pretentiosity

Being pretentious is a bit of a catch-22 sometimes, isn't it?

The word itself implies an act, a false face, pretending to be something you are not. So can you even be pretentious if you hold your hands up and admit it? Because I am self-aware enough to recognise I bear a worrying number of symptoms of the typical pretentious student. I have the tortoiseshell frame glasses, am off to do an English degree next year, but not before a holiday around Europe on trains through cities with cultural landmarks but more importantly lots of bars. For god's sake, I even bought a tweed elbow-patched blazer the other week, and THAT wasn't enough. I had to replace the existing buttons with gold buttons too (top left).


But I think the final straw came last week when I went to pick up the developed photos from my disposable camera last weekend. Yes, an old school Kodak disposable. The first half of the photos are from my recent holiday to Istanbul. I could always plead the excuse that I forgot my digital camera, but I won't deny that I took secret joy in trying to get arty angles of the authentic side of the city - no cheesy posing in front of buildings for me!


I want the protests, the noise, the unposed passersby (except for when they get in the way of my carefully composed portraits). I want the multi-layered landscape.


That's until I got bored half-way through the film and forgot about the camera, until New Years Eve. The next half of the film is a sequence of drunkards pulling more and more stupid faces while dancing to hideous noise. But it's all OK, because our New Year's Resolution is to read Ulysses.

wringing the words out

The only excuse I have for not blogging right now is that I am currently finding the formation of sentences highly painful. This may be to do with the 3000 word essay I am working on?

Much like the way my tooth-ache has prevented me from eating hard chocolate, but simply led to copious mugs of hot chocolate as an alternative, the pain arising from writing proper sentences seems to have led to experimentation in the form of badly punctuated poetry.

c-c-ch....

No, you didn't click on the wrong link; this is A Pretty Face. Actually, I changed the blog name too for all of three hours when I decided that the name didn't work. I can't even remember what I was thinking when I named this blog (I did try to explain it once but that isn't intelligible even to me). But then I realised that life doesn't work like that. You can't go back and pretend the mistakes you've made and you especially can't alter them now if you don't know what to change them too.

If I come up with an idea, maybe I'll change the blog's name to XXX, formerly A Pretty Face. But that's a bit of a mouthful.

For now, this is the blog re-design I mentioned, what, a month ago? Just before life decided to get in the way. The new design is actually a million miles far removed from what it was going to be, and I have a feeling it will undergo a few more tweaks, possibly drastic tweaks.

Can a tweak, by the very nature of the definition, be drastic? I think it demonstrates best what I am doing, though; I am not altering the content or substance of this blog. I'm just re-doing the make up, re-painting the face. Re-prettifying it.

Note: let me know if the colours hurt your eyes, or the font is too big/small for you to read etc etc. We never want to let style get in the way of functionality, do we?

Edit: Sabine at Psynopsis perspicaciously noticed that I'd changed my posting name too - which I clean forgot to mention here. I was starting to feel a bit too big-headed signing myself as 'pretty face'

in the pink

Inspired by...

• Delysia Lafosse's costumes in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (documented the other day)

• The many flowers I have photographed over the past few days

• My eternal love for the colour PINK due to the well-known medicinal properties it possesses (cheers you up, makes you smile, makes you pretty)

...I have given my blog a make-over. As you may have noticed, I have installed some fish. Probably a psychological manifestation of my desire to own a pet, I had hoped to set them against a lovely sea background, which as you can see failed miserably. Nevertheless, I hope you will help me to look after the new fish by dropping some food into their tank with a left-click of your mouse on the water.

You will have probably not noticed: the new addition of a small heading, above the award images on the right; a slight re-jigging of the order of the page elements, which I cannot even exactly remember; the updating and moving of my blog's search engine. But these are all part of the subtle changes in a makeover which contribute to the overall result.

I was going to change the blog's font, but then I thought 'whoaa there, a step too far'. Still, the font size is slightly bigger, as you may or may not have noticed.

