Grey Day So We Invade Trinity

Ok guys, it's a photoshoot day!!! I was going to save this 'til tomorrow, but I think the next couple of days are going to be spent in la library removing myself from the internet... No shopping. No procrastinating. Just attempting not to fail exams... At least 'til Tuesday! ;-D

But, since you're all so lovely, I thought I'd leave you with this *attempt to make the world at least pretend to be sunny and warm...*

I'm Blue! Dabadee Dabadi Dabadee Dabadi...

I just love twirling TOO much... But the skirt does FUN THINGS!!!

Gratuitous accessories love...

Pose... And TWIRL!!!

Stumbles...

Fights with tree... And giggles.

Oops! Sorry Tree!

Lost.

Hop, skip and a jump... But not quite home!

As you can see, the sun has decided to desert Cambridge for the time being... I'm trying to keep in the sunny feeling, by wearing bright colour, but I have a feeling all this spring chicken energy may sap away the longer this grey dreary spell continues. Let's keep our fingers crossed tomorrow brightens up!!! 

The location for this shoot was Trinity, which is the college next door to mine... We're supposed to be mortal enemies. 

Trinity has canons pointed at John's!!! 

No Kidding!

In this shoot, I'm wearing a GAP tee and GAP men's cardigan, vintage skirt, Accessorize and confirmation present bracelets, vintage tooled leather belt, Melissa for Vivienne Westwood T-Bar Mary Janes, ToyWatch and Anya Hindmarch woven clutch. 

                                           

So, that's today... I'm well behind on an essay, and rather sleepy, but never mind! 

I've mostly spent the day admin-ing and searching for the perfect Stepford Wife half-apron with Angie (@Norwegian_Wood) via Twitter and Etsy. I got a new haul from Love Miss Daisy Vintage today, including a raspberry pink  cocktail dress that just *screams* silly themed dinner party... WOOP! for post-exam planning! My current favourites for the job of *my apron* are these:

from Serendipity Treasures and phase three

from Boojiboo

from Spice Rak Designs

Also from Spice Rak Designs, and currently very much the favourite... Hmmmmm.

I was thinking I could attempt to make my own, but THE LEMONS ONE IS SO DAMN BLAST PRETTY!!!

Thoughts, comments and suggestions are welcome. I'm also looking for a hair tutorial (youtube?) for 50s Stepford Wife hair:

Definitely thinking about this waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much... Hehe.

Oh, and one final thing:

Can we all express the LOVE for T-B's teeshirt...??? (From teetonic.com - they have a girl's version in lilac too!)

Hehe. The boy done good.

Night all!

Xxxc

Sorry for being away!!!

Hello everybody!

It's been far too many days since I last posted, and I've been missing the blogosphere like mad! The dissertation draft is on its way to completion - not quite there yet, but hopefully by the end of the weekend! *Crosses fingers*

Anyway, I'm back (ish) - posting's going to be less frequent than usual for a while, but I have a few posts up my sleeve and some PHOTOSHOOTS!!! Woop! T-B is back in Cam-land, and we're raring to go!

So... The first of much Easter-term procrastination-shoots:

Wonderland: circa.1628

Wearing - French Connection long grey jersey skirt, TopShop realitees concession twist back t-shirt, Paul Smith mustard blazer, Jocasi belt, ToyWatch, Jaeger brown leather court shoes, brown macrame flower necklace bought from a tiny craft shop in Florence...

- Here I'm looking at one of the indexes... Each large book case has a hand written index inside a little fold out wooden window... Mostly in Latin, but occassionally understandable, they're almost as fascinating as the books themselves!

It was lovely to get out of the main library today for a wander around the "Old Library" in college... Built in 1628 from a donation of £1400 (haha), it houses some of the most precious books in the world - books, manuscripts, journals, paintings, medals, field notes etc - ranging from the 15th century to the present day... 

Some of my favourite things (aside from endless keyword searches of the medieval manuscripts collection) are the works of Ovid that belonged to Lorenzo de Medici (1474 - arms of the Medici - illuminated - and Marsuppini - sketched marginalia - here) , the first complete translation of the Bible into English (photos of pages from 1535 and 1537 here) and the 1808 book on the abolition of the slave trade by Thomas Clarkson, one of our alumni who was instrumental in the abolition along with other almuni including William Wilberforce (photos of illustrations of conditions on slave ships here). 

