harpy

Pen and ink wash on paper.

January 2010.

Made by Anushka goes burlesque!

I am very excited to announce that I will be having a stall at the upcoming Teasy Pleasy Burlesque Revue in Bournemouth, on Saturday, 6th March!

Organised by Miss Chastity Cherry and Sensu’Elle, it promises to be an evening of good old-fashioned fun, with burlesque performances, a live band, a light buffet and more. And now me!

They say:

Teasy Pleasy Burlesque Revue aims to encourage the enlightenment of Burlesque by enrapturing its audiences with captivating performances from National Professionals as well as local and emerging talent. Set in sumptuous surroundings, audiences will experience an evening of Artistic performance, live music and comedy to enrich the senses!

I will be there selling my signature fascinators, with hats and accessories to boot. Little and large treats suitable for ladies either side of the curtain, at the burlesque revue and elsewhere too! Be prepared for hand-sewn delights to grace your person, made from a variety of luxurious materials both vintage and new.

So if you’re in the South, or happen to be in the Bournemouth area with an evening to kill (or are simply dying to buy a hat from me), do come along! An evening of titillating fun with proceeds going to breast cancer – how many chances to be bad for a good cause do you get?

Tickets cost £10 in advance, or £12 on the door, and all profits are going to a charity for breast cancer. See the Teasy Pleasy Facebook event page for more details, including the line-up; join the Teasy Pleasy group on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter.

iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou

Mixed media
Made this a few months ago.

safe as milk

I’ve been needing a needle case for ages. Isn’t it one of those quintessential things that everyone has in their sewing box? Like a thimble, embroidery scissors, tacking thread and a pin cushion. Well, I own at least six pin cushions but have never seem to be in possession of a needle case. One of my university friends owns a darling one; it’s made of felt and looks like a little cottage with a red roof and flowers growing round the gate. It seems like an ancient twee relic passed down from a grandmother or great-aunt, and it comes as quite a shock when you flip it over and see the Cath Kidston label on the back…

But finally I have one. I made it from a kit, believe it or not: the fabric was already cut out into the right-size squares, and it required a minimum of mental effort to put it all together. It’s amazing when I come to think of it. I’m the kind of person who for the most part is too stubborn to follow a knitting pattern written by someone else, preferring to work my brain till it’s hurting with figures and measurements, calculations and knitting and re-knitting over and over again until I get what I want…even if it’s just a simple design that’s been published as a pattern many times before.

This is probably the real reason for which I’ve been without a needle case: it’s so simple in concept that really I should have thought it up myself. And yet I never made the time. So now, finally, my needles stand in neat little rows, according to type but only vaguely ordered in terms of size. Sharps, embroidery, curved, darning, leather and beading, they are all safe now within the padded pages of my needle book.

It’s totally hand-sewn, too. Another first!

Twelfth Night

Happy New Year, and Happy Christmas! The 5th of January is the twelfth night and so it seems appropriate to be writing my wishes of good-will for today, rather than leaving it altogether.

2010 looks strangely familiar, like an essence of something that I’ve read. A futuristic figure, is it not? It felt real yet unreal when I was standing by the banks of the Thames with my boy-friend, waiting for the final minutes of the last decade to be over, awaiting the fireworks. Lots and lots happened to me in the past ten years, and the last year was particularly good. But I always feel strange around New Year’s; because I’m half Chinese, I think, it’s not until the end of the lunar year rolls up that I truly feel as apprehensive and excited as others seem.

Do people still cast resolutions for the new year? I don’t in general, but I would like the coming year to be full of as much happiness as the last, with as much hard work and determination and success. And I wish the same to all of you.

cooking, culture

I received quite a few cookery books for Christmas, amongst them a copy of the Marie Claire volume ‘Kitchen’. Professing in its subtitle to be the ultimate recipe collection, it would seem from the confidence exuding from the clear white cover, bold titles and snappy tagline to be the be–ll and end all of recipe books, Prue Leith mixed with Delia Smith and a dash of snazziness in the design surely nabbed from Yummy Mummy Goddess, Nigella Lawson.

My boy-friend bought it for me, and it is a beautiful book. Extremely large and rather heavy, it features a multitude of recipes typed clearly onto glossy pages, and is full of photographs so evocative they make you salivate with jealousy. Jealousy simply that they are photographs and belong to the book , and so you can’t lick the pages to seize the taste.