But you will have certainly noticed the brand-new colour scheme I have implemented. I love it; it makes me feel cheery, smiley and pretty. I hope that it makes you, dear readers, feel that way too, and not like you've overdosed on marshmallows and want to throw up. If it does, just let me know, and I may just tone it down a little.

factory

I promise this will be the last post on my card-making escapedes for a long, long time. Over this past week, I have churned out a grand total of TWELVE homemade cards (and written and stuck notes into every single one).

Now I don't feel anywhere near as bad as I did for buying a stack of craft stickers to tide me over. I can see that without those, I would have probably needed double the amount of hours, made triple the amount of mess and been ten times as creatively exhausted. Bear in mind that even with the assistance of these stickers, I still spent many hours, made a lot of mess and got very tired. Stick-on pearls, flowers and birds will only go so far.

Anyway, I seem to have deleted the original photo I took of all the materials I amassed to assemble the cards. Instead, here, I give you the final product:


The huge quantity which I needed to produce meant that I really couldn't afford to spend hours sewing on sequins and beads and fabric as I have done in the past. So I instead kept boredom at bay by experimenting with an A5 format (even A6 for those two little black cards) which has very different design results from my usual A4 cards. I also looked for all the scraps of coloured card I could, as changing up the colours really is a fantastic way to not get bored when you need to incorporate a beige background into 12 very similar colour schemes.

So from a distance, they all look quite different don't they? But you'll notice that I have cut out card to contruct a thank-you message three times. There are two cards which are essentially pretty pieces of paper stuck on the front of a piece of card. And see how many bird stickers you can spot.

Oh well, I suppose all that is an inevitability when you are essentially being a card-making factory. The whole process led me to think about how designers of clothes or other products go about design/production. Do they use all the same tricks to make their wares appear different when really they're all much the same? Thinking about it, you can certainly find much more individuality in smaller brands and designers than large scale production companies. Maybe that's why.

cutting corners

It's slowly starting to dawn on me that I need to speed up my work.

Slow, thorough note-reading isn't going to cut it.

Spending hours making cards is out of the question.

So the other day, I wanted to make something flowery as inspired by my visit to the rose gardens. A quick search through my crafts box uncovered some stick-on decorations. I managed to complete the first half of this card in a matter of minutes.

Of course, then I began to feel that guilt of not having put enough effort in and spent an hour sticking on two ribbons in the most complicated manner possible, before deciding it didn't look right and removing the ribbons.

I'm not very good at this cutting corners business.

showing off is good for you

Sometimes I find the English love for modesty, even if it is obviously false, deeply irritating and stifling. Personally I believe that once in a while, an unembarrassed and undisguised showing off can be very good for you.

So when a couple of you asked yesterday to see a few of my homemade cards, I was more than happy to oblige. One thing I'd forgotten is that, as a self-confessed show-off, I had shown you plenty of my cards before already:

Exhibits One and Two - my favourite Happy Birthday cards
Exhibits Three, Four, Five and Six - my favourite technique
Exhibits Seven and Eight - thank-you cards
Exhibits Nine and Ten - matching card and giftwrap
Exhibit Eleven - LOVE card
Exhibit Twelve - homemade envelope
Exhibit Thirteen - a clue card

That's a lot right?

But did you really think I'd stop there? No way! I'm always up for more showing off and I don't feel bad 'cos it's the only crafty thing I've ever been able to do; pottery, sewing, jewellery, they all failed. So trust me to find the one most popular technique the hardest to master. You can find tons of information on the Internet about how to make absolutely mind-blowingly amazing pop-up cards, and when I was younger I spend a great deal of time trying to imitate them in design lessons.

And so in order to balance out my ego-show, I give you... my pop-up cards!

The top one - I made this years ago planning to sell it for Valentine's Day. Um, strange font, random heart made of tissue paper and messy glue. It's still waiting in my drawer for a Valentine who I don't think would mind.

