Little things

Good afternoon everybody! I hope you all are having a wonderful day wherever you are in this world. I bought a bunch of lillies yesterday, I can't wait for them all to bloom.

I went out into town today with the intent of buying myself some sandals from Primark. Since the weather is hot my feet were getting stuffy in my sneakers and they've just developed a hole as well. Unfortunately the ones I had my eye on were gone this time so I just bought myself some cheap ones (£3!) however I saw some amazing dresses in there so I bought myself two. This is one of them (for £9) and I got another that I will show in the next post.
By the way this is my fox friend Murphy. I found him in Cancer Research, isn't he cute?

Here are the sandals ^^ I love feeling air on my feet, it's much nicer than being too hot.

This is what I wore to go out shopping (I kept the jacket in my bag however, I didn't need it)
I got this jacket on Ebay, it's beautiful.

A lot of people ask me where I got this embroidered dress. I got it from Primark and although they don't have it anymore I noticed today that they currently have a lot of very simillar styled dresses in stock!

I bought myself a few things recently. The Pokemon items I got from Ebay and actually bought last month however I've just recieved them recently. I got a flannel, Koffing plush, Turtwig plus an Bulbasaur and Ivysaur figure.

I had to replace my copy of Final Fantasy X as I was playing it and almost reached the end when my game disc finally broke. There was a deal so at the same time I bought Hello Kitty Roller Rescue and a Naruto fighting game ^^

I've taken a different track in drawing recently, I'm drawing a series of animals and working on textures. This is a macaw.

Lily and Blossom.

Rabbit.

The words written here are from a poem I wrote to a prompt I found on Lucious Letters (http://luscious-letters.blogspot.com/) to write a poem about the house I grew up in. It reads;

Soft grass and opal skies,
Sunsets forever with ice cream in bowls,
Sitting on your mat and talking about sweet nothing,
Sweet nothing and nothing more.

Tadpoles in the lake,
Oh beautiful specks I still love to collect
And snail shells inching across my hands
Tiny secrets.

Strawberries, berries, little brown flecks,
Collecting up frogs with a cheap fishing net,
And taking them home with a smile on my face,
Little friends snoozing.

Laying eggs in the sunlight,
The cool den.

I sleep.

Below are a few more that I did!

What makes you feel content and dreamy? What is your idea of the perfect morning? The perfect day?

1. Sunshine with a cat laying in it, paints and a great drawing on the floor. Going outside and feeling the warm sun, collecting shells and feeling them, bright colours, dens, warm alive fur.

2. Get up and sit in a little alcove where I have made a den that lets the sunlight in. I read a book or do some drawing, my cat comes over and nudges me and I kiss her on the head. She’s chattering to me. I drink a cup of tea Chris has made for me and we sit in the alcove together and chat, I show him paintings I’ve done, he tells me a story he’s written and it’s really good, then he shows me a comic that he drew which is amazing and then I get ready for the day.

3. Brilliant sunshine, its late spring and all the flowers are out and blooming and the trees leaves shimmer like butterflies. I go outside and play in my garden, there’s a magnolia tree there and I play with the fallen flowers, I stick them in my hair, I smell them, I stick them to my nose and I put them on my cats head. I take a book and draw, I draw birds and write little poems. Chris comes out quietly, I don’t notice and he kisses me on the top of my head and it makes me feel warm like it always does.
He sits down in the grass and he’s bought some toys out, we play with them and mine is an owl. I laugh until I cry and I feel like I can’t swallow, we sing songs together like always. Then we go on a short train ride and go to the beach. We play in the sand and make castles, he makes an amazing moat that’s 2 feet deep and we stick our feet in it. We go down to the water with buckets, we see jelly fish and we get them back in the water. We paddle. Chris has a big golden retriever and he plays in the water barking and splashes us, we’re laughing.
We go to a book shop and look around, I buy The Wishing Chair and something by Anne Rice and then we go and explore and find a second hand shop. We look inside and find an amazing old book and we buy it and take it home.
We eat tea together which we’ve both cooked, it’s soy sauce and teriyaki beef with noodles and it’s delicious. Then we watch a Disney film together, maybe Pocahontas or The Little Mermaid. We sing along to all the songs.
We climb into my den at the end of the day, it’s softly lit and so comfortable. Our cats and dog get in with us and we all drift off to a deep sleep.

Begin a piece of prose with one of these sentences: "I wanted the moon...", "The walls voice sounded like a child's...", "The cat wanted to go back home..."

I wanted the moon to smile back at me. For so many nights, so many I had lost count, I sat on my windowsill and peered up at the moon and waited for him to smile.

We had many secret meetings, the moon and I. When everybody had gone to sleep I would climb up onto the sill, open the window wide and dangle my legs over the side. I was never supposed to do this.

