Blogspiration: Juliette et Justine Fashion Shows, An Indie Lolita Design Contest, Lolitaopoly, and some upcoming Conventions!

Look at that! I managed to make another one of these link roundup posts in considerably under 6 months. I have a few random things to share with you all, in addition to some neat stuff I've stumbled across online, that I didn't want to bother with a whole new post with, so why not more blogspiration posts?

The UK Lolitas have a pretty large and active community, adorably called the Tea Party Club, and a few months ago they were lucky enough to get the chance to host a Juliette et Justine fashion show. They pictures are just now hitting the internet and you can check them out here. Juliette et Justine is such a stunning and opulent brand, so it's really amazing to get to see so many dresses from them all in one place, and done up so elaborately for a show like this! I seriously wish I had a local community that was able to pull off a feat like this!

If there are any aspiring designers and artists out there, the indie brand Pop Princesses is hosting a contest that is open for just a couple more days, that allows artists to submit their portfolios for a chance to work on an upcoming print with them! Check out this post for some more info on it. It could be a great chance to work with a skilled seamstress and make those burando dreams come true!

So, I was going to make this post earlier today, but I got a bit lazy and I'm really into MST3K and Rifftrax, so I kinda slacked off today because it was frozen and snowing out and watched a bunch of old Rifftrax, but I am really glad I held off (not just because I got to watch those Rifftrax) because I stumbled across this completely amazing project by Misirlou, of a Lolita version of monopoly called Lolitopoly. Seriously, check out this post! It looks completely stunning and hilarious. I want to be able to play this game so bad, it looks like a complete blast to play!

I absolutely have a soft spot in my heart for old school styled Lifestyle Lolita lists of cute ideas, so I was pretty pleased when I stumbled across this list of Princess Tips: 25 Spring Lifestyle Ideas. Spring is actually a lot further around the corner than I want to even think about, but these ideas are still really adorable, and a lot of them are really appropriate for any time of year, provided you're into the Lolita Lifestyle.

I actually stumbled across this post, It's Cosplay, Not C******, on an otaku culture blog I am particularly fond of, and it's about Cosplay vs. historical costuming, but I feel like a lot of what she says is very relevant to the Lolita too. Obviously the major difference between Cosplay and Lolita, is that Lolita isn't always, or even less than 90% of the time, a costume but more of a "Yeah, this is just what I wear" thing, but it's still a very interesting read and definitely something a lot of us have heard before coming from other people who dress outside what is considered "normal". I'd like to share the following quote from the post:

"It doesn’t matter if you play a character who was a queen 400 years ago, or you play one who will be queen of future Tokyo in a millenium. What matters is this is a hobby people are drawn to for their own reasons. As long as they’re having fun and not harming anyone, lets knock off the elitism and let them have their fun. It’s a big enough sandbox for us all to play with our toys together."

In F Yeah Lolita news, I've added an extra, and hopefully helpful, page to the site! Blogging Resources is a one-stop page for, you guessed it, resources for bloggers. I have been hoarding a lot of useful sites for myself to reference now and again, so I figured I would share them with the rest of you. The sites linked range from helpful blog coding sites, to Lolita specific memes, to blog posts others have written about being a blogger, to just sort of useful kawaii images. I'll be adding some new stuff as I find it, so if you're a blogger, you might want to check back now and again!

My final "OMG, guys, check this out!" is some fun news for me! It's just about convention season and I've managed to snag a couple tables at some upcoming conventions.

The most recent convention is actually only a couple of weeks away! The third year of U-con at Uconn is coming up on February 16th and 17th. U-con at Uconn is a completely free convention that's put on by our state's college. It's a small-ish 2 day con that has, I believe, between 700 and 1,000 people in attendance for the previous years. It's free and it's fun, and I'll be selling some stuff in the dealers room and just generally hanging out and doing con stuff. If you're in the area, stop by and say hi!

