Couturgatory turns one! Anniversary giveaway

Yay! May 2nd, 2013 was my first post here. It was selfies with a bad camera phone taken in a wavy chunk of mirror.

Fittingly, it was during a heat wave in San Francisco, where the high was an unbelievable 91 degrees F/33 C and here I am, in the middle of another West Coast heat wave. I don't know why the people around me are complaining; I moved from 55-and-overcast All-day-every-day-all-year Town and I am fine. :D

Even with the chaos and sparse posting this year, I have done a total of 148 posts in a year, or roughly 1 every 2.5 days. That's a lot of blabbing! And I have you, dear readers, to thank for slogging through it.

In this year, I got a wonderful blogger introduction by one of the first bloggers I read, Ally of Shybiker, who I'm now honored to call my friend. I won a Bloggy, and had the honor of being linked to by Already Pretty, the style blog that introduced me to personal style blogs and started me on this road.

And of course, I've gotten to know awesome people around the world. The personal style blog community (both bloggers and readers) I stumbled into is supportive, intelligent, perceptive, and so very creative. I think my perspective on style blogging, and blogging in general, has widened. So has my wardrobe. Tee hee.

Yes yes, enough with the self-congratulatory (couturgalatory?) back patting, on to The Giveaway!

I am giving away one Cara New York fascinator, seen here:

Now, I know what you're thinking. 'Aya, you crazy wench, you love that ridiculous thing. Should you really be giving away your hat?'

And the answer is, I'm not giving away my hat. I am in fact giving away an identical hat I randomly found on eBay for not very much that I cackled over and squirreled away last year for this very occasion. That is right: if you win, not only do you get this sweet hat, but you and I will be Fascinator Twins.

Here's how you can enter: just leave your e-mail address (mebbe in a format like mail [at] domain [dot] com because bots) in the comments or contact me at notactuallyaya at gmail dot com. Giveaway open to all countries, and I'll be accepting entries for a week! (and obnoxiously posting links back to my own giveaway in all of my posts between now and then)

It's been a long and crazy week, but maybe I can post a photo of myself soon wearing both of them like Princess Leia.

I heart you all. I cannot imagine the last year without you, I really can't. 2013 was the most stressful year of my life, and all of my experiences blogging helped me make it through. Thank you.