Will be working on some posts tomorrow. I promise. I just had to put these up because I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to make tumblr suitable gifs of Malcolm's last speech in the last ever episode of The Thick of It. Which you can still see here. I literally had goosebumps. & my gif making skills have been pushed to their limits so before I drive myself crazy trying to get them tiny enough to work as a set I just thought fuck it I'll put up the big versions on my long neglected blog.

What have I been up to? Um... went to Paris, welcomed by best friend home from Russia, decided on a harlequin clown for halloween (because clowns are the scariest of all things), became scarily emotionless about dickhead students at work... That's all I can think of right now. I'm sure you aren't that interested. Oh & I saw that new Elle Fanning film Ginger & Rosa last night, it was extremely bizarre, in that is was so glossy that she made a totally unrealistic & wrong decision at the end of the film that sort of ruined the almost beauty of everything before it. I would recommend not going after a morning of watching Honey Boo Boo reality TV as well, so you're not unnecessarily cynical about staged filmic beauty.

What have you been up to?

Peek-a-boo!

Well that was mighty bad timing on my part. 54 days away, almost 8 weeks or 2 months & I left on a note that sounded decidedly unhinged. I'm figuring it out though, as I go along & my heads in a much better place. I also went on holiday, listened to a lot of Azealia Banks, Frank Ocean & Amy Winehouse & embroidered. Oh & started a tumblr. But it's pretty different to the blog. More feminism.

I think from here on in the blog's gonna change a bit. Maybe more writing, maybe better photography, just something I can be a bit more interested in. Because hell, if I was burning out on it you guys must've been too! Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see more of, like books maybe? Or music? I dunno.

So how have you been? What's new? I've missed you guys!

Alright, alright, lets get back to the serious business of outfit(ish) posts & better bloggery. In my defence of yet another gif, jumpers are hard to photograph & make look nice, or I find they are, so yeah. I love the men's bit of H&M, every things always made of nicer stuff & I saw a really rad orange & green raincoat in it the other day that brought to mind Marni for me. This on the other hand reminds me of a purple space dyed jumper from a Stella McCartney or Missoni runway last season... Because the only way I can get through high street shopping is to at least know where the *inspiration* has come from.

PLUS I am totally jumping on that whole nail art bandwagon. A little late, I admit. But having watched Super Scrimpers & found this series surprisingly endearing, I picked myself up some ring enforcements and got my reverse french manicure on. With the very F/W 2012 combination of bright red & pink. Now, whilst I may not be up to this standard yet, I am certainly considering the splatter DIY or even the drip one. Maybe that's a little ambitious, have you tried anything?

Oh gee guys, I'm almost at 200 followers. How insane is that? Three more to go! I'll definitely get setting up a competition thingy to say thank you. What free stuff do you guys want? Jewellery, clothes or food? Or paper goods/art? Ah we'll see what I can rustle up...

L.O.V.E

Posting before work? Now that's dedication. Especially when I've barely slept. Anyway, I've been going through a bit of a brown phase at the moment. I don't know where it came from but this dress is the third brown thing I've bought this month. Weird. Before that I only had one brown dress, that I barely wore. Maybe it's something about the weather. But anyway. Now I'm allowed to shop again when we were in Bath the other day (looking for some vintage jewellery) I popped into Urban Outfitters. I found this dress in the sale. It has like adjustable bra sleeves so you can make it extra low & wear it over t-shirts so it's work appropriate & very 90s. I was also thinking unbuttoned a little over a longline bra top would look good. For now though I'll twirl around like a 5 year old & admire to flared out skirt. Yay!

So my little boxing day treat finally arrived. Disco pants round 2. Weirdly I bought my black pair last boxing day... Oh wow that means maybe by next year I can finally own the gold pair that I was so close to buying 50% off. Anyway, yay for navy! It opens many possibilities of all blue outfits. I do love a head to toe monochrome. Doesn't everyone? 

The first week of 2012 was a weird one huh? I spent Friday in Walk In Centre and A&E waiting rooms. My tongue swelled up & a nurse had to dig my tongue ball/bar out. It's still healing but I'm ok. Also had a mini break down brought on my New Year's early morning "What am I going to do with my life" fit. And have listened to literally nothing but Lana Del Rey this whole year. Is that sad? I've made myself a CD from all her songs on youtube & I just wish she would dress a little better. That is the ONLY thing I am concerned about with her appearance. In other news I'm newly addicted to The Rachel Zoe Project and rewatching The September Issue & Lagerfield Confidential. Much to the dismay of my film accomplice, the bf. Oh well, maybe I'll mature in my tastes one day.