 The next con is actually a few months away, at the end of May, but it's one of my absolute favorites of the year, Anime Boston. I just got the news that I will get the chance to have a table in the Artist Alley this year, and I'm very excited for it! I have no idea where I'll be yet, or even what sort of stuff I'll be selling, but I just know I'm happy to get the chance to go back. I absolutely love the Lolita events that go down at Anime Boston!

I'd also like to mess around in this post a bit with link parties. If you're unfamiliar with the term (and you probably are unless you lurk around a bunch on craft blogs like I do!) it basically just means you get the chance to add your link directly to this blog post!

Blogspiration: Affrilliation Year 2, An Impressive Collection, & More!

Apparently, I'm only capable of making these blog roundup posts every six months! Not sure why I rarely do these, as I am always coming across interesting things to share.

First up is a post over on Kirakira Shoujo about a question that has been popping up since about 2001, is Lolita dying? It's not really a yes or no question, but Kirakira Shoujo writes an interesting article talking about the ebb and flow of Lolita's popularity! Lolita's not really going anywhere, and I'm not sure where people keep hearing this rumor, year after year, but the style is certainly always changing.

Affrilliation, the US's first exclusively Lolita convention has officially announced a second year! They've moved their con to a swankier new place and have started adding info about next year's con, which will take place the first of June! Check out their site for more info! Last year was considered a success and this upcoming one looks to be bigger and better!

Over on SkyScraperOpera's Tumblr I stumbled across this picture! It's a pretty amazing picture of their Alice & the Pirates Versailles Rose collection! I love this line because it's so striking and elegant. The pieces are classic Baby the Stars Shine Bright/Alice & the Pirates and they're all tied together with some gorgeous gold embroidery. I love seeing collections like this too! It takes some serious dedication and love to have a collection like this! One day I hope to have my own small collection of Meta's Antique Bouquet, one of my all time favorite brand series!

A common topic to pop up in the online Lolita communities is how to wear, or even if you should wear, Lolita to formal occasions. Over on Luna Rain, the blog's author talks a little bit about her experience of wearing a toned down Lolita outfit to a wedding and some general advice to keep in mind if you have a formal occasion to go to, but have nothing in your closet but frills!

A friend of mine just posted her adventures in this craft and I was blown away by how simple it seems! Check out this awesome tutorial! It's just puff paint and tulle but the results are so awesome looking! This was a tutorial posted for Halloween but when you wear Lolita, there are lots of occasions to get dressed up. I can imagine these masks in pastel colors for a Marie Antoinette Sweet Lolita themed masquerade look, in metallic gold to top off an OTT Classic styled outfit, or in Moitie blue to add a spooky touch to a Gothic Lolita outfit. 


Finally, I'd like to end this post with some pictures from the International Lolita Day tea party I went to in the beginning of December. These were all taken by Christina of Ramble Rori!

 At this particular meetup we had a guest speaker, Yuniya Kawamura, talk a bit about her recent book Fashioning Japanese Subcultures. Books that talk seriously about subcultures, let alone one that discusses Lolita, are few and far between, so this is definitely a book I hope to pick up sometime soon!

Maybe I'll update this little series of trips through other people's blogs more than once every 6 months, maybe not! But, until the next post, Merry Krampus!

Blogspiration: Historically Inspired Lolita, Frill Review, Wearing Lolita To "Inappropriate" Places, & More!

You may recall that last autumn I updated with few of my favorite posts by other bloggers at the time. I've been thinking about doing it again, and so here we are! After all, if the sad state of my blog updates hasn't clued you in, I've been doing a lot more blog reading than I have been writing!

