Friday Feature - The Klockwork Monsta's Underground Lair

Rumour has it that somewhere in the wilds of Northern England lived curious creature known as The Klockwork Monsta.

According to the legends The Klockwork Monsta was very fond of little bottles, and very fond of tiny things and thus began putting tiny things in little bottles.

After extensive searches I found the now infamous Klockwork Monsta in her underground lair.

The jar of Dust Bunnies that followed me home

 Me: What inspired you to start putting things in bottles?

Klockwork Monsta: I wanted to make a stone goblin and he looked cute in a jar, so I decided to make a few more. I wanted to start making specimins in jars but i havent really had time to make any bigger ones yet because of all the little things I found to put in jars.

A giant Dust Bunny...He looks hungry!

The dust bunnies are adorable, do they have have any kind of back story to them?

Dust bunnies: They are small, black as soot and apparently fuzzy, with spherical bodies and two inquisitive eyes. They move by hovering around, but they can extend stick-like legs and arms from their bodies to do certain tasks, and can lift objects many times their own weight. They make a squeaky murmuring sound when excited, and dissolve into powder (soot) if crushed.

A Mysteriously glittery "Drink Me" bottle

It seems a little strange to write "drink me" on a bottle with glitter in it, why did you choose to write that on those bottles rather than the ones filled with something more liquid?

I like glitter and I like sparkles!

But don't stir me...NEVER STIR ME!

What happens if you shake the shake me bottles?

The shake me me bottles have two mini D6 (table top gamer speak for regular six sided dice) dice in them, when you shake them they roll the dice inside the bottle, what happens next is a mystery.

What are you planning to make next?

Next is a secret! (the Monsta paused for a second before adding "all I will say is VAMPIRE HUNTING!" and then she suddenly took off at great speed leaving behind only a jar of Dust Bunnies to show that she had ever been there...

Fortunately if you'd like your very own jar of Dust Bunnies, glitter, dice or even blood (yes you read that right BLOOD MWAHAHAHAHAHA!) you can find The Klockwork Monsta's Underground Lair right here

Day 14 – What was your best and worst DIY disaster

That's kind of a strangely worded question, I'm not really sure how you can have a best DIY disaster.

Anyhow...

I'm pretty sure my best piece of DIY is my skull JSK.

As for the worst?

Probably the time I forgot to add ease to a shirt I was making and it didn't fit...Ooops :/

Day 13 – What was your first band t-shirt?

HIM I think

Tuesday Tutorial - Natural Dyeing with Onion Skins

A little while back I managed to get a little burn mark on one of my blouses that wouldn't come off.

Although the burn was small, it was in a really obvious place and with no way to remove it I thought I'd have to say goodbye to what, other than that was a perfectly fine blouse...

And then I remembered something I did in college!

Onion dying!

Now the instructions for this vary depending on what fabric you're using, for this tutorial I'm using a 100% cotton blouse, if you use a synthetic fabric chances are it either won't take or will be very faint and then wash out first time you wash it.

Onion dying works really well on wool although I can't remember how to fix it to wool.

You'll need a large pan (big enough to get eight cups of water into)

Half a cup of salt

Onion skins (I saved up the skins from six onions for this, if you want a darker colour you could use more)

Add the salt and water and blouse (or whatever you're using) to the pan and then boil, it's important to let it boil as this helps the dye fix to the cotton.

When the water reaches the boil add in the onion skins and stir with a wooden spoon, you should see the water start to change colour almost straight away.

Make sure to give the mixture a stir every five to ten minutes, this is to make sure that the cotton dyes evenly rather than being patchy.

After an hour, turn the heat off and let the blouse sit in the mixture as it cools (15-20 mins).

wring out the liquid from the blouse and pick off any bits of onion that may be stuck to it.

Hang your blouse up somewhere and leave it to dry out completely before wearing.

Because of the fixing stage at the start your blouse should be safe to handwash, I wouldn't recommend machine washing though.

And now with an outfit:

I'm not really sure what the black thing blocking my legs off is :/ Hopefully I'll be ale to get better pictures of this outfit soon :)

Day 12 – What's your gothic inspiration?

Louise Brooks

Hmmm now for me this is more of a list of who rather than what, and there are several whos.

