Prima donna girl, all I ever wanted was the world.

Recently I have had an awful lot of spare time on my hands, and I haven't really known what to do with it. I am a pretty lazy person, and often I do intend to be incredibly productive and creative only to end up having spent the entire day in front of the sofa watching May The Best House Win and How I Met Your Mother repeats. Now, there's nothing wrong with being unproductive, but a whole summer of it is woefully dull and boring! So, about a week or two ago I decided that I needed some sort of place to channel all of my ~creativeness~ so I bought a sketchbook and started putting together all the pieces I have cut out of magazines over the past, ooh, four years, along with lots of other things I have collected. Here are a few of my favourite pages so far;

A page on animal collective names. I have a real love and obsession for the strange and unusual names given to groups of animals (an obsession very strange and unusual in itself), like  murder of crows! Any Series of Unfortunate Events readers in the house?! I found this beautiful illustration set in an issue of the Independent, and I just find them fascinating.

Some mood boards based on sort of 1930s/40s glamour, rich fabrics, and kind of a French influence. I don't know, I find it really difficult to describe and actually articulate why I think the things I have put together go together, so I hope the images kind of speak for themselves.

Two colour boards.

I have so many pretty pictures of florals floating around, these are just two of the pages I have created. The second isn't really a mood board, it's just a collection of all the images that remind me of that dress (I wish I knew who the designer was!). The Klimt images are old postcards I found while helping clear out the cupboards in my art classroom last year.

Sort of vintage French Riviera patterns & themes, with a beautiful Basso & Brooke dress and pale blues.

Bright colour mood boards. (A young Kate Moss is in the pale blue in the picture on the right)

One of my favourite mood boards I think I have ever made. Partly because I just adore that editorial, and that all three images are so very much in tune with where I feel my personal style is going at the moment. Girly and feminine but still feminist. Basically Marina & the Diamonds in the Primadonna video (which is so beautiful and represents what I want to be and look like in every way).

A mood board sort of on the sixties, but also on perceptions of the sixties? All three images are modern interpretations of that famous decade, so I was kind of thinking about how true to life our ideas about it are.

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So, I hope you liked seeing some of my sketchbook pages. I want to use it to do more drawing & writing, basically so I can keep on top of all of my ideas. And also have it to look back through when I'm feeling sad so I can remind myself of how I am talented and good at things, and also see things that inspire me all in once place.

Goodbye for now.

The primadonna life, the rise and fall

Hello! It was the opening of my Textiles final show last night, and I thought I would share with you a few pictures I took of my display.

This is the best wide shot I could get of my display, it was along the main corridor through college so there was a wall behind me! I also took this while everything was still being set up so that's why the coathangers don't match.

Side view.

 Mannequin with my ruffled collar and embroidered brooches.

Three necklace pieces and two felt cuffs.

Shelf with my two earring pairs on a jewellery stand, mulage book, another felt cuff and my daily diary for the project.

Sketchbook

My tutor had arranged out displays so that we were set up next to people who had similar colour palettes or themes in their work, this is our pastel corridor!

Me at the show. Bit of a lame photograph of me, but it was very busy so we couldn't really take another as people kept trying to get past. We didn't really have to dress up, but I decided to wear my vintage Marie Antoinette-esque dress that I used for the photoshoot (which I will dedicate another post to!). It just felt like everything had come full circle.

Pastel Puke

This is a scheduled post as I am busy working away on my Textile final major project!

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I have been waiting for this pretty little piece of post for quite a long time, so when I saw this bright pink envelope on my doormat I knew exactly what it was! A little while ago, I did a little swap with one of my favourite bloggers - I sent her a necklace and in return she sent me a copy of her beautiful handmade zine about Meadham Kirchhoff! (Read her post about her zine here)

I took a few pictures of some pages from her zine, and I love them so much! I'm just going to leave the photos to speak for themselves.

Marlena is absolutely one of my favourite bloggers ever, and it was so amazing that she liked the necklace I sent to her! She has the most wonderful kitsch, sugary style and her thrifted pieces are incredible, and she also writes some fantastic DIYs for Rookie. I don't really have ~style icons~ as such, but the way she dresses is so inspiring to me. Anyway, it was really cool to do the swap with her! See you next time.

Paper dolls

My pretty paper parcels have finally arrived!

I bought these lovely Marie Antoinette and Alice in Wonderland paper doll books from Retro and Ruby's Paper Things last month, and I am so excited that they are finally in my little hands! The postage was a little delayed so she sent me the Red Queen book to make up for it!

Each book has the most beautiful illustrations of the character, and six lovely outfits. The books are so tiny too!

I found the shop when I was searching Etsy for all things to do with Marie Antoinette for my Textiles project, and I am so pleased I did! This little book is so pretty, and has lovely illustrations of significant costumes from the film. I am going to photocopy it (because the original is too precious to stick in!) and put it in my sketchbook as inspiration!

The Red Queen book is so beautiful too, I love that I kind of have the Alice in Wonderland set!

My next set of posts will probably be scheduled ones as I intend to work all the hours of the day (although, let's face it, I won't) until my Textiles deadline - which is Monday, eek! Anyway, these are three of my final pieces in mid-construction. I have made five brooches, three cuffs and these are the three necklace pieces! Everything is princess pleated and dyed by hand. I also have three collars to make, which are going to take so long as two of them involve an awful lot of embroidery! Wish me luck.

Ice cream colours

Hello! It has been a little while since my last post, and I am sorry! I'm a bit in over my head with my Textiles work at the moment and I'm still waiting for a couple of parcels to arrive that I can post about (starting to get rather impatient I must admit!) Anyway, this is just a little post about some of the work I have been doing.