Middle - I quite like the idea of the wrapping paper behind the pop-out. But I cannot forgive myself for that glitter application (WHEN will I learn the don't-use-glitter lesson then?) nor the fact that it took about 10 minutes to make; the guilt sets in if a card doesn't take approximately a month to complete.

Bottom - well... I don't know what I was thinking. A pop-out Eiffel tower? Made of tin foil? And oh-my-God the cover...

Oh well, laughing at yourself is good for you too.

treasure trove

Two of the things I find most relaxing are taking a ton of photographs, and admiring the objects of the photographs. Since I also really enjoy creating cards (pretty much my only creative-in-a-practical-way outlet) my room is a treasure trove of beautiful card, ribbons, buttons and pretty much everything I can lay my hands on. I am sure I have enough things to make clothes, jewellery etc; I am very well supplied, however my skill/time really doesn't extend that far.

I don't often spend very much money on craft supplies, preferring to accumulate bits and bobs along the way. However I recently went through a bout of creating several cards which all required quite a lot of material and left my supplies sadly depleted. I bought a couple of bog standard cards to tide me over, and so you can only imagine how delighted I was when my sister presented me with a cute little present she'd got me. Two of the most unique and beautiful pieces of card I have laid my eyes upon:

Before long, you've guessed it, I was happily flicking through and snapping away at the other greatest 'jewels' in my treasure trove.

I once decided to take up sewing. I bought a sewing machine, and my friends all got together for my birthday to buy this awesome stackable sewing stuff storage unit + all the sewing accessories you'd ever need. These days, the storage finds itself home to all my spare buttons, ribbons and the thread and needles which I use on my card work.


I am not disdainful of the more cookie-cutter variety of crafts. I did not buy these but have found these cut out letters which came in a Christmas card-making pack (along with pop-out shapes and glittery, velvety and shiny card) surprisingly versatile.

I also have a big brown box which is home to all the completely random bits and bobs which find themselves becoming useful. Old jewellery, skeleton leaves, bits of ribbon, glitter, sequins and scrap material live here in glorious chaos.

Do you have any treasure troves like this at home? What do you use them for: collages, scrapbooks, or just for ogling?

NOT-Valentine's Day Gift

I'm not one of those huge Valentine's Day haters, who harp on about the materialistic society in which we live, the detrimental effects on the mental wellbeing of those under pressure. But let's face it, Valentine's Day seems pretty much designed to make single people feel lonely, coupled people feel stressed and card/chocolate/flower sellers feel rich. Oh wait, maybe I am one of those people.

I have a very good friend - co-incidentally the person I told I'd started this blog, because I knew she'd take a look and then forget about it - whose birthday lies on Valentine's Day, and hates it. 'Coupled' people want to spend this day with each other, because on Valentine's Day, secksual relashunships, even if they only began approximately 19 days ago, take priority over long-term just-friends.

From reading this blog, you may be aware that I love making little crafty things which don't require too much expertise, cost or complicated equipment. My favourite things to make are cards, because they definitely fulfill all of those criteria, plus they also seem to make any gift more thoughtful and (hopefully) delightful for the giftee. Even so, being a perfectionist means that even this relatively simple task takes me hours and hours and makes a lot of mess - I cannot even imagine the chaos which would ensue if I did art on a regular basis. Therefore, although over the years I have made many, many cards, more often than not I realise that I have run out of time and will have to make do with a little note or a card from my shop-bought emergency stash.

However I knew that I wanted to make the gift for this friend as special as possible and so a week in advance, I set about starting the packaging. I had so much fun with it that I spent the whole morning on it and was finished by midday. Of course, the downside of this was that I was so excited that I wanted to present my friend with the present immediately, and spent the whole weekend wishing that the ensuing week would pass on fast-forward.

Luckily, the week's gone past so fast that I haven't had a moment for impatience. Now, I thought I might share the card I did make, although the gift itself might have to wait for Saturday incase my friend indeed does continue to follow the blog. Here's a hint if you are, I always like to link and/or match my card and wrapping with the present inside in some way...