Also Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks was a silent film star in the 1920's (if you look her up on youtube there are a number of clips from her films, mostly from Pandora's Box).

She's widely credited as being the inspiration for the bobbed haircut phase that swept the fashionable ladies of the 20's and early 30's.

Brooks was the rebel of Hollywood, while she liked being an actress, she hated Hollywood itself and eventually left to make movies in Germany instead.

In Germany she made the three films which she is most famous for (so stick that in your pipe and smoke it Hollywood!), Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl and Prix De Beaute.

The three films were incredibly forward thinking in their attitudes towards sex and relationships, unfortunately to forward thinking for the moral attitudes of the time and the films were heavily censored (Pandora's Box especially so as Brook's character Lulu is not the submissive dear seen in most films of the time).

Unfortunately after her flounce from Hollywood  many directors blacklisted her, and she found it hard to get parts any more.

She made her last film in 1938 and then became a call girl for a while,before beginning a new career as a writer.

Siouxsie Sioux

Siouxsie should need no introduction, but on the off chance you don't know who she is...

In 1976 Siouxsie went to see a band called the Sex Pistols after friend had told her that they sounded like The Stooges (who she was a huge fan of), she became part of "The Bromley Contingent" who followed the Pistols around and many of whom ended up in their own bands of became recognisable faces like in the cases of Sue Catwoman and Debbie Juvenile.

By September she'd started her own band, though their first gig was a bit of an accident and they didn't have any songs at that point so ended up winging most of it, fortunately it worked out ok and The Banshees were born!

With the Banshees, The Creatures and later her solo album Mantaray, Siouxise has sung and been involved in many of my favourite songs, the first guitar riff I ever taught myself to play properly was the main riff of Arabian Nights, the song I'd put on the Juke Box every week when I was first old enough to go to pubs was Peek A Boo and the first video I ever favourited on youtube was Kiss Them For Me.

Her make-up and wardrobe have inspired many many people (myself included, it was her bob in the Peek A Boo video that inspired me to cut my hair like that before I found out who Louise Brooks was).

Mana Sama

Of course no list of my inspirations would be complete without Mana Sama.

Mana Sama is the ever silent but beautiful designer and model for Moi Meme Moitie and guitarist with Mois Dix Mois.

Mana started out in the punk band Girl'e, where he was known as Serina before moving on to Matenrou and later Malice Mizer where he became Mana and started to be recognised for his fabulous stage outfits.

While with Malice Mizer he was involved in several music videos and two short films, "Bara No Konrei" which is a silent version of Dracula that seems to be heavily influenced by the Francis Ford Coppola film and "Bel air", also silent.

Day 11 – Is Goth a lifestyle for you?

Appropriate Lolita Secret is appropriate

There are some part of my lifestyle I suppose could be thought of as "Goth" (as I mentioned a few days ago I really enjoy having Halloween things around the house, cups, glasses, cake stands etc), but in general I don't really don't think of my lifestyle as gothic, because I really don't believe there is such a thing as a gothic lifestyle.

Day 10 – What do you hate and love about the subculture?

Hates first so I can have loves last and end on a positive note :)

Hates

1. Elitism. Yes I agree that gothlings should respect their elders and all BUT being "first gen/ second/ THERE IN THE 80'S!" doesn't mean you can act like a twat. I appreciate your experience and all but don't use it as an excuse to try and make goth into your exclusive "people of a certain age only" clique, it's killing the subculture.

2. Assumptions. Just because someone wears a big dress, corset or floofy cuffs (or all three at once), doesn't necessarily mean they're only into goth for the clothing, don't assume that someone with a gigantic bustle doesn't also know a helluva a lot about the music too.

3. Hypocrites. I am 100% behind the aims of the Sophie Lancaster Campaign, but I am getting really sick of certain people shouting about equality and how down-troddon goths are and then in the very next breath stereotyping chavs. I've not had the greatest experinces with chavs myself, BUT that doesn't mean they're all bad. If we ever want people to stop assuming that we're all baby eating, satan worshipping necrophiliacs then it needs to go both ways, we need to stop assuming all chavs are council estate, dole wallers that have 50 kids by the time their 25.

