Monday, November 17, 2014

Seven moons, eternal nights, wish a sky of thousand stars. For us there is no light...






Belated, I still wish to post my 2014 Halloween outfit. In the years past I have always attempted to create costumes out of the ordinary and this way I have never garmented myself as worshiper of occult gods. This year I decided to take the stereotypical Halloween witch outfit to another level. Not a scary, repulsive creature, but a messy Wiccan-like witch with references to the occult and a hint of sexy. I kept the pointy hat and broom though!

This fox couple in the picture below is from the local autumn fair last month
 






The dress is a vintage score from a long time ago, and combined with this shapeless lace vest from H&M and my black leather heels it gives the right witchy vibe. With black eye shadow, lots of back combing, braiding and plenty of hair spray I made my hair look all messy. 

The symbols are just doodles, scribbles from lose hand drawing with eye liner and I love the result!




I want to thank Elselien and Dylan for inviting us over before the big party and for their great costumes! And I want to thank E (picture above) for his untamable enthusiasm leading up to Halloween. Oh, the shopping we did!




Mood music: Sopor Aeternus


Wednesday, July 30, 2014

New Purchases of July




On my last day of my free-student traveling card, Elselien and I went on a shopping spree in Utrecht, a lovely old town in the very center of the Netherlands. During my five years of free student traveling I occasionally went there to shop. Utrecht has a few shops that we do not have up here, in the north. Whenever I am in Utrecht I wont leave before visiting Accessorize, New Yorker, Tally Weijl and Donna Li.
This is what I bought:


Two new skirts. Donna Li on the left and a faux leather one from New Yorker on the right. I absolutely love how the lacy skirt has a pencil skirt-model but is shorter in front. Also the bones make such an elegant shape. The leathery one caught my attention because of its decorated border, which is so well done!




I took these pictures in my clothing room. I promise there will be pictures about the room one day!


Another one of my newer purchases, is this lovely Victorian Black Lace Neck Corset from Decadent Designz. It is hand made in Canada and found its way into my collection of special accessories about two weeks ago. I think it is so beautiful! It is decorative, delicate, sophisticated and yet alternative.




I simply cannot get enough of little black dresses. They make me happy! The next dress is a 5 euro score from a traveling vintage clothing kilo-sale that visited our town at the end of May. It has this absolutely 50's vibe, but is still wearable in our modern times. I like the high neckline, that is created by this big bow that covers the shoulder. So feminine!


Oh, and these beauties, I had seen these in Sasha about a year ago, but were not available in my size anymore and they could not be ordered. Now I found them on the online second hand market, for a very pretty price. They will need some pads on the inside, but other than that I can walk in them pretty well! I am in love!


The spoons in the photos below are also a product of my Utrecht shopping day. I bought them in a store that we also have up here in the north, and basically every other city in the Netherlands, but I never seen these particular spoons. I found them so decorative. They are the perfect cutlery for celebrating a lovely tiramisu!

The frame was something I accidentally bumped into in Mamamini. It was bright red, so my eye had run across it a couple of times before I realized it had potential. And this is the result after three layers of paint. Even though I do not know what to put in the frame, I am loving it!




Last evening I went out for dinner with an old friend of mine, and I had a couple of minutes before she would arrive, so I hopped into a shoe store and impulsively bought a pair of adorbs pumps,with frills.The lacy socks are from Leg Avenue.



There are a couple of other purchases on their way. I ordered a build-it-yourself palette for my Urban Decay eye shadows and I got offered a beautiful outfit from Westward Bound, which must arrive in about three weeks. Exciting!



Wednesday, July 16, 2014

A collection of death


A lovely bouquet of roses
is now drying,
heads down, with strings attached.


One day I came home to this exquisite bouquet of soft pink roses and I wanted to preserve their beauty. This is my first attempt to dry flowers. I've been told to hang them upside down, not touching each other. First remove the outer leaves that may have signs of decay and them hang them like that in a dry place. They are still hanging from my living room chandelier. They've been here for about two weeks now and they do seem dry, but their color is not the virginly soft pink it used to be.


On the background you see my current project; a collection of death and macabre. The collection started with the beautiful centerpiece Elselien offered me for my birthday; the deer skull. After that I  got all inspired to add more death and serene decay to my wall. I spray painted all the frames. In the picture above, the frames are still empty. The small ones are now decorated with white on black prints of skulls and the larger frame holds a crow or rook feather I found in my childhood home town.


The cuckoo clock is an item I purchased a couple years ago.  I bought it secondhand from the internets, for a lovely price of ten euros! However, neither of us at home can stand the ticking of clocks, so it is always showing ten to twelve. The charm hasn't worn out yet, and this clock will never strike twelve, so no rush.

The seahorses are one of my recent creation that I am very proud of. They are a souvenir from Bulgaria that my grandfather brought from one of his journeys when I was only a few years old. When I told mom about my wall of pretty references to death, she dug these up and gave them to me. I made a deep frame for them, by attaching two frames back-to-back. The sea horses are held in place by tiny pins. The back is high quality velvet on a couple of layers or cardboard, so that the pins hold well. Then I painted the outside rim of the frames so they match together.The inside of the frames was of course painted beforehand.