Materials used: A5 purple card, strip of pink ribbon from GLOBETRIM London, wallpaper sample from Cole & Son, gold sequin star, 3 plastic gems, image from website www.1920s-fashions.co.uk

A sneak peak into one of my many overflowing bags of 'making stuff'.

Did you know...

Did you know...

-that every Christmas, enough wrapping paper to cover 20,000 football pitches is thrown into rubbish bins in the UK alone?

-that all this paper CAN be recycled?

-that I am an avid fan of being green in my living habits although it's my least favourite colour to wear on clothes?

-that I love giving presents and also being a little bit crafty?

-that re-used wrapping paper can look this great?

If you are giving or receiving presents this Christmas or Chanukah, or you know what, on any other present-giving occasion - make sure to reuse and recycle.

Freaky Friday

My week, in a poem...

Wonders on my winter wanders

Admiring observation mode's gorgeous sunset photographs a few days ago reminded me that I can't remember last seeing a pretty sunset in London.

But on my daily walk to school a couple of days ago, I was struck by the most beautiful sunrise. It was already 8:00AM but it seems that in these winter days the sun hasn't come out even by then. Painful and cold and dark when you wake up before 7:00AM but also conducive to lovely sunrises which actual human beings can witness. But I started wondering why I had never seen them before on winter mornings, and I came to the conclusion that I hadn't been looking hard enough. The beauty of the sunrise that morning was so overwhelming that I had to stop (unusual for me), take out my phone, turn it on, and take photos.

I'm still undecided about leaving my school at the end of this year for my last two years of free education (before university). A primary reason for staying right now is these magical morning walks. From now on, I'm going to make the most of them.

Scarier Dolly

I hadn't realised until I wrote this post about a 'fug' £100+ doll quite how many scary dolls I have taken photographs of over the years.

Here's one, taken about a year ago on a camera phone even worse than the one I have right now. The barbie looks a little angry.

This doll was meant to look like me. Something about the glazed eyes, unfortunate haircut and zombie-like arms makes that notion sort of offensive.

OK, maybe this one is more funny than scary. But funny in a nervous laughter kind of way, as in how unfortunate a pose for a couple of preteens to create. And you can't deny that the lopsided mouth and coming-apart stitching wouldn't look out of place in a slasher film.

Creative Juices

Recently, I have been busy busy busy and the amount of blogging I am doing is really suffering. I appear to have lapsed into a post every other day, which I really don't want to do. But for now, all I can do is prevent it from slipping down to every third day so here we go...

I do not see myself as an outstandingly creative person, but I do always feel the need to 'create' something. In fact, I believe that it is within everybody, as a part of human nature, to wish to create new things as best we can. That is what has allowed us to invent and evolve as a human race, from wherever we started off to the modern world. Isn't the extent of the change which is constantly happening a true testamant to the imagination of human-kind?

Some people have a special talent for certain creativity; in fact, everyone does in one way or another. They may be a fantastic chef, web designer, jewelry designer, musician, artist, actor, scientist, inventor.

As I have said, I am no Mozart, Monet, Einstein. Nevertheless, even when I am at my most busy, I still make some time for being creative. When I am not blogging as in these past few days, I am writing essays or short stories or even personal little poems. When I'm not writing, I'm taking photos on my rubbish little camera phone, or creating home-made cards. I also like escaping into a world of acting. Much of what I create documents beauty which already exists: in my writing, in photos and in the cards which I make out of the pretty ribbons, sequins, card and glitter I have amassed.

Running a little low on money, I have often wondered if I could pocket a few pennies this way. I have been offered certain adverts on my blog, or I could try that adsense thing, but I don't really trust the internet. I even looked up writing competitions on google, but I'm not going to pay an entry free. Recently, I have considered trying to sell some of my card creations, but being the perfectionist that I am, I doubt the profit would be time or cost effective. Still, I might give it a go.

I made a movie of my favourite cards on Windows Movie Player, but I don't know how to post it. Anyone got a clue? I'm talented, eh?

So, how do you get your creative juices flowing?

