For a while I've wanted to take pictures of what I wear everyday & then make an awesome gif of them at the end of every week. I kept forgetting, but finally this week I pretty much remembered! Although when I put them all together the crappy quality made it a little more headache inducing than even I can handle. So here it is in picture form & once I remember to scout out a new camera lens on eBay maybe the images will be of good enough quality for gif making!
Monday: old oversized top from H&M & some vintage culottes I got in Paris last year because after reading Elle Collections, Vogue & Bazaar last weekend I had an overwhelming need for polka dots. Looks pretty nicely like a dress as well.
Tuesday: Cat & mad face plus vintage skirt from Berlin. Got it as part of the €15 a kilo thing at Garage & although it's made of pretty horrific fabric, it has this cute little flower print & comes with a wonderfully clashing spotted belt. As you can see Holly cat was still not impressed.
Thursday: I forgot on Wednesday because I woke up late for my 9.30 train to London, even though that was probably my nicest outfit all week! Sods law. This is a (probably meant for nightwear) playsuit from Oysho where I made myself go to on the brief visit to Paris, so I could stock up on underwear & technically breaks my new years resolution, but maybe it doesn't extend to other countries? It's like this nice toile du jour print & I got the matching shorts too... I also wore it without a cardigan or tights to John Lewis last week to buy a hoover & when I carried the giant box back through the shop from the front it looked like I was naked. Amused the lovely John Lewis staff, so at least my sartorial mistakes make people smile!
Friday: As I'm spending the day making pattern blocks, embroidering & listening to Josh's amazing mix tapes, I'm pretty basic today with one of my favorite dresses with the amazing flashing pin ups print & cut off kimono. That sentence makes my new *adult* life sound pretty good, but actually I'm feeling pretty pressed up a giant brick wall at the moment.
Anyway, yes. London was shit. I dislike London & sort of forget how much whenever I'm away or I settle into a bit outside of the center. But going up for a day to loads of galleries & shops in the center is not fun. Having to perch on a flower bed to eat a sandwich because there are no benches in Kensington is not fun. & the guy at Morplan was a dick.
I also spent the day yesterday watching BBC Parliament & getting more & more angry. This shouldn't be a debate about police cuts Ed Miliband. I'm suspending my membership to the Labour party - I know, I cringe every time I admit it - because he didn't speak for me yesterday & so I can't allow him to think that he does. I'm glad to see from the wonderful comments on the post below though, that there are other people out there with their heads screwed on & their eyes open. There have been some really good articles in the Guardian all week as well, but nothing in the words of all the MPs rushing to condemn it so what are we meant to do?
Hope your weeks better!
Finally. If your gonna fight, fight for something. Proving stereotypes... Targeting the wrong people... Showing that if you call generations stupid they'll start acting like they are... Did it occur ironic to anyone else that The Smiths are the perfect soundtrack to this so called riot?
Anyway, I'm off up to London tomorrow to buy some pattern cutting supplies. Might stay on & uhr...loiter about Parliament on Thursday though. What do you guys think of this mess? I thought they were justified up to the people's housing & independent businesses. I mean the enemy is police, government & capitalism right? Or maybe this is the riot for capitalism. Anarchy for free stuff. Oh my, the debates we could have in our ivory tours... I sound like a dick. Time to bow out.
2 posts in one day!?
Berlin photos! So these are the only from the one's I took on my phone (hence the often shitty qaulity), but it's a start. This is why I am a rubbish blogger, not with the quickness of the internet. Anyway, so the one's of the ferris wheel, creepy boarded up candy coloured housing, broken dinosaurs & swan boats is from our (including my mum!) spurt of breaking & entering. I know I know, but it was into Spreepark. I've already shared by slight obsession with Coney Island & this for me has the same sort of eerie, fake happy sheen that I love about there. A few months ago some Berliners put on a gig here, becaue it's in the heart of the East, which is now like the cool bit... So there was an abandoned stage at one point, plus a cafe that looked like it could be open with some dinosaurs that weren't missing limbs.
But around the rest of the park (dodging through the security tape & caravans that have pitched up on the vacant plot) there were rusting rides, with all the trains & tracks overgrown with weeds. There were broken bridges, falling into the rivers & of course, the most beautifully abandoned ferris wheel. I'm sure the lomo shots I took (about 2 films worth) will look fucking amazing, so I'm holding out for that. But honestly, if you're in Berlin for a while you can get the S-Bahn to Treptower Park & walk round to it in about 20 minutes. There's a little board that lifted up for you to crawl under the fence. We followed some people who looked like they were trying to break in too, but we never saw them again & they carried on round the fence so we think they bottled it. It was such an odd thing to explore & I'm so glad we actually made it over there!