My next idea it to hand a tiny shelve under all this, so I can display my cow horn and possible other relics.



Right next to the death wall is a stairs going up. Already a while ago I started decorating the stairway, but I never got to post pictures of it.

The collection is inspired from the wall stickers that I matched together; a chair and a classic lamp psot with a clock. The lamp post was originally much shorter, but I made it longer. The chair gives a funny optical illusion when it comes to size. From downstairs it seems to have a reasonable height, but standing next to it, its back hardly reaches up to hip-height.




The three oval frames are from a flee market and have no purpose yet, that is, they don't have a content yet. The two round clock frames are a second hand find as well. I printed Alice pictures to in them and colored the flamingo pink and the pocket watch purple.

The decorative key comes from the local handy shop. I love that they sell such keys, even though they cannot carve them. I wonder if anyone ever buys those for real usage.


Monday, June 30, 2014

On Wednesdays we wear Black

... like every other day.



The Sassenhein lake greeted me again. with a touch of summer this time. At this lake is a pavilion with patio overlooking the water. Two days ago this place was the stage to the local summer fair. Summer weather was one wish too much, but aside that it was lovely. The merchants and the little stalls of home made marmalade and vintage utensils charms me. I particularly like the brocante stands, where you cannot know in advance what to find.



❤ Dry wood for the fire, heat up that cauldron! ❤


The cauldron on fire is a traditional Hungarian way of preparing gulyás soup (in English known as Goulash I believe). The installation is called bogrács. One of the stands on the fair was selling hand forged bográcses from Hungarian origin and gulyás according to authentic recipe



❤ Witch outfit; skirt H&M, top Mango, vest from the back of my closet. Black flower hairband is a DIY black hairband with black flower clips attached to it; so easy and so successful!  ❤

❤ Kiss Me in the Kitchen  ❤

Oh this pot holder / oven mitten is an item that I have seen on another fair, about two years ago and I have always regretted not having bought it. This time fortune was on my side, it was even on sale! €4 only! The little black dress is my apron for the rare occasions that I bake. The pearls are part of it.





My fair purchases included this cow horn and a lovely old-looking frame. The feathers are from my childhood home town, that I've collected two weeks ago.





 


My recent witch-y moods are most likely to be influenced by this horrific and intense series that I am watching these days. Just recently have I finished American Horror Story's third season: Coven, and oh my deer it was dark and twisted and beautiful.




Music to match the witch mood:
Brother Orchid - Season of the Witch

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Well, I've often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat!

 'It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!', said Alice.


It's been a little while ago already, but then again, it is always late..
I celebrated my birthday with my dearest friends in my cozy backyard, with an Alice in Wonderland theme. The inspiration for that came from a book that my brother offered me, that I show later in this post. Elselien and bf helped me with the preparations. Thanks dearies for making that evening such a great one!

Painting the roses red. Drew and cut these myself, inspired from my new book! ❤
 
The teapot had a great use of holding together the bouquet of field flowers I had hunted for the day before. Almost daily I see them along the roads on my way to town. The lovely thing about field flowers is that, since they don't live long, the offer varies majorly every day. The purple ones on these picture disappeared even from the fields two days after I plucked some. 
~
Elselien helped decorating the bottles, what a astonishing result we accomplished! The bottles contained pear- and applejuice, coke and a couple of different sweet wines.

~
Our conifer hedge was decorated with roses and mini teacups and tea pots and of course, a Cheshire cat plush and a few seasonal decorative hearts. In the flower pots we put our glowing and color-changing mushroom mood lamps, which nicely contributed the the magic mood.
~
Specially for this occasion I purchased a donut game, in which players must roll a die that will determine which of the plastic donuts must be added to the stack on top of the cup. The stack gets higher and higher and the player who will make the tower fall, anti-wins! The first picture shows us playing it.


This is the book that inspired my themed party and the decorations I made. Its English title is Everything Alice, which is a Wonderland Book of Makes by Hannah Read-Baldrey & Christine Leech. Thank you so much for this book, brother, I love it! It is full of DIY ideas for decorations of all sorts, for games, for hats, for treats and it has a couple of recipes for edible entertainment as well. The photos are beautiful and it is wonderfully illustrated with quotes from the original Lewis Carroll with matching drawings from the 1866 version of the book.
~
The card garland is a 3 meter long DIY project. It is basically one pack of cards glued back to back, which are unevenly distributed over a 6 meter long red ribbon.



“Little Alice fell 
d
o
w
n
the hole, 
bumped her head
and bruised her soul” 
(from somewhere in the internets)






Among the presents I received was a NintendoDsXL with Animal Crossing New Leaf!(yaaay, even more furniture to collect! Thanks bf!) and a High Tea that E and S will organize for us three (a tea party, so wonderlandish!). Elselien offered me the skull on the photo below. I love it! it is macabre and so goth. This inspires to me collect more bizarre things.



Mom offered me these Stackers stack-able jewelry box drawers. Last year she gave me the upper part and it come in so useful, that I told her I'd like the other parts of the set as well (the are purchased separately) and she remembered! Thanks mom!







 And honestly, I love white rabbits. As well as any other color rabbits for that matter!
  ❤  ❤