Brink of Insanity

Today, as I edged closer and closer to the brink of insanity, I decided to try deciding what to wear for my critical debut on Tuesday.

I found myself desperately unable to make any of my posh dresses look vaguely suitable. I ended up layering a Burberry silk dress over my £1 Primark top and brown tights (bought my mistake) from Marks & Spencers, which I'd worn to the library. On top of that I added my favourite summer dress from Uniqlo, worn so endlessly that it is beginning to resemble a shapeless and bobbly monster. Then I slipped on my least exciting shoes.

Then I swept all the clutter off my door, rearranged my mirror to create a blank canvas and took 10000 photographs. All signs that I'm not quite sane, but whatever. I was pretty pleased with how tall I looked in the results, so I thought I'd post it on the internet for all to see. In my mind, it looks sort of nice, in a Marni-eqsue sort of way. Like: look how effortlessly I mix textures and lengths and labels and prices to create this fantastic ensemble.

Time and Half-Birthdays

Birthdays are often anti-climaxes. But Half-Birthdays never are. Tomorrow, this blog will have been alive for exactly 6 months - now isn't that exciting?

Time is a difficult concept to get your head around. Not just in mathematics, where the 60 seconds in a minute thing completely messes up our way of working everything out in 100s. It can feel like 6 months have flashed by in no more than a week and at the same time, something happening 6 months ago feels like it actually happened a million years ago.

Looking back at the first month of this blog, I can barely believe that half a year has almost passed since I watched the Sex and the City Movie. That's a big percentage of my life, sort of. Yet at the same time, the exams which I was meant to be revising for when I decided to write a blog seem like a lifetime away, with far more important ones looming in another 6 months. 6 months ago I had enough time to write 4 posts in one day.

Here's hoping that the next half-year will be a good'un. Happy (almost) Half-Birthday Blog!

The root of all evil?

Normally I don't like giving people money as a gift; I enjoy buying presents too much. But when my friend asked for a monetary gift for her birthday to contribute to her foreign trip fund, I thought it would be a nice opportunity to get a little crafty and add a personal touch to my gift.

I haven't had the time to make anything recently but this morning I was happily free so I decided to use one of my favourite techniques; sewing on card. I am ridiculously unable to use a sewing machine; I seem to break mine every time I try to use it, so sewing on card is a lovely alternative and oddly therapeutic.

If we're going to have to let money continue to exist, we might as well wrap it up nicely.

how are you?

Whenever somebody asks 'how are you?', the almost invariable response is 'OK, thanks' or 'good, thanks' or 'alright'. So when you aren't actually alright, it can be difficult to know what to say. All of a sudden the reply becomes far more unnatural and awkward. Wouldn't it be so much easier if it was more normal to say how we actually feel?

But the truth is, that even if one moment I am far from alright, I know that a couple of hours later, my mood will have brightened considerably. Either it's friends or routine, which occupy my mind so much that there's little time left to feel sad or alone.


I took this picture on holiday a couple of months ago. It was a very special day, and being so isolated amongst the water like this was an extraordinary feeling; a sense of awe which makes the question 'how are you?' far less important.

If my honest reply to this question isn't exactly what I want it to be, I know I just have to ride it out a little bit longer.

Soppiness ahead...

When I hear the phrase 'outlet for your anger' or 'emotional outlet' or 'creative outlet' I often feel like I want to hurl. But sometimes, taking your mind off actual life and immersing yourself in a world where the only thing that matters is your creation, being as utterly perfect as possible, can be very calming.

I felt like changing my 'What's making me happy' picture. Surely a bag can't make a person feel happy for over a week. But as I looked through my recent pictures, nothing really stood out. I suppose I've been in an odd mood lately; it feels like everybody around me is in an odd mood too.

But then I went into the folder in My Pictures labelled 'CARDS' and looking at my own creations, seeing something I can be pretty sure that I do well, I felt a little egotistical but also quite happy. My latest card, which is actually, shamefully over a month old is the one I put up to the right. It also felt like a good choice, because love is something which always makes people happy, right?

