sail away, sail away

hello! wednesday night at last, which for me means a rest & a possible blog post! i've been on textiles rotation this week which has been amazing and fun and really cool and not what i expected, and i promise to stop using the word and now.

yesterday there was a vintage fair at a local student union & i went down to have a look before starting my intensive final piece work schedule (woke up at 5am this morning to finish it, woo!)

i bought this blouse for £8, a bit of an impulse/oh-my-god-i-have-to-buy-something buy before i left, but i think it's pretty cute! and reasonably priced too, compared to most of the clothes being sold there. it's a little more salmony pink than the picture suggests, and it has kind of boxy shoulders which should be ugly, but because it's a large size on me it actually does work. also, the folded cuffs and the collar/lapel things remind me slightly of an old-fashioned nurse's uniform!

part of the reason i bought it is because it has an unbelievably cute pocket with a broderie anglaise design. it is absolutely tiny as well, so goddamn cute!

it has a lovely collar too, and i have become such a sucker for collars lately! totes over the whole peter pan thing (although i will be doing a few blouse customisations when i can find the perfect fabric!), but i am so in love with embroidered or scalloped collars right now.

i also bought what my mum called the silliest pair of sunglasses she had ever seen, but what i think are amazing! you can't really tell from these photos, but they have a lovely tortoiseshell pattern.

i've decided that these are going to be my new driving glasses, because they flip up to be plain lenses! how awesome is that?! i cannot even express how amazing that is!

i highly doubt they are actual vintage as they look very new to me, and they were only a fiver, but i actually don't care because i just love them!

i've been looking for some new headscarves for a while now, i still love my palette patterned one but i need a bit of variety! i bought this nautical style one for only £2, and i really like it because it's cotton & i hate the flimsy silky ones because they just don't stay in my hair!

love the anchor & wheel design!

once more darkness, it descends

sorry about how scattered my posting is lately, just completely rushed off my feet these days!

today after college, me and some of the people in my group went to the local pub for a couple of hours. because we are all total art nerds, we went round in a circle & drew pictures of each other! mine weren't very good because i can't really do illustrative drawing, but here are the ones of me drawn by everyone else.

we all made a pact to put our favourite as our profile picture on facebook, so mine is the one on the bottom left drawn by my friend eve! i think it's so good, she really wants to go into illustration as well.

also, my tickets for the kooks arrived today! so excited to go and see them, people who have followed my blog for a while may remember my major obsession with this band. i was pretty much their biggest fangirl ever from the age of 14 to 16, and it will just be so good to see them live!

(i have seen them before but passed out & missed the majority of the concert, lol.)

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hopefully tomorrow i'm going to buy this beauty from miss selfridge! i've been a bit unwell this week & a bit generally fed up, so i think i deserve a bit of cheering up in the form of nice clothing. besides, there's a 20% student discount offer on at the minute, get in!

hoping to blog a little bit more next wednesday, it just sucks that i have so little free time right now! i have a huge list of things to post about too, so i may schedule a few posts for later on (:

turn to the left, turn to the right.

i thought i'd write a little mid-week update about how my week has been going at college! i have quite a few other things i want to update about, but i have so much work on at the minute and just not enough time.

anyway, this week i've been on the fashion rotation part of my course which i have really enjoyed! it's not quite what i expected and is much more illustration based than i thought it would be, but i'm definitely swaying towards choosing it at specialism. for our rotation project, we were given an artist and had to design a collection based on their work. i was given egon schiele, who - much to my embarrassment - i had never actually heard of before! here are a couple of my favourite paintings of his;

he does a lot of erotic paintings, so these are some of his more demure pieces. i love the way he uses colour, and the shapes and positions of the women he draws really lend themselves to clothing designs.

here are a few of my responses to his paintings (sorry about the dark photos!);

we also had to do a bit of fashion research, and find collections that we felt related to the work of our artist. i didn't really know much about designers, so i had a look at the research sheets we were given and had a bit of a browse on style.com & found possibly the most lovely collection i have ever seen. i was never really that into dior before (and i'm pretty sure this is john galliano's work, so that makes me a little uneasy from an anti-semitic hate point of view), but this autumn/winter 2011 is just so beautiful!

the shapes are gorgeous, and the full skirts really goes with what i was thinking for my own collection. i love the 1950s prom feeling i get from these dresses in particular, and the hair is styled just wonderfully.

