Let the things you love guide you…

I love colors. I love playing with colors and exploring new colors and matching colors up. I love a pure white background and really bright colors that pop in front of it.

When I first started playing around with the website for With Wild Aloha I used a whole set of photos that I had taken in Tahiti. The color palette was dreamy. Lots of white Tiare flowers and natural hued shells. Lots of aqua blue water, white sand and pink lei po’o. It was a color palette that I thought looked perfect for what I was trying to share.

My friend Tahiti (this time it’s the person not the place….isn’t that the best name ever?!) came over to take photos of my space and she said, ‘are you sure you’re settled on the colors you’ve chosen for your website because it seems like you favor a bolder color palette’. Friends, it was like a light bulb moment. She was totally right. I do favor bold colors!!!

Do you have something in your life that just brings back the most sensory memory?! When it comes to color for me, it’s this dress. I’m not saying this dress made me love bold colors but, I think yes, I’m saying this dress made me love bold colors.

When I was in intermediate and high school my church ran a thrift shop. It was kind of like an ongoing rummage sale. The ladies would open for just four hours a week and nothing in the store was over 25 cents. I’m not kidding you but, they made a tidy sum of money!

I used to go there with my friends and just browse for hours. I still have some of the treasures I found. Vintage aloha print crazy quilts, vintage japanese pottery, wood musubi molds from the 1800’s, and dresses…tons of dresses. Tons of vintage aloha print mu’u mu’u.

This specific dress is the first one I found. It’s the one that sparked my love for all things bold and bright and beautiful. It sparked an obsession.

I wore this dress sparingly and lovingly because I absolutely did not want anything to happen to it. It was been the pride and joy of my closet. Between wears it lived in a plastic ziplock wrapped in tissue paper. You get it. I love it.

This dress is still the pride and joy of my closet. I will admit, it doesn’t currently fit me. I don’t care. It represents this time in my life where I got brave and decided I could wear whatever I wanted. If I loved it then it was for me. It didn’t matter if it was in or if it was flashy. I loved it.

Before this dress I tried very hard to ‘dress like a cute surfer girl’. No, I am not kidding. That was my one true aim. To look like a surfer girl. Ell - oh - ell!!!!

So, when Tahiti was in my house saying ‘it looks like you favor a bold color’ I knew I was doing it again! I wanted With Wild Aloha to look like a very specific thing….something I decided in my head ‘looked cool’. It was a flashback to my bedroom with it’s seafoam green dresser with handpainted honu on it and my collection of Roxy stickers. It wasn’t enough to be a beachcombing beach lover. I had to be a beach lover who looked like a surfer too.

As I was laying in bed thinking about favoring bold colors and what I wanted to do with the colors I chose I hopped out of bed and went to the closet to pull this dress from the tissue paper.

I looked at the dress and thought, you my pretty, you are the heart of what With Wild Aloha means to me. The idea that the thing that makes us the happiest is the thing that is truest to our heart. The idea that even though something else is gorgeous it still might not make us the happiest.

How wild would it be to let the things we love guide us?

With Wild Aloha went hot pink and orange and raspberry because of this dress. Because I love the colors and because I love what they mean. They mean I’m free to be myself. They mean I want you to be free to be yourself too.

I love you just the way you are. I love that you love the things you love.