4. Stirers. Stop it, you're making things worse for everybody, yourself included.

5. Badly made corsets. You're potentially hurting your body by wearing them, and thought I'd never say it, they're also hurting my eyes.

Loves

1. The music.

2. The fabulous, fabulous clothes :)

3. The people. The wonderful ones out number the crappy ones.

4. Festivals.

5. Nice boots.

Day 9 – What genre of music do you dislike?

This is actually the hardest question so far imo!

The thing is I have a really varied taste in music, I don't just like "goth", I like little bits of everything, sure there are some genres I don't like as much as others, but I don't think there's a single genre I don't like at all.

I used to think I hated dance music, but then when I thought about it a lot of the bands I like use elements of dance music within their own (The Cruxshadows, Uberbyte, Ruslana), and I actually really like some early 90's dance.

Simerlarly, I used to think I hated rap music, but then I got really into nu-metal, a lot of which incorporated rap in with the heavy drums and guitars.

So to be honest, I can't answer this question because there aren't any genres I don't like.

Day 8 – What's your worst and best experience with non-Goths?

You've already heard about the ordeal I went through at school before, you don't need to hear that again and quite frankly I'd rather not open old wounds again.

So yeah, that is my worst experience.

The best experiences though?

Contrary to popular belief, most people are nice, you just remember the nasty ones more, so the annoying thing is that it's really hard to remember good experiences.

I guess it's probably one of the awesome times I spent with my Grandma when I was growing up (my parents both worked full time jobs so I ended up spending a lot of time with my Grandma).

Day 7 – Ten of your favourite goth bands.

"Certain journalists can be very lazy, and as soon as one motherfucker said goth then everybody else said goth. As you can see I'm wearing silver nail polish, not black nail polish, I stopped wearing black nail varnish because of that. Bastards! They have such control over me, the fuckers! I don't hear anything goth in our music, I don't see any similarities between us and The Mission or fucking Sisters Of Mercy, or god forbid, Fields Of The fucking Nephilim."

Ok, ok ok, I will eventually get to my ten bands but first I want to explain why I'm changing the name.

I'm not doing "ten of your favourite goth bands", instead I'm doing something more along the lines of "ten of your favourite bands that goths like" or maybe "Ten of your favourite bands you might hear in a goth club."

The thing about "goth music" is it's hard to pin down, as a bunch of people to name some goth bands and they'll probably all give you different answers, and if they're all in the same room it'll eventually lead to one of those "THAT BAND IS CLEARLY NOT GOTH BECAUSE OF X, Y AND Z!" types of arguments that we all know and hate (amusingly the person who does that will also likely be the one to mention that The Sisters of Mercy are obviously the epitome of gothdom, despite Andrew Elderitch's protests over the years).

Some of the music I like could never be classed as goth in a million years, but a lot of goths like it because maybe it shares similar themes with gothic music, perhaps it is inspired by goth or maybe it's another genre that many goths also enjoy (such as dark indie or industrial).

Thus, my bands (in no particular order):

Placebo

The Sisters of Mercy

The March Violets

Siouxsie and the Banshees

Patrick Wolf

Combichrist

Faderhead

Malice Mizer

O Children

Aural Vampire

Day 6 – Hand write your favourite lyric and take a picture.

Sorry it's sideways :/
Text reads:
"Relax, God is in control, watch the dot, obey my demands, shut your eyes you're dead."
This is from 100% by Angelspit.

One Year Bloggeversary!

It really doesn't seem that long, but as of yesterday I have now been blogging for one whole year!

In my first month of blogging I had 75 page views, that's now what I get on a quiet day, last month I had 2,994!

My most popular post of all time is the origami stars tutorial from last November (clicky)

Most of my views from other blogs have come from The Midnight Ballroom (which is a great blog by the way).

It hasn't been easy blogging for a whole year, but it has been fun.
So what's in store for the next year?

The triumphant return of the Friday Feature.

A return from the Tuesday Tutorial.

Phasing out the Sunday Round Up, because in general it just feels like I'm repeating myself when I could have a better entry instead, it will make the occasional return though at times like Whitby Goth Weekend or similar events when I've been away from blogging for a week or more and want to give a round up post of what I've been doing in my absence.