Reading the recipes, though, makes me wonder. I’m probably not the first person to make the comparison, but cookery books these days seem to reflect lifestyle choices more than anything else. It’s obvious, really: food is life and life is not worth living, I think, without food. Cookery books have been trendy for years and years now, and the situation of a shelf groaning under the weight of them whilst they remain dusty and untried is surely common to many households. Even in my student house, the place in the living room where we have accumulated our cook books (student-orientated or otherwise) is relatively untouched, my housemates preferring to conjure things up out of packets and jars rather than reach for the recipe book. 

Just look at Nigella Lawson. Personally the woman irritates me to hell: I can’t stand her egocentric television programmes and oh-so-witty prose, or the lifestyle that she stands for and sells. I’m sure it’s all PR really, and it has been remarked to me that she’s surely being kitsch and not taking herself seriously at all. That’s a likely concept, but of course it’s the others that take her utterly seriously. My friend Osman, in fact, is convinced that he is in actual fact Nigella’s long-lost child, mistakenly deserted at birth or abandoned somehow in the hospital to his own Persian parents.

Perhaps this correlation (cook books : mode de vie) would have been less of a discovery had I been familiar with Marie Claire the magazine itself. In general I find I don’t read magazines. Their cost is always too much to justify the purchase, and if I want to catch up on a journal I am lucky enough to be able to walk ten minutes down the road and catch up in the cosy university library. [A university which subscribes to Lula, Numero, Vogue, Selvedge and The Hat Magazine.] I actually do this seldom, if ever; but then, I’ve been content to feel as if I’m living in a bubble recently. I am a terrible hoarder with far too many possessions, and yet I don’t consider myself a materialistic person. Unless I’m in dire straits, as I am at the moment with clothing, I don’t desire things. Perhaps this is totally hypocritical since I self-confessedly do have a lot of them, but I am generally very content with what I have. I know the meaning of enough is enough.

So yes, I don’t read magazines because I don’t like the way that every single page is selling you something, and every single volume leaves me distressed and dissatisfied, unhappy with what I have and wanting more, more, now! I can see how they manipulate – I’ve got absolutely nothing against advertising, but it’s the lust for material possessions and always more of them that disgusts me. The guilt and the pride involved with owning objects, and the quick pleasure of ownership before they become mere clutter and you’re lusting after the latest whatever-it-is. (As a sidenote: Obviously this is why I dislike it when people buy Christmas presents just for the sake of it. It’s Ebay time…or else, how to re-gift?) I like having things that I love, and I like to give people things that they love. Something which is very meaningful is important if you’re going to bother giving at all, but that’s not the message given out by magazines. Or women’s magazines, at least.

What is Marie Claire like as a read? I’m assuming that it’s marketed towards women in their late twenties to late thirties – perhaps ,early forties? – who work in an office, wear smart, tailored clothing, and earn a lot of money. Do they have lunch out at restaurants and nibble on salads? Do they drink tall glasses of champagne at work functions and stand all day in pretty, uncomfortable heels? Do they have fridges which are empty save milk and bread; do they long for times when they can take time off work and create gorgeous meals to gorge upon, right from scratch? Because the recipes in Marie Claire Kitchen are sumptuous and decadent, involving hoards of the finest ingredients with three things at least in common: most are imported, many would be considered specialty, and all come surely with a cost. This is no doubt representative of the society we live in now: Britain has little industry, relying on import. This is costly, particularly with rising fuel prices; yet that is (or perhaps I mean was, since we’re kind of still in a recession) not so much of a problem as it was a couple of decades ago, since quality of life is probably at its highest, and in Britain at least the population is (was), on the whole, an affluent one. There are only a handful of recipes in here that I could afford on my shoestring student budget, and yet I crave linguine with prawns and fresh herbs; rocket, pear and parmesan salad; mushroom and pancetta crostini; scallops with ginger and lemongrass. If anything the book proves that food is an indulgence, and sadly makes the prospect of  these kinds of dishes materializing in my own future seem extremely slim. I’m a food person, and yet with a career in the arts industry how will I ever be able to afford to keep the cupboards well stocked with high-quality olive oil, fresh fresh bread and a selection of fabulous cheeses?

Somebody better start buying some hats from me; or else I’ll keep this book as bedtime reading. It’s extremely pretty and the recipes sound delicious. But it’s fantasy, and for the time being, little else.

