Saturday 31 March 2012

Reddit sock swap

NEW SOCKS!

So a few weeks ago I joined a sock swap on /r/Random_Acts_of_Socks and these are the socks that were sent to me.
They're so cute :D

I totally encourage anybody who likes postal swaps (and socks of course) to try sock swapping :)
(of course you give your address out at your own risk and if you live with your parents ask their permission first)

Friday 30 March 2012

Project perfect


Every woman/girl deserves acceptance, and we do not get enough of it in society, so why not get it from each other? How are girls every going to learn being jealous of each other is not okay? Talking bad about each other, starting fights, judging other girls, holding them up to unlivable standards that men have held us up to.. are not okay. Sometimes you need to look past whatever messed up characteristics that make us all human being and remember everybody needs support to do better in their own personal lives.. because once you know better you do better. 
-Jessica Inezh Davis

I am a woman who likes to dress up, I am all about my make-up and hairspray and fancy clothes.
It's in those fancy clothes that I feel most judged, in the Lolita scene, no matter how much we try and deny it or pretend it doesn't happen there is judging, and a lot elitism.
I'm not saying that everybody does that, but there is always that element.
The worst part of this in my opinion is that it is women judging and "bitching" about other women based on their appearance, don't you think it's bad enough that we have to face being judged by men all the time without buying into a culture of judging ourselves?
It happens to almost all of us, no matter which fashions we wear, I have personally been told I should be dead because of how I dress, seriously someone honestly thought that because they personally didn't like how I dress that I should be dead.

Enough is enough, it's time for us all to dress how we want to dress, look how we want to look and not judge other people on our own standards, in fact not judge people on appearance at all.
As I said in yesterday's post, it is RIDICULOUS to assume people will act a certain way based on how they look, I'm not perfect, I do it myself from time to time so this isn't me looking down on people and saying "You need to change" it's me looking at everybody on the same level and saying "WE need to change".

My first step is to take part in Project Perfect.
I couldn't take part in this yesterday, I didn't know about it until this morning but basically the idea is that everybody looked the same we couldn't judge each other on appearances.
So Project Perfect encourages women to take a photo of themselves wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants (I don't own any sweat pants so one of my lazy day skirts will have to do), and no make up or accessories looking as natural as possible (obviously it's impossible for those of us with funny coloured hair, tattoos or other body mods to be completely natural, but we can get as close as we can) and post it to our blogs/Facebook/whatever we use.


So that's me at my most make-up free (I did have "perfect" written on my arm like the event invite asks you to but it didn't show up to well).
You can find out more about project perfect here

Thursday 29 March 2012

Yay or Nay? Goths Make Better Lovers



So as the video tittle says this was aired in 2003, I just saw it for the first time a few days ago though when it was posted to a group I'm in on Facebook.

A lot of people seem to find it really sweet, and cute...Perhaps I just have a big, black heart but I really don't, I find it down right insulting in places.

I find the general idea that "goths make better lovers" to be wrong from the outset, I know I don't have very much personal experience (I can count my exes on one hand) but I have quite a varied friend circle these days and having seen their relationships from a friend's point of view I think I can safely say there are just as many good goths as their are utter twatwaffles, but lets not dwell on that.

The documentary itself is presented from the point of view of a non-goth looking in at the goth scene, from his point of view goths never seem to be single.
This is not true, I do however think I understand how he came to that conclusion.
There are of course less goths than whatever the fashionable norm is, and a lot of local goths know each other and will hang out together as friends, so perhaps he is mistaking friends for lovers? (not as stupid as it sounds, quite a lot of people used to assume my friend Gavin and I were a couple...It used to be a joke between us that we were cramping each other style when we were single).

I also feel that there are a lot of thinly veiled insults within this, the one that stands out most is the guy that is describing goth girls, who says something about how there are a lot of attractive goth girls but then also emphases that "fat girls" also sometimes join the subculture.
I find it really insulting that he would assume that what he finds attractive =/= what everybody finds attractive.
I also find the way he seems (to me anyway) like he is trying to "sell" the goth lifestyle like that really objectifying.

Delving further into what I find objectifying is the implication that goth girls are all (or mostly) kinky.
I really dislike that stereotype, not because I am against kink (I'm not), but because I am against fetishising groups of people based on stereotypes, it just leads to really negative things.
When I was fourteen (which would actually be the year this was broadcast, I'm not sure if what happened to me was related to this or not), I walked down my street on my way to the youth group I used to go to dressed as Death from The Sandman...It was a really bad attempt at Death but that is besides the point,  it was Halloween, I wasn't very confident in my early teens and Halloween was pretty much the only time I would allow myself to dress up.
For my make-up I had black lipstick and a ton of swirly eyeliner, I clearly looked 14.
Someone further up my street was having a new garage built and there were a lot of builders outside (I would just like to say here that I'm not stereotyping builders here, the majority of them seem to be fine, I am just explaining what happened to me), as I walked past they all lined up and shouted lewd things at me (about what they wanted to do with me based on my make-up) and made rude gestures.
I was so disturbed by the whole event that I still have issues talking about it, those men assumed because of how I had my make-up that I would be ok with that?
I'm not the only woman who has had to deal with this, when I shared this video with a few close goth friends of mine, other women started talking about how that part of the video had squicked them out and that they too had been harassed in the street by men who had assumed that they'd be "kinky" based on how they were dressed.