How was your week?

My mum was going to buy this for me for Christmas after she saw it in my gift guide. But £12? For a snow globe? No. When I saw it in the sale I had to get it. & make a gif, because, you know. How shit were the sales this year? I was so disappointed. Zara was completely ransacked already, the offers in American Apparel were so stupidly confusing & loads of places just had shit stuff in the sale with no like 20% off everything offers like I was expecting. What happened to everyone being in trouble? I guess all the good stuff went in the pre Christmas sales...which defeats the whole point. I did get some lovely underwear though, only £5 off. Rubbish.

How did you get on

in the sales? 

At work yesterday I got a text from my mum to say that her & the builders were very excited about a FedEx package that had arrived. So when I got home & opened it up I was extremely excited to see the magazine I wrote an article for a few months back. I don't actually know too much about it from the sparse correspondance I've had with one of the editor/contributors but google makes me think it's a publication in conjunction with a boutique type shop in China. It came from Hong Kong.

BUT enough of that, down to the nitty gritty of the fact that it is FUCKING AMAZING. It's basically like someone's vomited up all the best editorials & fashion adverts, along with some kick ass articles and bound it all together in a highly design conscious way. There are little booklets between the big pages, pop ups at the end & even one of those pull the slide & the image changes thing. It took me a while to find my piece, "Sunday Best" & I have to say the black on green niggled me a little because it's properly hard to read, but oh well. To be honest I'm just super flattered to be asked to do this kind of thing!

I'm not sure if the issue is available anywhere online. There are videos of the past issues here, but if you'd like to enquire about an issue if you drop me an e-mail (neonpeg@gmail.com) I'll interrogate them for you!

Skyping with Jesus whilst he's on tumblr & spamming me with links sometimes has it's advantages. Dermagraphique & Fuck Off SHIT Tattoos have become two of my favorite blogs. Basically they are the antithesis to tumblogs like Fuck Yeah Tattoos! Who post photos of any tattoo as long as the sob story is enough. Now, I do have two text tattoos, a finger tattoo & a handmade one (as well as having submitted to FYT) so I break almost all their rules, but it is pretty unfortunate what people end up with on their bodies forever. Plus mine were (mostly) well thought out & (mostly) worked on & done by an artist I love & respect. Although part of me may wish I had chosen instead to cover my whole body with classic traditional tattoos, but hey... Anyway, if you are considering a tattoo for the first time PLEASE READ one of these blogs.

At work we're having like a little exhibition where all the work is by staff & it gets made into prints that we sell in the shop. The deadline for submissions is 1st December, so if you're in Bristol over December/Christmas please come in to Blackwell & at least look at them! I will happily talk you through which one's to like & not like depending on the person who made them haha. So I was trying to get some inspiration from my old workbooks from college & stumbled across some lovely (if I do say so myself) embroidered ribs. I also did hips, but these turned out better. So...

What do you think?

Sorry this is a bit of a rubbish post, heightened by the close ups of my bad skin/face. Nice. But after some charity shop shopping last Friday I wondered into Boots innocently looking for matte lipstick. Red preferably. & something that would last so I can wear it to work. Unfortunately I got a little blind sighted. Have you ever noticed that there's no one to ask about make up in shops like Boots? There are people that hang around their make up stations but they only know that brand. I think more people would be good... just saying. For a novice like me the highly made up girls who know exactly what they're looking for among the bright lights & broken testers can be off putting.

Anyway somehow after my fuzz descended I found myself in possession of some lipstains by Revlon. The one's I got were called Gothic and Flame which sound pretty awesome. The bright pink Flame is really lovely, not matte but nice & it lasts (sometimes overnight) but the Gothic isn't as RED as I would like, it's just more red than my normal lips. I thought stains were meant to be really bright? I do however, appreciate the nice packaging & the lip balm that comes at the other end, both things the other Maybelline lipstain I own lack. 

