DIY Project Steampunk

Hello everyone,

Technically this is my week off, but.... well.... you know.... I applied for a grrrrreat shooting this Sunday and as I got accepted I had to go and figure out how to make myself a own steampunk outfit for it within a few days... Considering Steampunk is a very do it yourself friendly genre this is what I started with...

I bought a vest for 5 Euro and some faux leather fabric that was in the sale for 5 Euro per meter. The ugly pearl and stud part had to go and I added some faux leather to the back cause I find that more interesting looking!

I bathed my bloomers and the lace top in some black tea to make it more vintage and dirty looking and I made a faux leather bustle myself  loosely based on the video you can find below. I slaughtered a belt that I bought for 1,99 € and added it to the bustle to add a comfy yet stylish way to open it.

I really look forward to shooting with it on Sunday!!!

The happy Home Makers!

Hello everyone,

our moving is in full preparation mood right now!

Last week I went to IKEA with a workmate and we bought a bed and a bureau (hope this is the right word, I had to bablefish it. In German it is kommode) and he was kind enough to give me two wardrobes he didn´t need, so me and John spend two afternoons setting things up! And I finally got around snapping some photos of what we have now... In the progress of moving in I will take some more photos and I hope to find a photographer that will do a shooting with me once it is completed...
The view from our balcony
The wardrobe I was gifted! I might put tapestry on it or white paint or I leave it as it is, as it´s the same color as our floor. Iam not sure yet. Oh well... I have time to decide :-) We set it up without a manual. Iam very proud of that :-)


We don´t have the dinner table and the chairs yet. I will order that just before my vacation in July so we are home to receive it. This years summer holiday will be on balconia. Meanwhile my balcony furniture will serve as our dinner-table. I saw it a month ago at Strauss for 59,90 € and I wanted it! I had to wait and hope it would be around once I have the place and indeed IT WAS! It was a pain to carry home, but it is so pretty it was worth it. I can´t wait to have breakfasts on the balcony on warm weekends!
My bed, my bureau and the fake sheep fur are from IKEA, so yes, you can buy cute retro-ish things on a budget.. Our bed is so HUGE! We had to unpack it to fit it into my workmates car and I got a little panic attack "This is too big!!! This is WAY too big!!!!!" I kept saying and we set it up and John said "Damn is that big! So so big!!!!!". But now we got used of the sight and as long and my vanity table and my chippendale bureau fit into the sleeping room we will be fine :-)

By the way: I checked and all my make up fits into the chippendale, which I dubbed Chippie. Even my oscene amount of fake lashes!!!! HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY!!!

Be patient, as I won´t have internet starting from next Saturday to the 8th of July and I will just be able to write stuff occassionally on twitter and Facebook over my internet phone, but there will be new posts when we are back and set ourselves up, including photos of how it looks once we moved in!!!

Today we also put out our old trashy furniture. No worries, not old in sese of Antique. Just old in sense of "I needed something for my first apartment on a limited budget and this is what I got". And Saturday we are finally MOVING IN!!!

The red Queen

You know how it is, once photos start to flow in it´s a whole bunch. Hereé a extra lovely one from my shooting with ViewTure!

I made the headpiece myself :-)

Anyone having an idea what my next shooting theme could be???

Hint: I won´t be a mermaid!



It sparkles wayyyy more in person. I will add more glitter to cover it all up tomorrow.

Let´s pretend it´s valentines day....

Hello everyone,

seriously, I did not want to wait for Valentines day to post this picture....

Regular readers might realise that this is the Latex skirt that I cutomised from this...

I made the top from scratch and finalised it just in time for my shooting! <3

Making cute things with a naughty material

Hi everyone,

I hope you arrived in 2011 in a fantastic way. Every year is exiting cause we do not know what lies ahead. I hope to get more things done than last year. I´m tired of working, getting home and than doing nothing. I wanna do more crafty stuff for my shootings. And I just started with it. With a new material to match!

Latex is a material mostly associated with dominas, women in gasmasks and a kinky lifestyle by the mainstream. However what is not taken into consideration: It is a damn good looking material, relatively easy to use and you can do cute things with it!

