Collages & Colours

Sometimes there's no better feeling than tearing up magazine pages, ripping their glossy, shiny print into fuzzy white pulp - or letting scissor blades gently slice around a shape. Snip snip. I had the overwhelming urge to make some collages recently, and I happened to find a Glamour magazine on the train. The timing seemed right.

I love the strange little intimacies you can find in fashion editorials and adverts - soft gestures, hanging pieces of hair, a model's gaze into the distance, sunlight painting golden streaks across hands and faces. And materials too - shiny gems, frayed edges, things tucked into other things. It's endless tactility.

Collaging feels a bit like cooking. Things bubble to the surface. Textures shift and intertwine. Everything is pulled apart and messy, colours bleeding into each other and lines crashing together.

But paint's not quite as tasty as a good soup.

bonus bunny:

Egg Stickers & The Haunted Pen: Kawaii Box Review & Giveaway | November 2017・°☆

✶✵ This post contains items gifted to me for review purposes. ✵✶

Blippo have very kindly sent me another fun Kawaii Box to check out, and once again we're partnering to offer you a chance to win a Kawaii Box of your own (scroll down to find the giveaway). So, what's in the November '17 edition? Here's a list of the delights within:

1. Techi Techi Gomarachi Plush
2. Kanahei Soft String Bag
3. Gudetama Sticker Set
4. Kasugai Chibi Vege Ramune Candies
5. Rain Boot Ink Pen
6. Let's Go Mini Notebook
7. Harajuku Food Hair Clips
8. Twinkle Jewel Seal Deco Diamonds

We have lots of cute things in here. I love the Gomarachi/Mamegoma plush (first picture above) - this pink seal is Raburachi and she is obviously very stylish (I'm going to steal her look and start wearing a red bow too). We also got a nice mix of stationery, sweets, and accessories, with my favourite item being this little notebook pictured above. It's a really nice small size, and I love the Super Mario Bros. theme. The best thing about it, however, has to be the extremely small text at the bottom which says, "accompany growth". My motto from now on will be "let's go - accompany growth!" Honestly, is there anything more inspiring?

I am super happy to get a set of Gudetama stickers, as well as these adorable heart jewels, so I can finally express my deepest and most enduring love for eggs.

I also thought the Kanahei string bag was a really nice inclusion. It feels really nice and soft and will come in really handy for something, I'm sure. The pen with a boot is quite a fascinating artefact. The combination of the lid being a boot with a bear face, and the text on the pen itself ("can you keep a secret?") is a little ominous and I feel as if there is a strange energy to it. It might be cursed, is what I'm saying.

The last item I'm going to talk about is this little set of hair clips. They'll give me the ability to communicate my love for toast via my hair, which I've always wanted, so I'm very happy with them. The peanut butter one does say "buteer", but quite frankly that just makes it better. As anyone who knows me well can vouch for, I'm the queen of peanut buteer.

♡｡ﾟ.(*♡´◡` 人´◡` ♡*)ﾟ♡ °・

Now you've seen all the fun stuff in this month's edition of the mysterious box of cuteness, it's time for the giveaway. Enter below for the chance to win a future Kawaii Box of your own! Entry is open worldwide and the competition closes Monday 27th November. Good luck!

The competition has now closed. Congratulations to the winner: Lauren!

Lilly Ashton Kawaii Box Giveaway

On Distant Worlds: Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary ♬ ♡ ★

Music has such a strange way of travelling right down into your bones. There's nothing like it. It gets inside you like a ghost and wiggles around in your heart and your tear ducts. Whether you're performing or watching, I think this sense of possession is always present when you see live music. It's a spirit that consumes you. Beautiful music is almost magnetic, pulling you into a plane of pure awe. That's what it was like seeing Distant Worlds at the Royal Albert Hall for a 30th Anniversary of Final Fantasy show on 4th November 2017.

Arnie Roth conducts the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, the Maida Vale Singers, and that one guy in the audience who asks if they were going to play Wonderwall. I conduct a plastic cup of dark beer. They do a stretched arrangement of the opera from Final Fantasy VI and play game footage above the orchestra showing the in-game conductor manically waggling his entire self. It's a funny juxtaposition, but a lovely one too.

During intermission I see a lone Yuna clamber up the stairs. I fight the urge to yell "stay away from the summoner" in a comedy old crone voice. There are no Tiduses to say it to anyway. They show Final Fantasy VII remake footage during one of the tracks and the audience turns into 70% fist pumping glee. I close my eyes and think of marshmallow Barret as the cymbals crash.