Most of all though, I just really dislike the idea that how someone dresses or what music they listen to would effect how they act as a person.

So what do you think? Am I just reading to far into it? Or is this video just really insulting?

Wednesday 28 March 2012

Hairstory with a twist!



Bad pun is bad...I'm not sorry ;)



My hair inspired by this tutorial (my hair isn't quite long enough yet...And I'm not sure turquoise is historically accurate! Oh well I used hair pins anyway instead of sewing it so I guess that doesn't matter so much anyway...).




Tuesday 27 March 2012

Gravestones


So I've been doing a little bit of research into Gravestones for some artworks I'm working on and it's pretty fascinating stuff.
I've mostly been looking into the symbology of Scottish stones (Scottish Gravestones are really pretty in my opinion).

Scottish gravestones (particurly the ones from the 1700's) are often covered in carved symbols, sometimes skulls and crossed bones (often mistaken for symbols of piracy, when on gravestones these represent mortality), tools of the deceased's trade when they were living (horseshoes, anvils, farming tools etc), symbols to ward off curses and hexes (Garlic flowers, stars and hearts), amongst others.

I'm most interested in the reminders that life is short (the winged hourglass - literally meaning "time flies", "Memento Mori" - Remember we must die, and trees) are the ones I am most interested in for the artwork I have planned.

Monday 26 March 2012

Picspamage!

Photo by Allyson Smith

Lately I have been a BAD blogger and not finding time to talk about the awesome things that have been happening so today you get a picspammy post so I can catch up.


So on Friday We had Eisenfunk, Surgyn and Angel Grinder in Legends.


Eisenfunk (photos also by Kev)

All three bands were great, I had a really awesome night although I'm really covered in bruises and left wondering if a child's paddling pool was filled with vodka, and you had Daniel Graves (Aesthetic Perfection) and Sami from Faderhead at the other, who would drink their way to the centre first?

Photo by Allyson Smith

Saturday was my mam's birthday, so she, I and my grandma went to Sunderland for the football :)

Grandma and I :)

The Birthday girl :)


We were fortunate enough to get tickets in the third row :)

Sunday I was just too knackered to do anything except goof around on Facebook :)

Thursday 22 March 2012

Dark, Secret plans


I hate keeping secrets from you guys but I have a plan, and if it works out then fun times ahead :D

Wednesday 21 March 2012

A postcard from Hong Kong


I got a new postcard and a six page letter from Carrie in Hong Kong yesterday :)
I tried to find out who the artist was because I really like the image (it's so weird I LOVE IT :D).The back says "Wun Ying" but there are like a billion search results for Wun Yin, none of which seem to be the same person :(
There was also a web address though which lead me to what appears to be Hong Kong's answer to The Gadget Shop/Red 5, they have some pretty cool stuff, not sure if they ship overseas though part of the ordering instructions seems to have been chopped off by another layer of flash :/

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Black, black, black, black number one!

Sorry about having two hair posts in a row but my hair dye came.

So my hair at the moment is inspired by some of my horror heros, Lily Munster,

The Bride of Frankenstein

Cruella Deville

and to some degree Dave Vanian

I didn't manage to toally bleach out the henna though so for now I have red bits, I will probably wait a few months to let it recover before I attack it with bleach again because I don't want it to dry out.

Not really sure why the black looks so blue in some of these photos lol.

Playing with Braids


(FYI: I tried to post this numerous times yesterday but kept getting errors so today you get two entries from me...HUZZAH!)

I think I am obsessed with braiding :)
More than a little bit inspired by:


Sunday 18 March 2012

Sunday Round Up: Something Old



Monday: Retronaut: STORYVILLE STREETWALKERS, NEW ORLEANS, C.1912 featuring a pair of spectacular stockings!
Tuesday: Bad Wisdom Photography: Leeds Steampunk Market lots of photos from Leeds Steampunk Market
Wednesday: Madame Guillotine: The Wicked Lady An intriguing tale of a dandy Highway Woman
Friday: Great Artists' Mews: Improving Classical Paintings with Cats! Never shall I look at The Mona Lisa in quite the same way again!
Saturday: The Hathor Legacy: Is Anorexia not all about the menz? (possible trigger warning) The Hathor Legacy and their readers combating the myth that women develop eating disorders because they want to look attractive to men.