Unfortunately in my little gif you can't distinguish between them (there are 3 photos) & I'm still on the hunt for a matte RED lipstick. Any suggestions apart from Chanel? Or should I just be someone who spends £23 on lipstick & get on with my life? In other news I'm sorry the blog is shit but there's no daylight anymore! I have builders in my house all morning & it's dark when I get home. I'll try & figure it out on my day off (Friday) until then please bare with!

I'd been promising myself some time to look at my clothes & try stuff out to prepare for winter.  Does anyone else do that? J treated me like I was clinically insane... but then there aren't many variations on black jeans, black band t-shirt. After some jumper/dress combos that may be marginally successful, I landed on this dress. I got it in Berlin from a pretty good vintage shop, it reminded me of the central Beyond Retro but the stock was like 100 times better & less static inducing (Alex's vintage I think, near Cash that one that eveyone recommends but was shit).

The hottish weather has meant I've overlooked this lovely crimplene dress because it's just so damn thick. But it's cold enough to get away with & if I take off the tights for work (where it's pretty hot) then it's slightly practical too, yay! Minus the belly inducing waist belt... haha. I love crimplene because (as you can see from the gif) it doesn't move! You lean one way & it stays where it is. I can't count the number of times I've put something on, thought I was prepared for the weather & then realised that in the slightest wind it wants to expose my underwear to the world. Not this bad boy.

In other news I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself having finally made it to a Doctors appointment yesterday & I also had Cat turn my hair into an afro so I'm abducting her to reproduce it for halloween. I'm really looking forward to it! A little pissed about probably missing Friday night at the lanes because I get back from Belfast pretty late, but Saturday & Monday should make up for it. What are you guys doing? Is anyone else appalled at the lack of stamina shown for people doing Halloween stuff on Monday night?

Just me?

Another gif? Am I trying to give you a headache. Well, no. I just like the way they look. Especially over amazing things such as politics making it onto the catwalk. Go Johnson Hartig for living up to the brand name Libertine. Disappointing though that the shirt itself will probably cost hundreds. Oh well, I feel a DIY screen print coming on. Anyone else want one? Maybe I'll sell them, just to subvert the whole idea itself. In other news I've started blogging the Spring 2012 shows so if you fancy seeing them through my filter, in a nice scrollable, tumblog manner, head over to ICBFASHION.

Not much else to say except that I am a shit blogger, I have just eaten a proper amazing pie at the pub & my best friend/platonic soulmate is abandoning me to go to Russia tomorrow. I'm pissed. But more sad. Oh well, as least I have a day off to wallow. & everyone's packing it seems like. Either to go away to uni, or on holiday, or back to where they came from for the summer or off to do something proper with their life.

Oh well.

It's been 44 years since the Abortion Act was passed in the UK, 4 decades since my mum defended that same act against threats to change it & today on the front page of the paper is yet another threat against one of the most basic women's right we have in this country. An evil, spiteful & unfortunately powerful woman by the name of Nadine Dorries got elected as an MP in 2005, since then she has twice made ludicrous attempts to undermine basic rights by being the driving force behind the Conservatives obsession with shortening the abortion limit & teaching abstinence alongside sex education to girls - not boys - the clear misunderstanding there obviously being that ideologies are more important than arming our young vulnerable people with the tools they need to protect themselves, whatever promises they make.

But this isn't about Dorries, however much of a despicable character she may be, this is about the fact that the government is listening to people like this & that today, with the strategic words from a lawyer or two, they are proposing to change the decision making process of women considering abortions. A small change means it doesn't have to go through Parliament & so on the grounds that those evil, selfish (note: sarcasm) people who go into the British Pregnancy Advisory Service are money hungry emotionless baby-killers; proposes to replace them with softly spoken heavily biased towards religion, pro-life & supposedly "independent" advisors. Advisors who will go onto softly, religiously whisper words of encouragement into ill-prepared vulnerable women's ears about the fact that the cluster of cells is in fact already a human being.

They can say they are "independent" because they keep their religious funders in hushed whispers & out of the limelight. No doubt it's a man, whom I'm afraid has absolutely no authority over anyone's womb & has no idea at all about what a heart wrenching decision it is for anyone to go through an abortion. & an even more sinister thought that was niggling at me until John Healey said it, was that this highly controversial & oddly timed announcement comes just before the Commons debate on the Health Bill as a whole. I wonder how much of that two day debate they will happily hand over to suitably angry opposition MPs who they will accuse of living in the past, when in fact they simply can't believe we're still having this conversation.

