Reading through all the lovely fashion, makeup, and hair blogs lately makes me wonder if I’ll ever earn the “fashionista” badge for real. I mean, I’m sure you’re reading this and wondering why I started writing about fashion, hair, and makeup in the first place. Good question.

I started DeluxeGrrl because I thought it would be interesting to go from geekalicious codermuffin to rockstar fashionista. There was a lot of things I needed to learn along the way — like becoming one with the makeup brush and realizing that not everything halter is good — but I’m getting there, slowly…

And then I realized that plus size fashion was more than just clothes — it was downright political. It was this stream of blogs that I had never really ventured out to read before — talking about this new-yet-not-new concept to me of size acceptance. It was amazing — and downright frightening. And yet, I dived deeper.

I discovered clothing stores like Kiyonna, Igigi, and my new fascination, Missphit. I also met interesting designers like Tara, and friends like Sarah, Glen, and Aja. I even learned, somewhere along the way, to embrace my hips and curves…

Creative link-love aside, I have found this journey through size, clothes, fashion, health, beauty, and style to be both a neverending source of wonder and also a level of frustration.

I blog because I want to reach out to girls like me that never really held up a piece of clothing and felt something intangible from it before growing into a vein where they had to have that, they had to start looking sharper, presenting themselves better. I could post some of my nerd pictures, but I don’t believe in torturing the innocent.

So, at two in the morning, as I sit coffeeless, I’m reviewing the numerous press releases, stories, link lists and other publicity drippings that get sent to me. To everyone that has linked to me, emailed me things, and, in the case of some of my commenters, dropped a line to let me know the other side of my argument, thank you! I hope as we merrily walk down this deluxe little path there will be much more to share. I have to say that sometimes it’s hard to come up with posts like this — I want to make sure that I’m being heard, but I also don’t want to stretch fashion out into this textbook thing that isn’t living.

All this, from the nerd in pinstriped slacks. My wardrobe just isn’t fashionista enough, I might want to give Di (of legendary, incredible Fat Chic fame) a call and let her pimp my ‘drobe? perfect my pants? pimp my hangers? There just aren’t enough streetcorners for everything in my wardrobe that needs to be pimped out, I tell you…