The moon and I had secrets. I would tell him all of my fears and ask for him to take them away, I’d make wishes to his friends and I’d study his face with a cheap pair of binoculars. He liked me, I think.

I liked the days when I walked to school bright and early and it was cold enough to see the moon still shining away… he was hazy then and high, hanging there and fading. On those days he would come back in the afternoon and I would see him on the way back. I would smile at him and he would smile back.

Why? I tried asking him a few times but he was ignoring me, turning his face away. What had I done so wrong?

I grew up.

Magpie Magazine

I recently found out about Magpie Magazine (http://www.myspace.com/magpiemag), a zine which is published monthly and is focused around celebrating new folk art, music, poetry and writing.

I'm seriously considering submitting some of my work to them, it would be so exciting for any of my paintings to be published in one of their volumes!

I sincerely hope they will be interested. Here are the paintings I am considering submitting, of course I would need better quality pictures of them but this is just a rough plan at the moment.

(When she is coloured of course, I am thinking of painting her blue and a light seafoam green)

I am also curious as to whether you would like to see any of these in the dear SWEETLING book?

Magical Monday!

Hello everybody! I hope you have all had a great weekend and a good start to the week.

Today I had my Tui na Massage exam and my tutor said I did well! On Friday I did a resit of my first semester Acupoint paper and last Monday I sat my second semester Acupoint paper.

Now I have two weeks off so I'm very excited about it!

My boyfriend and I are also currently in the process of packing up our belongings in anticipation of moving house this Summer. I can't wait to decorate our house!

I'd like to introduce a new feature to d-S which I've decided to call Magical Monday.

Every Monday I'm going to make a post with links to some of my favourite websites, places that put a smile on my face and inspire me. Monday's often seem so dreary and I hope by doing this I can bring something special to you that you might not have seen before.

http://igorandandre.blogspot.com/
I found out about this man a short while ago and spent hours looking through his blog, marvelling at his art. His work is truly wonderful, I love his unique style and his use of colour.
The idea behind his project is very inspirational. Basically he started a sketchbook whereby he decided to draw a number of portraits in order to see his progression and improvement.
He started with Gemma Ward and Lily Cole and most of his early work is drawings of these two however he's since branched off onto other people as well.
What I like most about his work is that it proves that 'practice makes perfect' theory, or more that if you love something you can improve on it just by continuing to do it. You don't have to be a great artist to make something great and if you put your mind to it you can improve in any facet of life that you want to.
It also shows how easy it is to start something like this. There's hundreds of pictures of models online especially if they're well known so you can easily start something like this for yourself.


http://www.learntarot.com/course.html
I love doing Tarot card readings. I first got interested in Tarot cards when I was about 12 or 13, my nana used to take me to this New Age shop in town when I was a child and I would browse it for hours every week while she sat in a chair and read her book. I never tired of exploring all the amazing things inside, I loved looking at all the spell books, ornaments, crystals, stones, candles and runes. The shop closed down a while ago and I miss it very much.
Something that really struck me as I got older was Tarot Cards.
My dad got me my first set and gave it to me as a gift (as is customary with Tarot I believe) when I was 13, since then I've bought a few other decks but I still mainly use the one that my dad bought me all of those years ago which is the 'Tarot of Moon Garden' deck.
In a lot of ways I suppose I could say I've been bought up with quite 'new age' beliefs and so reading Tarot was always encouraged by my family.
I don't really understand how they work however I like to sit down and ask a question and then do a reading to get some insight into a problem or query I might have. You can read for yourself or someone else and I've also done a lot of readings for my family, friends and also my online friends.
The above site teaches you how to read and understand the cards, it's a lot of fun and is very interesting to study.

http://princessportal.com/
I started reading Princess Portal early last year. It's written by a lolita named Skye who follows what I suppose you could call the lolita 'lifestyle' or more a Princess lifestyle.
She writes about being a Princess in society today and I find her articles very uplifting to read. She often posts articles about historical princesses as well as modern ones, even those who you wouldn't stereotypically think would fit the mold.
She also often answers questions emailed to her and posts pictures, stories, advice and a monthly 'Princess Challenge' which encourages you to do various fun and positive things.

http://www.theoi.com/
This site is an encyclopedia database on Greek Mythology.
It's so interesting to read about all the stories, the heroes, demons and creatures. I love fairytale stories, fables and things like that so I often spend some of my free time reading about some of the hundreds of creatures that exist in Greek history.