Full Article. Picture Source.

Quick post to say I have FINALLY finished tumbling all my favorite looks from the past Resort, Spring & Couture shows over at ICBFASHION.tumblr.com. I know you can pick your own but I like to narrow down my choices for collages/inspiration/overview you know? It also gives me an excuse to flood this blog with more gifs! Mwah ha ha, this time a copycat of another seasons Christopher Kane collection because damn his clothes look good in quick succession, no?

& holy shit, whilst I was painting skirting board & watching prime ministers questions the Murdoch empire took a massive step back! Go us & our signatures & Ed Miliband who is frankly kicking ass right now, along with Gordon Brown, who personally I think should still be PM. I want sturdy moral politicians like him, not slick robotic evil PR machines like who we've ended up with. Looking forward to reading about the Guardian picking apart exactly how Cameron was lying in Parliament about them not warning him, because I am smug in the middle-class way sometimes. I'll go there. Although by pure definition I am not middle-class I read the Guardian, ergo it comes with the territory. Anyway enough of my extremely English internal class war...

It's sunny tomorrow.

What's happened can only be expressed through garish gifs, ok? Ok. So it's a displacement activity. But how HOW if you are a brand can you 1. Wait until all this broke to take your advertising out of a newspaper like the News of the World. 2. Work again with basically the same people at a different newspaper, as they're the ones who were there when the whole shit was going on. 3. Work in any way shape or form with Rupert Murdoch, his brood or News Corp again. I say boycott anyone who was there in the first place. (PLUS Tesco are still fucking there!?)

**Edit. The urls for the Sun on Sunday were registered two days ago. Seriously? He loses nothing, if anything he's cut his losses on a tired paper & will carry on as usual**

WE CANNOT LET THEM USE THIS AS A BRUSH OFF FOR THE PROSECUTIONS & INVESTIGATIONS THAT NEED TO TAKE PLACE. THESE PEOPLE ARE STILL DOING WHAT THEY DID & WE NO LONGER HAVE A DEMOCRACY, I REFUSE TO GIVE UP OUR FREEDOM OF PRESS (WHAT LITTLE WE HAVE LEFT) WITHOUT A FIGHT.

Sign below

So the day finally arrived & after running some errands I went into Rise, an independent, because I still feel guilty about fueling Alex Turner's demise into a drug addled Chung bubble. I was actually pretty disappointed. *SHOCK* I mean, Arctic Monkeys have never been huge on album artwork, it all kind of went downhill since the first album (as you can see by the disc gif I made, I think I might be getting addicted to gifs) & when I got it home & dug out the other three I realized just how similar it is to Humbug, down to the weird eerie desert photo in the center. But this review by the ever lovely Alexis Petridis pretty much says everything that needs to be said, with better references. I still can't listen to Don't Sit Down 'Cause I Moved Your Chair though... I skip it every time. PLUS there will be 2 reviews of it in the next issue of SWEAT, one by George my Arctic Monkeys virgin friend & the *hardcore fan* that is me. What do you think? Are you gonna buy it? It's almost worth it for the awesome photo of Max Helders (my now favorite Monkey) in skates & a helmet. Or do you not care at all?

In other news I'm extremely excited! They have managed to produce antimatter for about 16 minutes! Plus Paul Dirac was mentioned in the guardian, which if nothing else, is awesome news for those with his equation that predicted antimatter tattooed on their arms. *ahem* It basically means they can look at it a lot closer, get a wider range of data & try & get some averages about it's behavior & where the fuck all the antimatter from the beginning of the world went. My money's on a parallel universe! You can read the article here.

Also feel the need to re alliterate - having spent so many posts on this blog explaining my varying states of depression - that I am extremely happy at the moment. This weekend has been lovely. It was Max's birthday & because me & Jesus are cheapskates & basically the same person, we spent £2.50 on the joint present of a cactus, then spent the whole night worrying it was a shit present. Max loved it, so did Cat even though she got stung (is that the right word?) by it almost immediately, opps! We, The People was good & I fell into bed, avoiding after parties like the plague & in fact fell asleep on the phone. Oh well. Now I need to do some physics revision & figure out if it's possible to set up a projector onto my bedroom wall... err... I'll explain on Thursday. This was a longer post than I intended it to be.

Sorry!