 Photo from Artsy-Fartsy Mama

First up, a tutorial for using molds to make your own cabochons from Artsy-Fartsy Mama! As some of you might know, I pour a lot of my own resin pieces, and so the thought of making my own cabochons sounds like a pretty tedious task unless I happen to have a mold that can make many pieces, which is an incredibly expensive thing to ask for, and a still pretty expensive and also messy thing to make on my own, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that this tutorial used polymer clay! A much quicker, and less-messy alternative, and the pieces still looked amazing! Now, not everyone out there assembles their own jewelry pieces, so I though that this tutorial would be perfect for those that do a lot of deco work, as cabochon-heavy deco pieces tend to be pretty expensive to make, since cabochons can cost almost a dollar a piece. Which is no big deal if you only want one, but as anyone who's been bitten by the deco bug knows, one cabochon is never enough! You can pick up the mods she uses from Mold Muse, which look incredibly professional and are reasonably priced. After checking out her tutorial, I think I might pick up some molds from them this week!

Xelyna the Gothic Lolita has a very useful translation of Kera's June issue of Top 16 Fashion Keywords. It's basically just a pretty cool list of 16 trends for the month, and it's nice to see some things I'm already very interested in on there (Classic Lolita & teeth motifs!) as well as some things that I think sound pretty cool and I'd love to try out this summer (wearing all white & see-through gowns!).

An amazing Gothic Lolita coordinate inspired by 1790's fashion and the French Revolution.

Calanthe's Nightingale is a pretty amazing Tumblr, and I actually just realized that she has some pretty awesome longer blog posts on there! Unfortunately, due to the "real time" nature of Tumblr, I just completely missed out on these when she posted them last year! But I gladly ate them up when I discovered them on her awesome Tumblr last week. Along with some other very interesting blog posts, she has a small series entitled The Historical Lolita, where she has some incredibly in-depths posts about making coordinates inspired by specific decades from the 1700's. I have to admit, I don't know enough about the 1700's to tell one decade from the next, so these were amazing to read and to get inspired by! You can check out her posts about 1760, 1770, 1780, and 1790 on her Tumblr. I know these are from a while ago, but I would definitely love to see her pick up this series again!

Over on The Everyday Goth, the ever-witty Mary Rose has been doing some wardrobe cleanup and spends a post musing about What Makes A Wardrobe Complete. It's not necessarily a post with tips and tricks for those of you looking for an answer to that question, but I found her commentary on a What Not To Wear book she found in her bookshelf hilarious and completely relevant to any one of us, Lolita or Goth, who are outside of the "mainstream" fashion scene. For those of you looking for an actual check-list for a Goth wardrobe, later in the week she followed up on that post with her own list of what she considers a complete Goth wardrobe.

Violet LeBeaux modeling her pearl collar!

On Violet LeBeaux, my go-to blog for easy and fun tutorials and girly pink inspiration, she recently posted a tutorial for a cute retro style, but oh-so-trendy, beaded collar that is so much simpler than I ever thought one could be! I love the one that she is modelling above, because it looks so much like a vintage pearl collar that my grandma used to own! I think this easy tutorial could be applied to so many different styles of Lolita: a beaded pearl collar for Classic Lolitas, a pink deco'd collar for the Sweet Lolita, a black pearl & blue (or red!) cut-class bead collar for the Gothic Lolita, and even a studded one for any Punk Lolitas out there! I love the retro look of this collar, because I think that it could also easily be an accessory that can be worn outside of Lolita, or even in other fashions like Dolly Kei or Cult Party Kei.

There was a recent post on EGL, the LJ-based hub for Lolitas worldwide, about wearing Lolita in "inappropriate" places, such as donning the frills for jury duty! It was just a post where people chimed in and told their stories about the least appropriate place they have worn Lolita, but it was such a fun read. It's things like this that remind a lot of us that Lolita is just your everyday fashion for a lot of people worldwide!

Some drool-worthy photos of the boutique at Frill, courtesy of Sonia from over at Lolibrary.