In the more modern section of the library (- by more modern I mean it holds more recent books), there are vast archives of the works of fellows and alumni including the field notebooks of Jack Goody (anthropologist) and the conference journals, mystery novel manuscripts and neanderthal cartoons of Glyn Daniel - ex Disney-prof of archaeology (- Janus entry for the papers here). 

I love each and every one of those things with a passion, and every time the adorable college special collections librarian (J) lets me into the old library, sometimes for hours at a time, I breathe in the air of musty old books and really think about how lucky I am that they're here... And I'm trusted with their safety! It's quite scary to think about sometimes! You can't really take them out of the bookcases, unless J is with you - well, practically, one could, but morally... If you actually want to study any of it, one should get it out with J and look at it in the reading room. Some of the medieval manuscripts (like this one) are breathtaking to study in person...

Saying that, especially downstairs, you do tend to just rummage... I love all the pastel sketches of fellows done for their portraits, and there is one particular archive that I have been allowed huge free reign with, that I won't tell you about just yet, as it's going to form the basis of a project that I'll be publishing on the blog in a couple of months time! Let's just say, it's awesome... Well worth the suspense... Honest! :-D 

Sigh... So much for today's work ethic! I should probably go and get on with my case studies now. Must stop thinking about old books with no relavence to dissertation and start thinking about the ones in front of me!!! ;-D

Xxxc

P.s. Please bear with me while I catch up on my several hundred googlereader posts and everyone's lovely comments! And, as ever, photos by Alex Tatton-Brown, and thanks to JH.

Whispers, Wispiness, WASPs

This fine, cold evening, I've gotten very drawn towards faded, wishy-washy colours a la Virgin Suicides... Sofia Coppola's genius film not only has the delectable Josh Hartnett in, and may well be the only Kirsten Dunst film ( - apart from Bring it On which is standard chick-flick-love doesn't count territory - ) that I actually like, but also has GREAT VISUALS...  

I love this film with a passion akin to my geekiness about the lives of saints (trust me, that's BIG)... And this is thanks in no small part to the washed out beauty of the colouring, and clothes, more specifically. 

I started thinking about it because of the StylishWanderer's post yesterday; all washed out greens and pinks and pops of coral rose... Sigh.

So then I went a-wandering through google images and IMDB for...

(Ok, so aside from the colourway, this one's a Josh-ogle...)

 
Oh! The lace! And the Twirling!

Next: An ode to those DETAILS!!! Now I know the first two images are morbid... But I LOVE the stacking of beads in those chintzy-seventiesesque-pastels and the tights and shoes with thefit block heels!!! 

And these reminded me of a post Susie Bubble did a while back, which included this 'Virgin-Suicides-esque' Elena Fernandez Raya photograph! (Not very original, am I? ;-D) I can't find a useful lin k though, so you'll have to make do with Susie's amazingness I suppose... Hehe.

 

Oh... And can I have a white corsage from Josh Hartnett please? With that plasticky ribbon and the evergreen sprigs? Oh pretty pretty please?

And, of course, the Seminal shot of Kirsten on the playing fields which just sums up the mood and dreaminess of this movie for me...

Which of course (well, to me anyway...) brings up a Studio Ghibli image I have from a friend's music collection (so no source, but go to the wikipedia page instead!)

So anyway... I slept on it, and didn't really do anything about it today... Until, on an EPIC shopping expedition, I ended up with the Noa Noa Spring09. Feast:

Oh, what fun this journey into my brain's special little image-association-game has been!!! The shirt that may have been influenced by these colours / thoughts may work its way into an outfit post soon, and I'll flag it up. Honest!

Yet another EPIC picture-filled, rambly post - apologies - Xxxc

Night at the Museum

So last night I spent the evening shepherding kids around the archaeology museum in the dark... It was really truly surreal. Cambridge does a 'twilight in the museums' event where all the uni ones shut off the lights and do fun games. Ours involved picture cards and torches, finding which objects details on said cards came from. 

I have to admit I had quite a lot of fun, though by the end of the 3 hours, I was fecking freezing, as I'd left my coat upstairs. Oops!

Having been in my Eley Kishimoto heels all day, I stashed a pair of black flats in my bag to aid not-falling-down-holes-in-the-dark. Turns out I could have kept the heels on - I'm more agile in them anyways. See the scarf-necklace red-layering fun below...

The bit of the outfit seen here consists of Hobbs blazer (nicked from the mothership), Topshop Batgirl tee, Tibetan stole from Nomads in Cam, a charity shop silk scarf and red metallic beads bought in Florence for a euro. The unseen details were my grey Acne jeans and Eley Kishimoto shoes. (Though I wore M&S crease toe flat pumps in the gallery...)