I bought this Latex Mini Skirt on ebay for a few bucks with the idea of making a cute and quirky girdle out of it! You can really make a bargain with those. In fact I bought a second one for 11 € including shipping to make one more!

Everything looks cuter with ruffles and hearts. I know the glue is supposed to be transparent before you stick the pieces together, but I was impatient!!!! Next time I will be a good girl cause the liquid glue can make ugly marks on the shiny material. I learned it the hard way! Note how I found an additional use for the hairclips with that I usually pin curl my hair!

I carefully marked the hem with a gel pen to glue my dried ruffles there in the most possible even way...

Tada!!! Now I will just need to make a top to go with it and add the suspenders! Ignore the glue marks on the finished result. If anyone knows a good way to get rid of the marks let me know! I already tried alcohole and water. This is the second latex piece I ever made and I will be doing a shooting with it hopefully soon!!!

Latex Project

Hi everyone,

this weekend I experimented with glueing Latex and Iam quiet happy how it turned out. I made a skirt and a little hair-acessoire. The hems of the skirt are sorta wobbly, but that is something I can still go and figure out. Iam still happy with the way it looks, bacause I thought it would be way harder! Now I just have to shine it and find out how to remove the glue leftovers. Any ideas how to do that the most effective way? Let me know.

I consider to make a top to go with it.

film, cut, sew

Hi everyone,

the filming day was fun! I think you will see at least something of me in the finished clip as Iam in almost every scene - sitting around, walking through the picture, seeling stuff, shutting doors, etc. We started to joke that it looks like there is a little red haired stalker :-D The team also took some making of photos - we´ll see wether I get them and wether there are some nice ones I can share with you :-D

It will take a while till there is a finished clip of it. There is still a lot of material to film for the main actors and it has to be cut etc. etc.

I had my hair cut yesterday! I was so tired of the split ends! You have to pay a price for all the hair-colouring that goes on to keep it a shimmering flawless red. Other may get away if they don´t colour their hair for several months, but I can´t. After all visible roots mean EXTRA-WORK for the photographer. And I do what I can to avoid extra-work. So it was "Goodbye split ends" for me. After all I ocassionally use clip in extensions for my shoots. When you see me with hair that is waaaaaay over shoulder-lenght you can bet it´s not real ;-) I will see wether I can show you pics of my new hair cut later. I have no one around to snap a decent pic at the moment :-)

I got back to sewing, too! I haven´t done that in a year or more, but I still had this crazy mexican print fabric that wanted to become a skirt really bad (I just managed to get one meter of that. Damn it!!! But it was just enough for a skirt ;-) I´m happy my first real sewing project in FOREVER turned out so nice. The pockets took the most time, but I felt they were necessary as the huuuuge mexican print made my hips look even wider than they are. The pockets make it look normal now :-)
Honestly I have no ocassion to wear it for. Surprisingly there are never mexican parties here ;-) There is a new mexican restaurant down the street, but I´m not sure wether they´d think I´m trying to make fun of their culture or something when I come to pick up something :-D We´ll see. I can use it for a shooting.

Sari in Wonderland

Hi everyone,

today I went to see Alice in Wonderland in 3 D. Spectacular!

There is one scene where the mad hatter makes hats for the red queen which really makes me fall for all those pretty excentric hats. I spotted a heart-shaped veil hat that especially made me uhhhh and awwwww. Back home I figured that while I can´t have the hats I can at least play with make up and do a kick-ass red queen inspired styling on myself... I ended up looking like the love-child of the red queen and Paloma Faith (hey, that´s pretty good. I said before that I wanted to archieve a similar hairdo as Paloma anyway and I managed it even without a hair-piece)

The funny thing is that minus the extreme lips I would actually totally go outside in that attire!