Outfit of the day posts- It probably won't be every day, but I do want to start doing the occasional outfit of the day post, especially when I wear Lolita.

Repeating the 30 day hair challenge- I tried to do this last year but my hair wasn't long enough for some of the styles...Time to give it another whirl.

Posts with more ommph!

I have really enjoyed my first year of blogging and I hope over the next year things get bigger and better :)

***

There's still time to enter my first bloggeversary give away here

Day 5 – Is there a local Goth band or group in your area?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA oh dear...

Yes, yes we do...

Without naming names, they aren't especially good in my opinion, and managed to cause some minor drama so not very many people in the local area like them.

HOWEVER!

A lot of the people in my local area (myself included) ARE big fans of a band a from a little further south than us...

Alice Moving Under Skies! :D

Day 4 – Name a stereotype or cliche you can relate to.

Halloween crap.

I
freaking
love
Halloween
crap
!

I love Halloween and all the awesome tackiness that goes with it.
I love to buy things at Halloween that I can use all year around, for example my cocktail shaker came from ASDA a few Octobers ago and has a giant skull on the side of it, it also came with a small collection of "Gothtini" glasses.
The same year I also bought a set of six champagne glasses where the stems of the glasses are skeletal hands!
I have a pair of black roses in a Jack Daniels bottle on my living room window sill.
I also tend to buy some very tacky chic beauty items around Halloween, glow in the dark nail polish, spider hair clips...The list is endless :) 

Covenant, Method Cell and Novus

Sunday night was one seriously awesome gig, perhaps even my favourite gig of the year so far!

Just to ruin your illusions of what dressing rooms look like...BUT LOOK I LAYED THE FOOD OUT ALL PRETTY AND STUFF!

The sound check was the quickest, most efficient sound check ever (here's the thing, sound checks are pretty boring after the first few you sit through with your "OMG I'M SITTING THROUGH A SOUND CHECK!" grin, they're especially boring if the band involves a huge drum kit, I love drums but I hate drum checks it's like an hour of THUD THUD THUD, so after a while you start hate sound checks and love bands that are mostly electronic and/or have German or Italian band members because they seem to take the least time to sound check).

Novus

I've seen Novus three times now,each with a slightly different line-up, one thing remains constant for me though, I know a lot of people find them a bit "Marmite effect", but live I really like them.

Method Cell

I'd not seen Method Cell live before, I had heard their album a few times and Kev has been playing a couple of their tracks on his radio show (Late Night Gothic, www.aceradio.co.uk, every Tuesday from 10 until Midnight, [/shamlessplug] ), so I knew I liked their recorded stuff already.
I very much enjoyed them live and I thought they brought a lot to the gig, I really enjoyed the new track that I've since forgotten the name of.

A warm day in Reykjavik!

Soon after the entire club filled up with smoke machine smoke as Covenant took to the stage.

Covenant as I said were pretty fantastic, this was both musically and performance-wise and the strobe lighting was actually a pretty nice addition to Legends's regular lighting.

They played all of the old favourites as well as some of the stuff from the new album, it was actually a pretty good mix.

They seemed to go down incredibly well with the crowd too which is always great :)

After the show I managed to get a picture with Daniel Myers :) (one of these days I will manage to get a photo with someone and I'll manage not to look derpy)

***

The following day Covenant played York, but their train wasn't until the middle of the afternoon so they asked Kev to dinner (I think this was mostly down to wanting to know where in Newcastle is good to eat at, but still it's nice to ask to the promoter to join you for dinner the next day, so yeah if you're a band and you're reading this MAKE A NOTE OF THAT, you don't have to BUY the promoter dinner, just go somewhere nice and eat with them :) ).
I ended up going too because well I had nothing better to do.
We ended up shoe shopping with them first before it got to food...Shoe shopping with Covenant...MOST SURREAL MONDAY MORNING EVER!
Eskil went off in search of a post office so missed out on dinner, but the rest of us (Myself, Kev, the Daniels and their tour manager who's name I've managed to forget :/), headed off for curry (apparently there are no good curry houses in Sweden, can anybody confirm or deny this?).
Turns out that they're all really nice guys :)

Day 3 – When did you come out the Goth closet?