Attending to the living dead

Hallowe’en was lots of fun.

I had done a bit of a work for a burlesque dancer here in Bournemouth, who performs by the name of Miss Chastity Cherry - see here and  here. Namely, I trimmed a hat for her. (What else?) It was fabulous – she’d bought a basic top hat which I drenched in veiling, satin rosettes, ruching, tulle and sequins, creating a slightly gothic and very aptly Hallowe’en-esque concoction. I’m still waiting on some photographs which she’s promised me, though you can get an idea of what it looked like here.  Miss Chastity also does pin-up, you see, and so she said that she’d get some good photographs for me to add to my portfolio.

I went to see her perform accompanied by my wonderful housemate, who is an actress, and very keen on my costuming her. (The last time we went out in fancy dress she let me do victory rolls on the top of her head, and was the only tiger in the room with such a very creative solution to ears…but more on that theme another time.) As it was hallowe’en we had to dress up, and the only idea which had got lodged in my mind was to dress up as a zombie nurse. Serena decided to go for the same idea, and we had a very, very fun afternoon pottering around charity shops and cheap discount shops looking for costuming components – followed by an extremely hectic evening cutting and sewing and dressing frantically (well that was me, I don’t remember what Serena was doing while I was making our costumes…) and then shovelling food down my thoat and running for the bus…

We did our zombie make-up on the bus and made nuse outfits from men’s shirts, child’s white tights, and a kid’s toy nurse kit from QS. I suppose that, considering the height of our hemlines and the fact that *sigh* we were wearing matching outfits, the multitude of extremely dodgy comments from men in the club we went to after the burlesque show were to be expected. But predatory pervs aside – what a grand night! It even ended with walking along an ice-cold beach, shivering, at 4 in the morning – totally sober, and singing Beyonce at the tops of our lungs.

sugary songs for a sour december day

 

 

 

Dear Mama,
I wanted to make you a mixed CD for Christmas but then I realised that there were only 3 tracks that I wanted to put on it. And since I’ve never had any patience, and since today’s a pretty miserable day in need of some cheery tunes, here’s your 3-track set for December the First.
Love,
nushykins xoxo

PS I tried to send you the MP3 files but the e-mail bounced.

Work and Play

Not very many days ago I woke up and realised that how you dress every day matters, because it simply refers to how you are presenting yourself to the world each day. Stand up straight, wear clean shoes, and make yourself beautiful. If that is what you are about. And make yourself appear confident to the outside world, even if those who know you within are aware of your ultimate fragility. Trick them into believing what you want to, wish to be true.

The metal-framed spectacles I wore for several years grew tired and snapped, so I took a leap and bought a pair of black cat’s eye frames from the 1950s, complete with rhinestones at the corners. Some of them have fallen out and I’m not sure when I can get them replaced. They were from the website Dead Men’s Spex – who by the way I recommend as a company. The man who runs it is quite nice – even if the fact that tax isn’t included in the price is highly, highly irritating. I had lenses fitted in early October, and they have been sitting on my nose ever since.

To uni today I wore, amongst other things like faded jeans and teal boots and many layers of black and white t-shirts, a handknitted scarf, real and fake pearls, a cloche hat, and a genuine 1950s mink swing coat.

Things Alter

I am happy!

Today, I woke up to a freezing cold house, close to shivering underneath my quilt and blanket. The furniture is lousy, the shower unimpressive, and the central heating temperamental at best.

But I am happy! And it feels so incredible to be so. I spent the weekend in London – the first time I’ve been back there since I moved to start uni. It was strange; things hadn’t changed, really, and yet I felt different.

I went to see the opening of Petrushka at the Little Angel Theatre in Angel, Islington. This is the show that I worked on over the summer, creating props and working in the puppetry workshop which is attached to the theatre. It was wonderful to see the show in its entirety, and to look at my handiwork onstage! The show is fantastic as always, and certainly not just for kids. When you go, look out for the carnations, sacks, tower blocks and mittens – all of which I had a hand in making!

I came back from London on the coach. It passed through south-west London – idyllic in the winter-time, like a page out of a tourist guide book. There were fairy lights in the trees outside the Natural History Museum, and the windows of the grand department shops were suitably dressed. It was wonderful. I got home and put up Christmas decorations in my room immediately.

Heaven
I’m in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we’re out together, dancing cheek to cheek