I don't think I can do much justice to these performances, but there's a unique magic to the orchestra, the wry enthusiasm of Arnie Roth, seeing Nobuo Uematsu's perpetual grin in person, and of course being in such a beautiful venue as the Royal Albert Hall. I saw audience members clutching moogles and grinning hard at everything, roaring with excitement on introduction of Liberi Fatali (which, woah, sounds incredible with a choir). After all of it, I came away with all the stars in my eyes. Seeing an orchestra is like nothing else, but to hear everyone's love for these pieces of music, it makes me realise my total goal in life - that all I ever want is to inspire something in other people like that. I can't be an orchestra, I can't make a touching video game, I can't sing ominously in Latin (or can I...), but I can make someone smile, or feel excited, or encouraged in some way. In any small way I can, I can make some difference. And if I can inspire happy feelings in someone for even the tiniest fraction compared to Distant Worlds with my drawings or words or jokes, then I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to do.

Also Nobuo Uematsu is the best and he deserves to be licked by many dogs. ♬✧♡*+:•*

BONUS: Here are some moogles for good luck.

Outfit: Cool Zips

Okay, so it's autumn, it's that strange part of the year where all possible outfits are either too cold or too hot or somehow both at once. At this point, seriously, let's just make pyjamas acceptable outerwear. Let's just do it. I want to see all business folks wearing their fuzzy dressing gowns as coats. We deserve such extravagant comfort in our lives.

Anyway, this confusing time has lead me to try vaguely to find the part of my brain that remembers what a light jacket is. It is buried behind one million kpop gifs and a haphazard pile of Stardew Valley strategy (because getting people to like you in that game is a complex and particular system that has probably pushed the last bit of algebra right out of my brain). I think I'm remembering, but it's hard to say just yet.

I dug this old H&M mini jacket out of my wardrobe. I remember buying this thing and being so in love with it back in... 2008 or so. Yeah, it's really almost ten years old now. I guess that makes it a remnant of late 00s/early 10s style. I was watching this old SHINee performance from 2010 the other day (a solid favourite - Onew's hairstyle is beautiful and good) and it awakened in me a very strange nostalgia for the fashions back then. We were all so innocently casual. There's a very particular kind of scruffiness that I like about that time. It was all full of light biker style jackets and coloured trousers. And a certain style of graphic tees. I was obsessed with aquamarine/electric blue at the time.

Back to this particular mini jacket, though (and yes, oh yes, mini/cropped jackets were a big thing back then). I saw it in H&M and I needed to have it. I think I left it on the rack initially and then could not stop thinking about it until I went back and got it. It was the perfect jacket. Fitted and cropped enough to make me feel that weird kind of comfort and confidence that only comes from a tight piece of clothing (do you know what I'm talking about? It's like a snugness and also an awareness of the shapes of your body? idk), and it had COOL ZIPS. And cool lapels. It was just the best possible, coolest possible item of clothing for 17 year old me at the end of the 00s.

I rediscovered it after leaving it at a relative's house for a few years, and I think it fits really well into outfits now too. I feel like I need to ride a miniature motorbike off into the distance while wearing it. The other things I'm wearing are just a basic black tube skirt (also from H&M) and an earthy brown thermal top (source unknown).

Also, here's a gif of me trying to take pictures of myself:

Cool.

The Dragon Fort

Sometimes when you're an adult you just need to take a moment and cover your bed frame in lofty sheets to create a mini fort (only possibly neater than the wild ones from childhood made of upturned chairs and flung pillows). It's necessary. The human soul demands it. Forts are the key to contentedness. Or at least, that's how I felt when I arranged a couple of sheets around my bed the other day and plonked a small dragon plush in there. Dragons belong in bedroom forts. Trust me.

It has been pleasant lately. Aside from the endless dilemma I have any time I go outside, in which I find myself constantly taking my coat off and putting it back on because apparently my body is incapable of regulating a reasonably comfortable temperature, it's been nice. My mum gave me the two beautiful Halloween Pusheen toys you see above, and I now consider them my dear children. I shall teach them my personal perfect scrambled eggs recipe (I like to add a pinch of sage) and help them write their CVs (key skills: flapping wings, being angry).

I feel quite motivated recently to head towards goals. Not big things, but just having lists and plans in general to work towards particular things. Painting more with references, journaling outdoors, making a nice dinner (pasta counts, okay). Things like that. I just feel oddly focused on some kind of ambling, happy progression. Even with games I've been playing with this purposefulness - it's still a game, so it's still for fun, but just with a bit of a focus on achievements and finishing game sections and things. When I do something fun within this framework, it still feels like an accomplishment, so I get to feel like I've ticked something off a list when I watch an episode of a TV show I've been meaning to catch up on, or when I've listened to a new album. It might seem odd to treat your recreational activities as if they're work, but I find it gives me an extra sense of enjoyment and creates a nice structure too.

I guess that's me though, I've realised more and more that being organised is a big part of me and the way I operate best. And making myself a cute fort area, or a neat desk area, or surrounding myself with cute things in general - things like that definitely improve my mood and make me feel inspired.

After all, what's more encouraging than a dragon and a sticker collection?