship store. We have been to other stores, particularly two that are now shuttered (Manhattan Beach and South Pasadena), but we hadn’t been the the flagship store.

Many people don’t know that Trina Turk is a big inspiration behind Chelle Summer. I fell in love with Trina’s designs from the beginning. While I didn’t realize it, what I really fell in love with were the colors and the patterns. In fact, when Greg and I married, she had towels and sheets at Macys, too, and we registered for those. I am happy to report that if you come stay at my house, you are most likely to sleep between Trina sheets and dry off after a bathing with a Trina towel. But my closet is filled with dresses and I wore a lot of her swimwear before I was making my own.

Most people think I am heavily influenced by Kate Spade and I am, to a point, but Trina is a bigger inspiration for me, probably because of the California cool that her designs exude. I like to think of Chelle Summer as a bit Trina, a bit Kate, and a sprinkle of Lilly Pulitzer.

It was in this process of admiring her things that I began to come up with my own ideas. Certain styles of clothing didn’t always work for me and I had other ideas for prints. As my own work as continues to evolve, I can see where the inspiration started, but now it’s all mine and continues to move forward that way.

Stopping in the Palm Springs store was of acknowledging how far I have come with Chelle Summer. And while I still have a long way to go where I want it to be, it’s always good to reflect on where we’ve come from.

Thank you, Trina, for all the inspiration. I wouldn’t be where I am without it.

La Palma Dresses 101

Learn more about the inspiration behind the La Palma dresses and the different ways you can wear them.

Being True

I believe this to be one of the most challenging aspects of life– being true to oneself.

I have watched so many people throughout my life and witnessed their disappointment and sometimes anger at how things have turned out for them. I learned early (although I’m not sure how) that it was going to be a difficult road if I wanted to be who I believe I was supposed to be (and still do). I saw that it meant I wouldn’t always fit in and when things would happen, like when I wasn’t included in things, it was painful and often took years before I understood– having been able to take steps backward by then to survey the entire scene– that it was because I was different, I had a different road to walk, I had different things to accomplish.

There have been many things I could have done to make this road more like everyone else’s, dreams I could have sacrificed, but somehow I understood that wouldn’t be me.

I have been struggling with this new decade I have entered, not for the reasons I see other people struggle with it– mine is because I’ve had so much loss especially in the past two years (not to COVID– everyone has died from other illnesses and some from natural causes). I feel this sense that life is even shorter than it felt before. And there are things that have always motivated and inspired me that are now gone, things that had been with me for a long time, people who were important to me.

I am still motivated and inspired, don’t get me wrong, there aren’t enough hours in the day for all I want to do which is the other side of this dilemma I face– hitting this new decade and figuring out what’s most important to do and how to spend my time.

While I look at what doesn’t fit anymore, it’s also about making sure I stay true to who I am, have always wanted to be. When I’m out running early in the morning, it’s when I think about it the most because I’m usually in prayer (and trying to kill time while getting those miles in). By the time I finish, the list is long and the sun is shining in my office with the summer light giving an extra boost to the color that surrounds me.

I know I’m true to myself then and I use those moments to soak up the positive energy to keep me fulfilled for the continued journey.

Searching for Hope

It felt like a bit of a stabbing pain.

After the shooting at the elementary school in Texas last week, people began to post a list of the all the schools where there had been shootings in the past nearly thirty years. I scrolled down the list and saw the school where Greg teaches– Cleveland High School.

It was not a pleasant reminder of that day, of the kid who brought a gun to school and shot it a floor below Greg’s classroom, of everything else that transpired that day and has since then. And then on the same day as the shooting in Texas, likely before that shooting, a kid brought a gun to school at Cleveland. Another kid spotted the gun in the kid’s backpack, asked me to be excused to the bathroom, and went and found help. The kid and the gun were dealt with quickly and quietly.

The following morning, I tried to post on Facebook and wrote at least five posts, but none of them felt right, deleting them all. Nothing felt right. In my head, the words felt meaningful, but looking at them as a post, they felt meaningless. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t stop thinking about and everything that irritates me and makes me angry, things I am usually able to at least keep at a distance so I can forge forward. Things I mostly only share with Greg and my sister and a few others in my life, things I do not post because I don’t think it’s worth it. If one of my posts makes me feel bad, why am I a sharing it? What’s the point of that? If I need to feel better, then many others probably need inspiration, too.

We can all be negative but I’m not giving in. I’m that person hitting negativity with one of those big inflatable bats, letting it know its not welcome in my world, that I refuse to let it overcome me.

It finally occurred to me that I was grieving. Another loss. Another loss of so many things. Another loss that makes me feel less secure in this world, that makes me worry more about Greg at school rather than driving the interstate to school.

Yet we can’t stop living and I finally pushed my way back into my work that day, feeling a little better by day’s end. But I didn’t really feel better until I had a party yesterday– bringing people to gather for food and conversation, to enjoy the warmth of the sunshine (and ignore the wind).

It’s hard when it keeps coming at us, when we feel helpless, when we are in those moments when we don’t feel like we can make meaningful change. And yet there is hope somewhere in it– it’s inside us. It’s hard to find it outside us because we must start inside.

If only we all could find it.

"Route 66 Dreams" Inspiration

The Quarter

I used to post all the times I would find a coin, especially because it seemed to happen quite often. People also told me it made them happy because they understood that for those of us who have lost loved ones, those coins are, well, pennies from heaven.

It doesn’t happen too often anymore– I’m not blaming the pandemic on this one so much (because I still ran everyday during it) as I felt a drop off because my life had changed. I felt as if I didn’t find the coins because I didn’t need those near constant reminders than my deceased loved ones are with me. I chalked it up to moving forward, a good thing.

When we go to mass, I always light at candle for Our Lady of Guadalupe. As the priest I do my spiritual direction will say, God speaks through her to me, perhaps because I don’t always hear God. But I also feel very connected to her as my birthday falls on her feast day.

There are many times I stand in front of the painting of her and I talk to her about my creative endeavors. I don’t want to reveal the specifics right now as that’s between her and I, but I have felt like there was a bit of a gorge in one aspect of where I’m at and where I want to be.

Sunday morning was very windy, after an even windier night, and I didn’t particularly want to go out and run so much as I knew no one else would be out (only those of us who are die hards). As I ran along with Ash, I felt my answer from Guadalupe (or was it God?). I found what I needed, what was missing, what I needed to specifically ask for. While I’m not sure how to exactly tap into what I need, I do know now what it is that I’m seeking.

Not long after that I spotted a quarter.

It was worth it to grin and bear it through the wind. Prayer is often empty but this was a morning when I felt an answer from the a prayer of the day before. It doesn’t happen often so when it does, it’s an inspirational reminder that hope and faith are where it’s at.