http://colormekatie.blogspot.com/
I found this blog this month and it's wonderful!
Katie (as I assume she is called) is one of the most cheerful and creative person I have had the good fortune to find in the blogging world. Every one of her posts has something sweet and happy to brighten up your day and I just can't help smiling when I read her blog.
She often posts DIY projects she is part of or fun little activites she does like handing out flowers to strangers or getting thousands of people together to ride the Subway without any pants!
She seems like a lovely person with many inspirational ideas that make you want to go out and do something fun too.

http://endofmarch.tumblr.com/

I first read 'End of March''s blog on Livejournal but recently found her tumblr which is full of beautiful and dreamy images.

http://www.emofree.com/
This is the home page for EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). Don't let the name of the site put you off, EFT is free to download and teaches you basic techniques that enable you to positively impact your life and change a whole range of things that you might have difficulty with for example addictions, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, weight loss, allergies, pain and so on.

It's actually like a mental form of Acupuncture and works on the same lines which interests me based on my studies.

http://www.theselby.com/

The Selby is a site that interviews 'famous' people from various proffessions and basically takes photos inside their homes. Some of the houses photographed there are amazing for example that of Annakim Violet!

I hope you enjoy this post and if you have any sites you really enjoy then please feel free to leave a link in the comments! I'll post them up next Monday along with other sites that I enjoy.

A few outfits

Hello everyone! This was my outfit for Jack Nicholson's birthday! I wore the waistcoat because it reminds me of him and the outfit was a very innocent take on something Jokery.
I hardly ever bare my knees but there's something so free about wearing shorts don't you think?

I rarely show the back of my outfits but sometimes it's nice to see them too, a confession of mine is that I hate that part at the back of the knee. There's an acupuncture needle point there and it freaks me out thinking about how I'll have to needle there next year!

My red and white outfit, I wore this to go out shopping today in the beautiful sunshine! I love Spring and Summer, the feel of the sun on my skin makes me so happy. The Muscovy ducks have had ducklings recently and they are absolutely adorable, I will make sure to take pictures of the sweetlings soon.

The beret looks like a chefs hat here don't you think? hehehe

Doing this is like my past time, I'm always trying to encourage people to play this game with me where you basically screw your face up as much as you possibly can. It feels funny and it looks funny too! I have a picture of my cousin doing it with me as well.

A much friendlier face!

This one was taken completely by surprise. I had left my flash on and didn't realise, the look on my face is one of utter confusion and puzzlement that I just got a light in my eye!

Let's twist again like we did last Summer! Oh lets twist again like we did last year!

Hello!

My boots, they are one of my favourite pairs of shoes and they only cost me £6! They are very comfortable to wear.

My purse and glasses! I collect cute little character charms and like to put them on my zip. There's Frieza (Dragon Ball Z), Sailor Moon character (a gachapon from Tokyo), a cat (Tokyo), Totoro (London anime convention) and Palika (Pokemon Pearl)

Today I bought a few little things when I went shopping in town. I actually went to try and buy the Batman Jack Nicholson plays the Joker in, I was astonished that they didn't have it especially since they had the very first Batman in!
Instead I got Marie Antoinette, The little Norse Prince and the Sex and the City novel.
My boyfriend and I watched The Little Norse Prince today, it's by the same animator who did Grave of the Fireflies but to be honest I wasn't impressed with it at all.
I didn't like the story and it left me quite dissappointed, it just wasn't my thing so I think I may sell it.
I'm excited to watch Marie Antoinette with him though! He hasn't seen it yet and I just love the costumes in it, they are amazing. I like Kirsten Dunst also ^^

JACK NICHOLSON DAY [APRIL 22ND]

JACK NICHOLSON DAY - WEDNESDAY APRIL 22ND

Tommorow (April 22nd) is the 72nd birthday of one of my biggest heroes, Jack Nicholson!

I think Jack is an amazing man with so much talent and charisma. He's been in so many amazing films that I love and I also think he's so adorably cute.

To celebrate his birthday my boyfriend and I are having a Jack Nicholson Day! I invite everyone who loves Jack Nicholson to join us in the fun!

We are going to dress up like one of Jack's characters, act like Jack, talk like Jack, watch every Jack movie we've got, make up some fun Jack related games to play and also bake him a little cake.

Some of the films I reccommend to watch would be: Something's Gotta Give, As Good As It Gets, Anger Management, The Bucket List, Little Shop of Horrors, The Departed, Batman, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and of course The Shining.

There are many more but these are just my favourite films that he has been in.

I think my outfit is going to be something Joker/Little Shop of Horrors inspired so expect incredibly high eyeliner eyebrows and a crazy outfit.

If you love Jack then I'd love for you to join in by doing whatever you like. It's not about making some amazing outfit or anything like that, it's just a day for remembering why we love Jack so much and having lots of fun.

Take pictures! If you do then please share them with me.