Around 15 I guess...

Day 2 – Share photos and experiences from your Baby Bat days. (pictures probably not mind-safe)

Oldest photo I could find bar the purple lipstick one.

I'd just started college, I was 15, natural hair colour, no make up and fairly boring clothing.

A few months later, still natural hair colour but baaaaaaaaaaaaaad make-up. Meh I think we all have a photo like this somewhere, nobody is perfect the first time they do something, and this is one of those times.

I kind of look like the "Gothapotomus" macro in this one :/

A few months later I had my hair cut into a Siouxsie-esque bob and dyed my hair black.

This was from a group project in college between the fashion students and the photography students.

My first set of fake dreads weren't all that great, but they did glow in the dark which was pretty cool :)

I was a bit shit at making sure I re-dyed my roots :(

At this time I made three friends who I thought I would be friends with for the rest of my life, unfortunately, things changed, we changed I guess and I only see one of them now and even then it's rare I see her now because life kind of got in the way, we have bills to pay and crap these days.

Even so I still look back on this time fondly because I have a lot of happy memories of those people, and part of me still hopes some day we can be all friends again, although I think that is probably quite unlikely.

One of the aforementioned friends was very good with a camera, thus I have a lot of photos of my lack of clothing co-ordination and poor make-up skillzzzz from this time 0_o

 This was a week after the one above, I was cosplaying as Death from The Sandman by Neil Gaiman...Yeah it was pretty bad, soon after this I decided Cosplay wasn't really my cup of tea after all.

This was a week after the Death disaster.

I see this posted around a lot, as people seem to think it's bad Mana-Sama Cosplay.

Bad it may be (although of all of the photos of me from this time in my life I think that this is one of the least bad, despite the terrible lipstick, and this is my boyfriend's favourite photo of me), but I was not cosplaying Mana.

The friend who took the photo had a habit of uploading photos to deviant art and saying they were cosplays when they weren't, I was still a little weird around people at that time because of all the time I had spent alone while I was home educated, so I was scared to say anything in case she took it badly, in retrospect I don't think she would have and I really wish I had said something.

I mentioned this purely to clean the air about this photo, that it is not cosplay.

I was trying for Lolita though, so I suppose you could say this was my "ita" phase.

This was the week after that, as badly co-ordinated as they are, I really miss those boots.

This was the last time I hung out with those friends before I left for university. Bad make-up, check, green streak in hair, check, bad dreads, check, HOLY FUCK WHY DID I DE MY EYEBROWS GREEN?!?

I pulled this pose a lot *cringe*

University Freshers week...Holy fuck why did I wear that "corset", funny thing is I don't even have "I was drunk" as an excuse for the corset or "I BELIEVE I CAN FLY!" pose. I was an art student and booze was damn expensive in Galashiels unless TESCO happened to have some bottles of beer parcel tapped together in reduced to clear (that happened more than once).

YES I STILL CONSIDER PHOTOS OF ME FROM THREE YEARS AGO "BABYBATTISH!"

This was my 19th Birthday party, my friends were broke and I decided that they were the only people I wanted to be with so we sat in my friend's kitchen and drank vodka out of a child's tea set (STFU EMILLIE AUTUMN I DID THIS BEFORE YOU NOW RUN ALONG AND GO RE-RELEASE OPHELIAC AGAIN!)

Note the lack of support making my boobies look droopy as hell (not that they're massively pert but this picture makes them look worse than they are) and vial of my friend's blood around my neck. I accidently lost that necklace at an Angelspit gig, I was pretty devastated because "a vial of their own blood" is the coolest thing a friend has ever given me as a gift.

Oh yeah, about the hair (lets skim over the dodgy eyeliner kthanx), I shaved it off for charity a few weeks before this picture was taken, it was actually a pretty fun experience.

STAY IN SCHOOL KIDS!

I have no idea why my friends decided to put this wig on me, but apparently I enjoyed it at the time...This is what vodka from teapots does to you...

This is the last of my photos that I consider baby batish, I may still from time to time wear a bad outfit or some hideous make-up but hey at least I don't wear corsets with twisty busks in them any more... Infact I'm really picky and rarely wear any corsets with plastic bones in them these days...I like my steels :)