How to go for that look? Off course turqouise eye-shadow. For the fun of it I added fake-lashes with rhinestones. I first covered my lips completely with concealer, than with foundation and drew the heart on with a lip-liner. I put my hair in rolls and clipped them with hair-pins. The cardi is by H & M, the headdress is something I made myself out of actual playing cards, glue and glitter. (It was supposed to be for a showgirl shooting that never happened in the end)

Have a fab Sunday!

Sari

Pretty little things....

Hi everyone,

I was a bit quiet lately which is due to the fact that there isn´t that much going on at the moment... Well, nothing interesting anyway. My bankcard lost it´s validity 2010 and as I still went on spending the X-Mas money that I had n cash I did not notice it until the beginning of this week. What a shock. Now I can´t get cash for some more days, waiting for the card and as John has no bank-account anyway we are stranded. Thank god I have a credit card, so I can at least pay in the super-market. It´s just blahhhhh! I really hope I get my card and the code in time for my vacation - or we are screwed.

Let´s go to a lighter subject. I haven´t done that much crafting in the past few weeks, exept of sewing fringe on, cause I was on the hunt for something. Cameos. I´m obsessed with them at the moment. They are so wonderfully old-fashioned yet chic and will make a beautifully addition to many acessoires. I have now found the perfect little set of them. And while I was at it I found cute heart-thingies that I had to have, too (thank god I can pay those via paypal ;-) So after Sweden I will be taking action again and craft my little HEARTS out (you get it?;-)

I´m also looking for some shootings right now. I haven´t shooted since a month or so, so it starts to itch in my toes. Hopefully I can fix something for February???

Spats

Hi everyone!

it is damn cold. But I just can´t find that many boots I would consider to wear. Most are horribly unsexy and not exactly elegant and call me silly, but when I buy myself a pair of shoes I expect them to be comfy AND good looking. After all I plan to wear them regulary. To make it worse many shoes have not a round toe which make my huge feet look even more huge, so I don´t wanna wear them. So I found a option.... Spats! I can just put on my heels and add a pair of spats to keep my legs warm! I think I´ll atempt to make me some. I doubt they get as pretty as on the picture thought.... ;-)

Tutorial on spats: http://laupre.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/tutorial-easy-buttoned-legwarmers
The spats shown are available to buy here: http://de.dawanda.com/shop/maide

Crafty

I just received the book (Amazon outdid themselves and I got it after not even waiting for 24 hours) and flipped through. Oh my god!!! So frigging cute stuff!!!! I got to hold myself back with starting to read it cause there´s a big hill (no, actualy rather a mountain) of laundry that I have to fold. I know when I start with the book I just can´t finish anymore!!! I saw at least 10 things I wana do just flipping through! So can I recommend it? Hell, yes!

Get crafty

I saw the most adorable book on amazon!!! And as it turned out now that I won´t go to Berlin I figured I use my spare-time to do something creative :-)








I ordered straight away and hope it will arrive next week so I can buy and prepare for two weeks of crafting!

Productive

Hi Folks,

today I made me a mini top hat of satin. It´s actually quiet easy if you have a bit of patience... I found this instruction best: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Basic-Mini-Top-Hat

The top hat will be used in one of my next shootings :-) I allways wanted one, ut they are hard to get and the most I saw where too expensive for my taste. The material for that one costed me hardly 3 Euro and most of what I used I had around me anyway.

So what else did I do? I bought me a hula hoop to get rid of the X-Mas belly :-) That seemed the funniest way to do while waiting for my Burlesque Cardio DVD (plus I can train to shimmy my hips already). They had a minitrampoline in the store I bought it, too, but for one thing that thing was too damn heavy to carry it home by myself and for the other thing I´m too scared to bang my head on my ceiling jumping around. Just imagine John came home from work and finds me lying with either a broken neck or knocked out next to the trampoline. I really can´t do that to him (though jumping around is fun fun fun and it wasn´t too expensive, too). But hmmm... maybe if I´d buy me a helmet to go with it... Come on. You know and I know that it is hard to find a sport that is actually FUN ;-)

Have a nice day!
Sari

Photos

So... The German Swingstyle Forum Return2style.de has many ladies that love to sew their own things - me included. And since Nanny, one of the fabulous ladies is connected to a build up Wild West town (Texas Rangers Ranch) in the heart of Düsseldorf we set up a meeting there to trade fabric, copy patterns and sew. (I just copied as I had to go by foot and train, but I was very pleased... I traced 3 patterns: A jumper-suit with culottes, a skirt and a hawaii-shirt for John). Actually we just wanted to get rid of our left over fabrics, but I guess most of us went home with at least just as much as they brought....