The clothes are in the best vintage shop in Berlin (fact.) Tony Durante of Surezstrasse. I can't remember how we got there, but it's in the West district of Charlottenburg. West Berlin still feels extremely different, in contrast to Treptower Park & Spreepark, they have the Tiergarten that has memorials all over it & proper flower beds etc. It's next to the Reichstag, but once you head into it there were like no tourists. & it was a nice way to get the the Bauhaus Archiv which was so fantastic. But anyway, on Surezstasse there's a collection on antique & vintage shops, a lot of them are just decor, but we found at least three or four with clothes. One with a scary lady who was impressed I could pronounce Yohji Yamamoto...
But Tony Durante's was simply everything an amazing vintage shop should be. He was really enthusiastic about the clothes (less so about Berlin & the rent prices in London) & my mum liked him because he actually talked to her rather than ignoring her whilst trying to get me to try on as many clothes as possible like most other shops. Although when I told him she'd thrown away all her vintage Ossie Clarke, Biba etc from the 60s he said I should kill her. All jokes though! He also showed us this amazing house coat by the guy who makes tweed for the queen, & lots of pieces he said he didn't put out because he didn't want to sell them, just because we showed an interest & actually knew a little what we were talking about. Unfortunately I didn't buy anything, the one dress I wanted to he wouldn't let me because it was slightly too tight around the shoulders. Very upsetting, but he was right. There was also amazing jewellry. & in September (I think) they're having a Surezstrasse street party where all the shops will have stalls. Kind of want to go back for it... oh if only I was a jetsetter. But yes, if you like vintage clothing, even if you can't afford the higher (but totally justified) prices, he is an absolutely lovely man just to talk too. He also has an accessories stall in London (from which he told us a funny story about Kate Moss) for something a little closer to home!
& finally the smiley face and the big mud circle are from the Hamburger Bahnhof museum. The first was from the toilets... but there was much better stuff to see too! The mud circle is by Richard Long who brought over mud from Bristol's very own river Severn to make the Berlin Circle, how weirdly awesome is that? Travel all the way to Germany to see an artist from my home town. Or mud from my home town! This was an interesting museum, because it was stupidly hard to get to from the S-Bahn, with barely any signs for pedestrians. Then when inside it was like a microcosm for hipsters. Literally. Outside there were none, on the way there, on the way home, we saw no hipsters. & yet walk through the door & it was crawling with them. Very weird. We actually found this with quite a lot of museums, or maybe that was just me. So yes, even if you're not into modernist art, or Richard Long, there was some very good people watching to participate in!
Oh & plus a waffle from our very first day (almost forgot about that) I don't think I took a picture of Currywurst, but we had the whole range. From upmarket in the biggest foodhall I've ever seen at KaDeWa to proper rank in Treptower park where the sausage was covered in ketchup & then sprinkled with curry powder. Nice. Anyway, I brought some curry-ketchup back with me from the super market so maybe I can recreate it!
I miss Berlin.
Yesterday settling back into the routine of work rather uncomfortably after holiday, a bright ray of sunshine struck right through my reorganizing of the 3 for 2's. Commissioned by Penguin Ink - whose rather awesome logo of I took a shoddy photo of for the first picture - 6 of the worlds great tattooists have re-imagined 6 - well, in my humble opinion 3 or 4 - equally great books. They're also on 3 for 2 in Blackwell's, so despite trying to have some constraint, I opted for Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which a friend confessed was his all time favorite book recently (fate?) The Rotter's Club by Jonathan Coe because I've just read The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim & it was billiant, & The Book of Dave by Will Self because fate (again) aligned as for about a year now people have been recommending me to read Will Self & this is the cover done by one of my favorite artists of the bunch, & the profession, Duncan X.
Sorry for lack of posts, my Berlin films are being developed by the very slow Jessops as we speak. But I do have some photos on my phone for posts, as well as having finally remembered to start something I've been meaning too for about 10 weeks now & haven't. Ooo cryptic. It'll all be clear by Friday, probably, promise.
Out.