Finally, I want to talk, again a little bit about the Lolita convention that recently happened, Frill! Despite the fact that I couldn't make it this year, the whole weekend it was happening, I was so excited for everyone who got to go XD I was refreshing Tumblr and EGL a lot more than usual that weekend, hoping people would post some quick snaps of it. Thankfully, the blog posts and photos have finally started rolling in from it! I am overjoyed to learn that almost everyone who went counted it as a complete and total success! I am also excited to hear that, hopefully, next year's Frill plans to be in a bigger and better location. All the reports I've heard have said that there were between 150 and 200 attendees, which is a pretty massive amount of Lolitas to all gather in one place! The above photos are of the boutique, and taken by Sonia of Lolibrary, but if you want a little bit longer of a post, you can check out Inside Elegy's huge post about her experience at the con!

I am so excited to hear that Frill was a success, because something like this, a massive gathering that was organized by and for Lolitas, in their very own convention setting, is really a huge step for Lolitas in the US! Even though Frill was a very long ways away from me, next year, I'm sort of determined to make it in person.

Lolita Blogspiration

I am pretty addicted to the world of cute, creative, and Lolita blogs, I love spending a few hours browsing around them, reading new articles and exploring new blogs by clicking around on links. I've tried to find ways to promote the various blogs I love, and articles I find interesting, from occasional shout outs, to the short lived "weekly prompt" thing that you may or may not have noticed on my sidebar. But I think the best way to send some blogging love out there is just to make a post about it. Will this be a new series? I have no idea! I would like to do this regularly, but, as I am sure you have noticed on here, I love to drop new series just as quickly as I start them.

Even if I just do it this one time, or every now and then, I hope you'll check out these blog posts and hopefully get as inspired by them as I have been!

Over at Cupcake's Clothes check out this amazing shooting star nail tutorial! It's done on fake nails, but it's simple enough to do on your own nails. While my own Lolita wardrobe is not exactly the most colorful one, I am a complete sucker for cute pastel combos, and an even bigger sucker for stars!


Being Badass: Having Self Confidence is a post over on Geekminina (formerly Ramble Rori) about, you guessed it, being badass and having self confidence. It has some great tips for those of us that sometimes feel like we are not being the awesome person that we could be, as well as some tips on walking the fine line between believing in yourself and being a jerk. Christina has actually started a series on being badass, something I will be looking forward to more posts about!

Over at iHanna, which is a crafty blog filled with eyecandy that I love to browse, she made a post about a neat little internet gizmo that makes fancy color splotches based on search terms through an image bank. Using things I don't quite understand, like technology and math and the internet, you just punch in a word and it makes instant art! I had fun punching in a variety of Lolita words, trying to guess what the resulting picture would look like, then being surprised at how wrong I usually was!

This post is a bit old, but even though it's from a blog I follow I somehow managed to miss it until now! Over at Moss Garden, Martha posted a wonderful Brothers Grimm fairy tale with a Mori Girl inspired coordinate. Her coordinates are definitely some of my top favorites, so this post was a real treat. Check it out for both the fairy tale and some more amazing photos of the coordinate!

 I don't know about the rest of you, but I am sort of a craft fanatic. If you can make it, I want to learn how to do it and make it for myself. My newest craft obsession is perfume oils. Some time ago I was trying to hunt down a very specific scent and was turning up empty handed so thought "Hey, why don't I just... make it?" so I did a bunch of googling and found that it was something I figured I might be able to do. I now have a small army of single notes and plans for releasing some signature scents in my Etsy. My experimentations are on hold for about a week though because I managed to spill a bunch of oil on my desk, so now my work space smells like a cupcake, making blending quite difficult! For those of you out there who want to possibly try this somewhat daunting task (It's not really harder than it looks, just more time consuming and fiddly) check out this tutorial over on Indie Fixx for making your own signature scents. I'm actually really loving Indie Fixx for their tutorials right now, I'm practically drooling over this one on infused sugar!

That's it for now! I am constantly reading blogs and hunting down tutorials and finding things I want to share with everyone, so hopefully I'll remember to feature some of the more fantastic finds on my blog here!