Here are the first photos (taken by Nanny)!

Fighting with the foil... Yes it was a little bit windy at times...

totally concentrated...


with Miri: Don´t pay atention to my one eye beeing smaller - it´s just the side-effects of my allergic reaction... I swear they are equal size normally ;-)


It was a fab day and I hope we´ll do it again!!!

Project Duct Tape

So after reading Fräuleinwunder-magazine (which was a fantastic treat! I readed every single page and just made breaks to surf to online-shops promoted in there) I remebered that I wanna make a duct-tape dress form this weekend. So I went to a tool-store in order to buy duct-tape. Now I honestly didn´t know what duct-tape is and bablefish wasn´t a very big help with translating so I stood in the floor with like 20 or 30 sorts of tape staring at them for 10 minutes trying to decide. But in the end I decided for a roll and it seems I took just the right one! Then I went to buy a cheap-t-shirt and found one for 1,99 €.

When John came home we watched the how to pictures and started to wrap, wrap, wrap. It felt kind of weird, like a corset but not that tight. And we even managed to cut of the T-shirt without damaging my bra! The cut out version of it looked like a shock to me as it looked like I have a figure like a mashed potatoe without any waist and weird-looking boobs. However when I filled it with fbric-scraps and leftover from other projects it looked like me in the end (and yes, I have a waist in fact!!!). It´s weird to see yourself 3-dimensional. You don´t even see yourself really 3 dimensional on a video so it´s funny to walk around the replica of your body. I can´t wait to do the first fitting job on Minime (that´s how I called her).

Yesterday I walked past the most sunning partment I ever saw. It´s for sale - if it was for rent I´d inquire for the cost... It´s in a Art nouveau house right next to the main-street that I walked at. It has dark wooden pannels on the wall!!! And the floor to match. Build in wardrobes in the same colour (still authentic my guess) and 20s lamps to go with it. Typical High ceilings off course. The only bad thing: Everyone can look in your window while walking by the main-street. That´s like my dream-apartment. I´d lovwe to take a walk with John today to show it to him.

Dress Forms

arrived home at my Moms and while she walks the dog have some time to post ;-)

I have wanted a dress form for quiet some time in order to make it easier to fit my clothes. However they allways are expensive and what if I loose or gain weight? Than I can buy a whole new one (or have to buy and even more expensive adjustable one).Today I remembered that beefore I was sewing I readed about duct-tape dress forms. So I went to research...

http://www.leanna.com/DuctTapeDouble/index.html
http://www.taunton.com/threads/pages/t00002_p5.asp
http://sewnews.com/resources/library/0806form/index.html
http://www.wikihow.com/Create-Your-Own-Dress-Form
http://etsylabs.blogspot.com/2007/03/dress-form-tutorial-want-to-make-exact.html

I guess I know what John and me will do the weekend after this one. ;-) I just know he´ll ask "Can´t you ask a girlfriend to help you with it?" haha.

We didn´t do much but eating here yet and it rains, rains rains.... I thought about doing a video, but I guess people would consider it boring to see tons and tons of forrest, fields and fields and forrest and maybe a few castles.

For the crafty folks

Here´s a great tuturial on how to make cute pill-box hats. I tried it myself yesterday and the result turned out ok for the first try. It´s a pepita-fabric and since it didn´t turn out that well on the beack I added a veil to it that I attached to the back to hide it ;-) It perfectly coordinates with a outfit I finished yesterday, too so I´ll use that for a shooting soon!!!

So now I know what to do with all those fabric scraps piling in my scrap-box!!! And I´ll drop by that hobby-store next to my working place to see what they have to doll up the hats even more.