F Yeah Lolita

Lolita Brand Inspired Decorating

2012-01-13T17:39:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last few days working on a new Tumblr, Lolita Decor, which is dedicated to, you guessed it, decorating with Lolita sensibilities. So now I'm sort of all in a dizzy about looking at cute rooms and thinking about decorating, but Tumblr isn't really the kind of place for more in-depth blog posts so I would like to make a few posts more posts about decor here. One of the things I love about Lolita inspired decorating is that there are so many possibilities! From light and airy Victorian rooms for the Classic Lolita, to the adorable stuff-animal-filled rooms of the Sweet Lolita, to a Gothic Lolita's dark and spooky abode. There are as many ways to decorate with the Lolita in mind as there are to put together a Lolita coordinate!

I'd like to try something a little different this time and instead of focusing on one particular style's aesthetic, I'd like to put together something like an inspiration board based on individual brands. These are all relatively simple and affordable ideas, sure I could post some photos of drop dead gorgeous Victorian mansions, but that's completely out of the picture for so many people! So instead, I'm focusing on a few simple things that can easily change the look of a room, curtains, throws, wall art, and various other knick-knacks and trinkets, smaller things that can help change the look of a room and can be accumulated over time if need-be.

For a MmM inspired room, I focused on some of the iconic elements of Moitie, simplicity, black with blue accents, and wrought iron.

A candelabra is both a classic Gothic piece and a frequent MmM design. Luckily, candelabras are still a trendy piece of decor so they are relatively easy to pick up for a good price, and pretty cheap as well. A black candelabra is ideal, but silver is just as good.
What goes perfectly with a candelabra in a Moitie inspired room? Blue candles, of course You can often find blue taper candles just about anywhere that sells taper candles.
Hunt down some fancy filigree picture frames and fill them with your favorite Moitie-esque image. If finding black frames in a fancy design is a difficult task, pick them up in just about any color and spray paint them black.
Moitie is well known for using crosses and other religious imagery in their prints, pay homage to this with a gothic wrought iron styled cross or two on your wall. These are usually pretty easy to pick up in home decorating places for a very reasonable price. If you're bold enough to go all out and paint your walls black, consider painting the crosses (and any other delicate wrought iron pieces you hang up on your wall!) Moitie blue.
I'm a sucker for throws! They are a very easy way to make it look like you have an awesome bed covering without buying an all new comforter, or for disguising a not-so-fancy couch. In keeping with the simplicity of Moitie, I've picked a plain black throw, but to keep it interesting, it's a black faux fur throw. I have one of these of my own and I seriously love it. It adds instant luxury to just about anything you can throw it on without making it look busy. It's also incredibly warm and cozy. Faux fur throws range in price from about $20 to $70 and beyond.
In keeping with the theme of adding a bit of blue to a black feature, I would consider scattering around some blue throw pillows. Finding just the right blue might be a bit tricky, but you can usually hunt down someone on Etsy who makes pillow covers to make something in the perfect shade of Moitie blue, or with very minimal sewing skills and a bag of fiberfill, you can make your own.
If you're looking to add a little bit of blue to a bed, especially with a black throw thrown over it, pick up some blue sheets. Sheets can be found in just about any color on Amazon or Ebay, and they are something to add a relatively cheap bit of blue to a bed. With a black throw tossed over a bed, and some blue sheets turned down, you can hide pretty much any un-gothic bedspread you might have on your bed.
Wrought iron styled wall hangings can often be a more expensive piece of decor, but you can pick up smaller ones for a smaller price if you still want the look, but don't have a huge budget. If you choose to have a larger one, you can use it as a focal point on a wall, or you can hang it (securely, please!) above the head of a bead as a mock headboard, without having to pay the price of a wrought iron bed frame.
Another pricier, but not prohibitively pricey, piece to add might be a black vanity table. Recover a not particularly interesting stool, using this tutorial, in a scrap of luxurious blue fabric. You can even pick up vanity tables in a wrought iron style, but if you're on a budget, cheaper wrought iron furniture might get a bit wobble after a while. If you are looking for something to display some pieces, but have no interest in sitting down at it and staring at yourself, look into a baker's rack. You might need to get some pieces of wood (don't forget to paint them black, or blue even!) to go over the metal shelves in order to display small items, but they're a cute way to add shelving for light weight decor.
Moitie inspired room. Fancy them up further by using them to display your favorite pieces of jewelry, drape earrings out of the openings, or wrap a necklace around the necks. If you prefer to keep your jewelery in a jewelery box, you can always wrap a pretty piece of black lace or tulle around the bottles.

Innocent World is a brand known for several different styles, from dramatic Classic pieces, to cute Sweet-Classic fusions. For this inspiration board, I'd like to try to settle somewhere in between these two things. Lots of dusty pastels, combined with elegant Victorian details.