My project title is Marie Antoinette, and I've been working on a few fashion illustrations to put alongside my design development work. I quite like drawings these stylised hairdos! I have also done another one (quite like this picture), and I left them all without faces, as my Textiles teacher said they looked better that way!

(Edit: the images are a little blurry because I had to reduce the file size so they could be uploaded on here, sorry!)

I've been doing a little amateur (and I mean very amateur) editing on Photoshop to change the hair colour, and this was one of the in between stages.

Sea blue & grass green

Candyfloss pink & lilac.

Turquoise & lemon.

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Sorry for such a short post today! I do have some quite exciting news though. My friend and I sent in application form for the TV show Pointless back in February as a bit of a laugh, and we got a phonecall the other day asking us to go for an audition next Friday! So excited it's slightly ridiculous.

I can't be near you, the light just radiates.

I mentioned in this post that I would post pictures of my sketchbook pages from that project. It has taken me a while to get around to taking them, but here they are!

Applique & reverse applique samples (little bit tricky to see as they are made with netting and gauze!) with images from Louis Vuitton S/S 12 catwalk show. This project was called "Multiples", and we had to take inspiration from repeated shapes that appeared either in nature or manmade objects (ie trees or piping), and you can just about see the little diamond shapes on the ice cream cone in the corner which inspired these samples. 

These are images from a little further on in my sketchbook where I started taking my inspiration from cobwebs.

Clockwise from top left: photocopy of a sample made with feathers, modelling on the stand with samples, backstage photograph from Meadham Kirchhoff's S/S 12 show, applique cobweb sample (which you can't really see that well), modelling on the stand, Meadham Kirchhoff details & an illustration of a final idea.

Pictures of my favourite Meadham Kirchhoff dress, princess pleating sample and a little knitted bow. I was really inspired by Meadham Kirchhoff in this project, as you can probably tell!

These are my favourite pages from this sketchbook. In Textiles, we are encouraged to really think about the way our pages are set out, and think in terms of positive/negative space - basically not cluttering the page with too much unnecessary information and letting things stand out. In one of the crits we had, one of my tutors suggested I took my colour palette inspiration from the Marie Antoinette film (which I was totally fine with, it being one of my favourite films ever!), so these pages are a colour story based on that film & featuring photocopies of my collar samples and swatches of the trims I used. We were actually only supposed to use neutral colours for this project, haha! That didn't really last long with me, I just cannot comprehend neutral colours! Pastels all the way.

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In the bottom right corner of this page, there's a photograph of the shoes Manolo Blahnik designed for the film which I have a really, really cool story about! I've kind of spoken about my mum's job on here to some extent, but to sum it up she's a Fashion & Textiles Historian & she is/was involved in helping put together exhibitions along those lines. When I was about thirteen, she was working on an exhibition about shoes, and part of that involved some correspondence with Manolo Blahnik (via his PA mind, sadly!). He was working on the designs for the shoes at the time, and he asked from some pictures of shoes from the era, which my mum duly sent him! So, my mum kind of helped Mr Blahnik design those shoes! That to me is so, so cool.

Detail of the double spread page.

Clockwise from left: modelling on the stand, sample of some knitted pompom wool, a colour board from the Color Collective (one of my favourite inspirationy type blogs), illustration of the collar on the stand, image from Marie Antoinette, another colour board from the Color Collective, lace swatch.

I don't know if you've heard*, but pastel is a massive trend for this summer (although personally I am always and have always been wearing pastels!) so I used some images from Vogue's collection edit to relate my project to that trend.

Clockwise from top: modelling on the stand, inspirational image of a cobweb in pastels, page from Vogue, image of Meadham Kirchoff as featured in Vogue, photocopy of a knitting sample with feathers on acetate.

There you are! Hope you enjoyed my little sketchbook tour, I quite liked writing this post actually so I may do more like this! Would that be something you'd like to see more of? See you soon darlings!

*Just kidding guys! Really amusing myself, as ever.

the dog

hey guys! i'm finding myself with more time to blog these days, which is brilliant as i totally love doing it! i've got a pretty long list of things to blog about, so i'll probably schedule quite a few when i can. i feel like such a rubbish blogger given my pretty dismal number of posts last month!

anyway, if you follow me on twitter you might be aware of my overexcitement at all the knitting, embroidery & fabric manipulation workshops i've been doing over the past week. (i'm supposed to be doing some embroidery now in fact, but it's not until friday so i've got a fair bit of time!) i've done some knitting before, but i never really knew how to cast on or cast off so it always felt a bit restricted, but i've managed to pick that up pretty quickly in the workshops. i've loved doing the knitting so much, somehow i've managed to do 24 samples!

all of my samples!

samples made using ribbon & large needles, sari fabric and the bottom one using thin wool with big needles & gradually adding two more wool strands.

samples with different string, a shredded charity shop scarf, bobbly wool & a sample knitted with different pieces of lace and ribbon.

two samples made with different thicknesses of nylon guitar strings, and one made with copper wire & thread.

experimenting with knit & purl, and making a rib.

samples with thick yarn, and using three and five wools on thin and thick needles.

everything is in creams and browns because we are restricted to a neutral colour palette on this project. at first i thought this was going to be a total nightmare as i love colour & that's usually the first thing i take my inspiration from, but it's actually quite refreshing to concentrate on texture instead!

this project is all about "multiples", so i'm looking at cobwebs and architectural details.

i can't remember if i said in my last post, but i recently got an offer from sheffield, yay! they sent me an email about accommodation the other day, scary stuff.

i listed 16 new items of jewellery in my shop yesterday, including this cute little dalmatian necklace! i'm also offering free postage on all orders throughout this month, just use the code DECEMBER at checkout to receive the discount! it's valid on international orders as well as domestic ones, so now is the time to treat yourself! (or buy christmas/hanukkah/other denomination holiday presents, whatever floats your boat).