Thursday 15 March 2012

Trying to make the best of warmer weather (Outfit post)

So I'm trying to not look like "a hippy at a funeral" while the warmer weather comes in...Do I win?

I went for a bit of a Greek thing with my hair today, quite liking it :)

Wednesday 14 March 2012

Edwardian Hairstyle with a Twist :)

From the front.

To celebrate my hair now being at the longest it has ever been I've been playing around with it a lot, trying out different hairstyles that I've never been able to try out before.

Side

I've recently fallen in love with the big, piled Edwardian styles, although my hair isn't quite long enough to do them properly just yet.

Other side.

But with a few small adoptions I can get something quite pretty :)

Back needs work though!

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Tuesday Tutorial - How Not To Do Henna Body Art! (Le Professeur Gothique's monthly Homework Assignment)



Today's Tuesday Tutorial went a little bit wrong :/ However in the interests of proving that I am in fact Human (shocking I know) I decided to keep it, so this week's tutorial will instead be a little silly!

As regular readers will know for most of last year I had dark red hair, which I was dying with henna.
I always made sure I bought body art quality pure henna because not only does it give a better colour, it isn't padded out with any of the potentially nasty additives that are sometimes used in hair henna (some of which if you use a conventional box dye over can either turn your hair green or even burn it away...EEEK!).


I bleached my hair last week, thus ending my deep red phase but I still had a box of henna sitting around so I decided to try doing some henna body art.


The first thing I did was sketch out some potential designs. Originally I wanted to do a bat, but I kind of fail at drawing bats so I thought I'd go with a stylised ankh instead (I know ankhs aren't very Indian but I wanted to give it a bit more of a Gothic twist to a traditional Indian beautifier).


There were no instructions so I decided to guesstimate, I think that was my problem right there...
I emptied out around half of the powder (tip pure henna is almost always slightly greenish when it's a powder), and then mixed in some water.


I kept thinking the mixture was too dry so just kept on adding water...I think this was terrible mistake number two.


Terrible mistake number three was thinking that a sandwich bag would work instead of a proper tube applicator 0.o


Of course the lines came out too fast and because there was too much water the henna spread...


Blurry orange mark? Oooops...

So I decided to have another bash at henna-ing my feet:


This came out slightly better as I added more powder to thicken up the mix, but the lines are still a little wide...Oh well *le sigh*

So if you really want to try henna body art...Learn from my mistakes and listen to these ladies instead :)

Monday 12 March 2012

Leeds Steampunk Market

Photo by Hackenbush

Regular readers will have noticed I did another disappearing act on Saturday, I had meant to mention that I probably wouldn't be around to making an entry, but funnily enough I didn't get around to it...Oops!
Anyhow I was in Leeds.
I suddenly discovered that there is a 7am on Saturdays 0.o
I travelled down with Queenie (does this make me Nursey? FETCH THE UDDERS!) to help out on the Forever in Black stall.
On the way down to Leeds we passed several rather strange things (such as a GIANT yellow dog shaped car, a GIANT can of Red Bull and a sandwich shop called "£andwich" 0.o)
I've never really worn Steampunk before so I ended up in Ero/Guro (or is it Guro/Ero?) Loli. Photo by Michael Young

The market itself took place in Left Bank which is a converted church, which is now arts, music and performance space in Leeds (it's also where The March Violets filmed the video for Dandelion King ).

Photo by Hackenbush

I had a pretty fantastic day, from a "helping out at the stall" point of view we did pretty well (and I'm actually starting to remember the prices of things...HUZZAH!), and from a fashion blogger point of view I saw so many people wearing interesting things, which has inspired me to add a little steam to my wardrobe too :D

As well as the market there was a little entertainment (as in actual entertainment, not just the chance to giggle at me and my lack of depth perception), from what sounded like someone with a Hurdy Gurdy (not sure on the details of that as it was going on behind us and there was quite crowd but it sounded interesting), and a little later on from The Big Snakes Mystery Orchestra, who I quite enjoyed.

In all I had a rather splendid day!

Sunday 11 March 2012

round up

Monday: ACQUA ALLEGORIA: OLIVIER ROUSTEING AT BALMAIN Stunning fashion collection inspired by FabergĂ© Eggs.

Tuesday: ~resonanteye~: ghost ship; glazes painting of a Ghost Ship on choppy waters.

Wednesday: The Boarder House: Immoral Women: Why We Need More of Them why we need more immoral women in gaming.

Thursday: BuzzFeed: Lady Gaga's Bad Romance: Women's Suffrage Bad Romance parody featuring women who want the vote!

Friday: Retronaut: CAWSTON OSTRICH FARM, 1896-1934 Vintage Ostrich photographs!

Saturday: Oranges and Apples: Alexandra Cameron stunning fashion photography.


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