The Joker

Funny people are often very unhappy. I do not believe this to be a generalisation, considering how many sad examples there are to back up my statement, and if the said funny person is not currently unhappy then they have almost definitely suffered from depression, unhappy childhoods or tragedy in the past.

I used to hate being seen as funny, because I would get all paranoid about whether people liked my humour or my me. My ditziness or deprecating comments were a mask for what was most probably general angst but which felt tremendously important at the time. As I've grown, I feel that I've become more content, and although I am obviously not happy 100% of the time, I feel like my smiley persona is less of a persona than it used to be. Once, somebody told me that they could never tell when I was upset because I always smiled. Then I went through a period of being irritatingly melancholy. I think I've found a good medium where I can vent my unhappy moments and be able to smile afterwards. There's only one problem.

I think I've lost my funniness.

I do still make people laugh and smile and I like that. When I'm in a particularly sarcastic mood, I can be pretty witty. But I really am beginning to worry that soon I won't have any humour left. God, I realise how ridiculous that sounds now but I made a resolution to write at least a page of fiction every day and started yesterday; I was shocked to discover how terribly, horrendously angsty I sounded! Today I wrote a couple of short pieces inspired by rainbows. The first was just generally trying to be intelligently symbolic and metaphorical. Hmmm. So I decided that the second would be a little lighter. It turned into a piece of micro-fiction about a messed up little girl with a screwed up family background who ends up running away. I have decided to share it, because as they say, it is essential to be able to endure humiliation if you want to be funny. I'm OK with that:

I had a best friend, and sometimes she liked to pretend that her name was Rainbow. Sometimes it was Princess Luna India Rainbow, or Dr Rainbow Bowman, or Sparkle the Rainbow-Catcher. But mainly she just liked to be called Rainbow. On our first day at school, my Mum tied my hair back and made me wear my brand-new navy blue boots. I hated them; I’d wanted to buy the pink satin pair which would have made me look like a ballerina. A very scruffy ballerina, my Mum said. Of course, my friend was wearing her shiny red shoes which she told me her Daddy bought from Dorothy Gale. I believed her, but later my Mum told me that Sophie’s Daddy had been living in Hawaii ever since the Son of a Bitch had found out that her Mummy was pregnant.

When I went back and told all this to Queen Rainbow the Great, her purple mascara began to run and she said that Hawaii was very beautiful and when she was older she would be Queen Rainbow the Great of Hawaii. She told me that Son of a Bitch was what they called the Kings in Hawaii. Then I started to cry and my purple mascara ran too, because my Daddy was a lawyer not a King. My Mum got angry with me for wearing make-up.

Once, when my goldfish died, The Rainbow Detective told me that the Evil Witch who pretended to be a dinner lady at our school must have poisoned her, because she’d poisoned her Mummy too. I couldn’t sleep at night for three days, and then my Mum promised me that Sophie’s Mummy just had a little accident and that evil witches didn’t exist. Barbara was actually a very nice lady. The next day at school, Runaway Rainbow said not to believe her and that Adults are just very good at lying. She’d formed a plan of action: I’d bring in the new bicycle I got for my birthday (for her), and the old one in the shed (for me). Then we’d run away at lunchtime, before the Evil Witch tried to poison us too. In the meantime, we’d have to be very careful not to drink any orange juice.

I didn’t bring in the bicycles. Miss Rainbow Star was very angry and said that I’d broken the rules. She didn’t speak to me for a week, apart from once, before she ran away. The last time I saw her, Blue Bird Rainbow said to me that I was her very best friend ever. She gave me a friendship bracelet made out of daisies and said that she was going to find the Land of Oz, like the song that Judy Garland sings in the movie.

I still can’t see a rainbow without the black mascara running down my made-up face.

Hopefully my creative juices will start flowing more smoothly if I can keep this up, and maybe I'll run out of melodrama and regain a little bit of humour. I'd like to keep the relatively balanced mental state though, please.