 
Xxxc

Life, our universe, and everything...

After yesterday's megapost, I thought I'd follow up with a bright-living post of lots of pictures... Just to give you an idea of the calm-chaos thing we have going on in our set!

1) We like post-its.

2) I don't get up in the morning...

3) We like birthdays and balls best of all.

4) Childhood should never be left behind... (Meet Squirrel-Pooh!)

5) Pink to make the boys wink ;-D

6) I usually kill plants. This is an experiment that may turn out very very badly...

Right, I'm off out now, to conduct people around a museum in the dark... Wearing rather high Eley Kishimoto heels. Oh well. Wish me luck!

Xxxc

Love for Literary Feeling

Jumping on the Clothes Horse's beautiful bandwagon... I love bookshelves. When I go to a lecturer's office for a supervision, nothing fascinates me more than taking a gander at their bookshelves. One thing in this place that makes us lucky (in my view) is all the lovely lovely space for books. I have 11 good sized book shelves in my room... Far more than I could fill with the books my parents allow me to lug back and forth, but I do my best!

So... Up first we have my two 'down time' shelves... Top Shelf: One half filled with dvds (a strange and mildly embarrassing selection of Studio Ghibli cartoons, Buster Keaton silent loveliness, Star Trek films, chick flicks of an extremely unintellectual nature, and lots of French films), the other half, with juice (and alcohol out of the picture... Such a student eh ;-D)

Bottom shelf: Holst - The Planets score, psychology books, bibliophilia and fashion interviews, my Ghana guide, a bit of (soc and bio) anthropology and some 'classics' - I believe we can see Tolstoy's War and Peace...

 

Now we have a little further along the same bookshelf, missing out Mitford, Golding, Dante and Rillke, we come to my depressing Russian novel, Kapuscinski and Tenessee Williams obsessions, part of my Cambridge Pocket Shakespeare collection, Henry James spine chillers, the obvious Austin, the Bride of Lammermoor and Wuthering Heights... The stripy spine is a book of ghost stories. The rest of this shelf contains marshmallows and a lot of books on sewing and costume, a book on Mikhail Baryshnikov and my college's 500 anniversary book.

Next up, we have my 'everyday' bookshelf... The one with academic books; my own and library ones. They're made up of lots of archaeology, a few tomes of theology, a bit of art history and a few biographies and historical accounts. We also have my BRIGHT folders, some of my birthday cards, my Fresh Horses DVD for a moment when I can justify the procrastination, pictures of my cats, my Greek orthodox rosary, lots of post-its, some NARS and paul and joe make up, my CdG perfume, rescue remedy and my notebook stash. No particular order to that. FIT huh! ;-D

My room mate and I really are different in too many ways to count... One of these ways is in our bookshelves. Firstly, my room has quite a bit more book space... Secondly, we have completely different book-taste! Lookie-see...

See! Lots of scary science and management... Though some of those management tomes might work their way onto my shelves next year since I'm (*crossed fingers*) taking it for part III... What a strange thought!

Lots of DVDs, a few art materials... And the Badger-Pooh! I got these (Squirrel, Deer, Beaver and Badger) for myself and my closest friends a little while back... Mine will probably be shown in my next room post...

Bookshelf organising aside, I really am a bibliophile... I love spending hours in book shops... Independent, new booksellers or Dusty old booksellers. Just no high street chain, thank you very much! My favourite places have to be Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street and John Sandoe Books off the King's Road, both in London. The former is an amazing building, filled with travel writing and fiction mostly, but they have a gorgeous 2nd hand gallery above the Western Europe room. John Sandoe is probably where my heart lies... I've been going there since, well, I was pushed around in a pushchair! We used to live in Chelsea, on the KR itself, and it still feels like home to me. I try to make a trip to John Sandoe about once a fortnight when I'm home, as the people in there are so amazingly knowledgeable, and I've known several of them since I was teeny-tiny... They can find anything, from anywhere too!

I also love to read books about books. If you ever want a quick and uplifting read, Anne Fadiman's 'Ex Libris' is a beautiful little collection of essays. And looks cute too!

Finally... If you're ever in a bookstore with me, get out of the way... I'm a fiend when it comes to buying the things. Always have been, always will be. 

At least I don't buy Mills and Boon by the bucketload anymore!!! (Yes, that was a middle school phase...) Hehe ;-D

Xxxc