also, this is pretty much the most beautiful dress i have ever seen in my entire life.

my work based on the dior shows;

i'm getting my hair cut tomorrow, and i just can't wait! i've been stuck in a rut hairwise for so long that i desperately need a change. to be honest it probably won't be that different, i'm just wanting quite a bit off!

i'm a good woman and i never did say whatever it was that you did that day

hi! this is going to be a very quick post as i'm leaving for a concert in, ooh, 40 minutes and i still have to get ready! here is a short summary of some things i've bought recently;

laura marling's a creature i don't know, the kooks' junk of the heart and slow club's paradise.

laura marling's album is so good! i love her, and the whole album is just absolutely beautiful. so far sophia is my stand out favourite, i just can't stop listening to it.

i haven't listened to the kooks' album yet, but i have a huge love for this band (rather obsessively so when i was about 15/16) and i'm going to see them in october so i wanted to be prepared.

slow club are fast becoming one of my favourite bands, and i'm actually going to see them tonight! the new album is really, really good, it has a different feel from their acoustic/folky debut but still sounds like a slow club record. also, i pre-ordered the album so i got a free 5 demo track cd as well as a signed copy of the album! get in.

i got a free tote bag with laura marling's album at hmv, yay!

i bought sophia on 7" too, i really love the artwork although i haven't listened to the b-side yet.

today i bought brideshead revisited by evelyn waugh and the waves & to the lighthouse by virginia woolf. i loved mrs dalloway & ever since then i've been wanting to read something else by ms woolf. i love her style of writing and i think she's a very important figure in modernist literature.

i picked these up in a charity shop last week for 75p each, which is a complete & utter bargain! my pile of books to read just grows and grows.

i also bought the complete works of oscar wilde in the charity shop for £4, which is incredibly cheap considering just how thick it is! i love the illustration on the top too.

i adore oscar wilde's works and i've read the picture of dorian gray (of course) as well as most of his plays, but this also has his children's stories and all of his poetry. i'm excited to read all of this but it will have to wait for now!

i'm really sorry my posts have been so infrequent recently (and that this one has been such a whistle stop tour!), college is keeping me far too busy at the moment! it really is a huge amount of work, and when i'm not working i'm just so exhausted. i've hardly been able to keep up with my jewellery shop either, i was meant to list some new items today but just haven't had the time! hopefully i will have time to list them at the weekend, and post here too (:

trace

this week on my college course, i've been doing photography! the brief is traces, ie. the marks/traces people or objects leave behind. on friday, we were given about 4 hours to wander round newcastle and take photographs for the project. i walked around on my own, and i'm pretty pleased with the pictures i managed to get! here are some of my favourites;

a crack in a wall near the college.

a piece of blue twine tied around a fence with peeling paint.

a piece of day-glo knitting wrapped around a tree.

(this is part of an art exhibition that was on a few years ago, it was called "guerrilla knitting" or something. i went looking for these as i think they're beautiful, and i thought they'd be perfect for the project. the exhibition might have something to do with feminism or not, i don't know, but i thought it might because of the whole guerrilla girls thing.)

some empty milk packets on a roadside bench.

another piece of guerrilla knitting, this time wrapped around a traffic light pole.

(i got given a few funny looks for this, as it was right in the middle of a busy crossing)

a faded, peeling best vintage advert sellotaped to a wheelie bin.

a deflated, wrinkled pizza express balloon and a burnt out match.

a wet napkin next to a flower pot.

(this is one of  my favourites, i just like the way the yellow napkin matches the yellow flowers)

a bright pink child's shoe on a double yellow line.

(this was quite an opportunistic shot, i was walking back up from the college courtyard as i knew there were some more pieces of knitting down there, and i just saw this lying on the ground. i think this is another of my favourites as i just love the colours in it.)

i hope i haven't overloaded you with pictures! i actually really enjoyed taking these, the photography rotation has been really fun - and a welcome relief from the trials and tribulations of fine art.

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also, i've listed a few pin up girl brooches (including this one) in the shop! i really love 1940s/50s pin up girl style and i'm so pleased i found these to make into brooches, they are so lovely!

i've also been thinking (as anyone who follows either my personal or jewellery twitter might know) about getting a stall for one of my local vintage/craft fairs to sell jewellery at, what do you think? i'd love to give it a go, i'm just worried about costs and things.