A fancy Victorian inspired rug with a cute pastel floral pattern is the perfect addition to a Innocent World inspired room, either laid down on a hard wood floor, or on a neutral colored wall-to-wall carpet. Similar rugs to this can usually be purchased at most any home shop. If your budget is small, a smaller rug is just as good to add a cute splash of color and design.
A garland of roses, or other faux flowers, can be picked up at most any craft store for a reasonable price. These are perfect for the Classically inclined to drape around just about anything. Attach it to a door frame to create a Secret Garden inspired entrance to any room, drape it across a bookshelf, or wrap it around a standing mirror.
Chenille pillows look cute and cosy scattered on a bed, or on a sofa. Chenille is a fabric featuring soft little tufts of fiber, set in pretty patterns, that dates back for a couple hundred years, but was very popular in the early 20th century. There are several sellers on Etsy who specialize in remaking vintage chenille bedspreads into more affordable pillows. If you still find the price a bit high, check around the supply section of Etsy for portions of chenille bedspreads that you can buy for a relatively cheap price (usually between $10 and $20) to make your own pillows.
Same as the Moitie inspired room, consider tossing a throw blanket over a bed or not-so-cute couch. Instead of a black furry one, opt for a cute Victorian inspired tapestry one. You can find throws like this in a multitude of different colors and designs for between $30 and $60.
Lace table clothes are a cheap, and easy to find bit of decor that has a ton of different uses. You can use it like a throw to cover up a bed or sofa, drape it over a bookshelf and tie it back to create drapes for your bookshelfs, or you can cover just about any flat surface from desks, to dressers, to plain old tables.
You can find decorative curtain rods just about anywhere for a good price, and they can instantly transform even boring curtains into something a little bit fancier.
But why stop at boring curtains when you can find some fancy ones? If you're crafty, curtains are super easy to make out of a couple yards of pretty cotton, if you're not so crafty, they can often be picked up at discount home stores for a reasonable price.
Innocent World is a brand that hearkens back to a more innocent and romantic time, and what is a better way to channel this time than with a collection of books from times gone by. A pretty row of vintage books can add easy decoration to just about anywhere. Stack a couple up on a bedside table, or keep a row of them on top of a small shelf with pretty book ends on either end.
I can't get enough hatboxes, they should be a Lolita's best friend. You can hide clutter in them, store your accessories in them, and even stack them up to create an instant end table. They're also incredibly affordable! You can find hatboxes for between $5 and $15 at just about any home goods store.
A perfect addition to any Lolita's space is a full length mirror, a standing mirror is a homey addition to an Innocent World inspired room that is a bit pricier than a wall-mounted mirror, but it can really make the decor of a room.

I hope to get a few more brand inspired inspiration boards done in the near future, since they were really fun to make and, well, inspiring! If you're looking for some more Lolita inspired decorating, check out my little side-project Tumblr, Lolita Decor.

Looking at all these rooms has really got me in the decorating mood! Those of you out there who do add a bit of Lolita to their decor, where do you get inspiration from? Specific brands, your favorite style, your favorite Lolita print theme? Personally, I can never pick just one so my own brand of decorating is a bit eccentric. Sheer black draperies, gilt frames, and cute stuffed animals are all things on display in my own Lolita space.

How to Wear Lolita Everyday- The Everyday Lolita

2011-12-31T11:47:00.000-08:00

As I have mentioned before, I wear Lolita nearly every day. I don't really consider myself a Lifestyle Lolita, and yet, I live my life in it, I like to consider this an Everyday Lolita. I don't always deck myself out in show-stopping get-the-most-photos-at-a-meetup Lolita though, I've managed to find a nice medium between going all-out and casual Lolita. The best part of being an Everyday Lolita is that there are enough days in a year to experiment with going from one extreme to another and playing with the different Lolita styles.

Finding the time to wear Lolita

When people who don't know me in real life learn that I wear Lolita nearly every day, the first question they often ask is "How?! Do you have a job where you can wear Lolita?!" I would actually never in a million years be able to wear Lolita to work, so what do I do? The answer is ridiculously simple and sort of a no-brainer: I change my clothes. I am not going to hang around all day in my work clothes, and it's not very often that I will go straight from work to PJs, so I change into my Lolita clothes when I get home.

It might be a little frivolous, but Lolita is a frivolous fashion. As silly as it sounds it makes me happy to spend the extra few minutes a day to change into something I really enjoy wearing, even if I only plan on wearing it for a handful of hours.

For those of you that can get a little fancier at work, but can't go all-out Lolita, consider wearing a few accessories or even more mature styled Lolita blouses. Even something like carrying a Lolita purse or wearing a piece of jewelery from your favorite brand is enough to make you feel like you're wearing a little bit of Lolita, even when you absolutely cannot.

If you are the kind of person who gets out of work/school and hops straight into a pair of PJs, consider investing in a couple PJs that are more on the Lolita side of things, or even some cute and frilly roomwear.

Some tips for wearing the frills every day

You can, of course, just go all out every day, but that usually takes a ton of effort, time, and a pretty epic wardrobe, which most of us don't have. Realistically, wearing Lolita everyday usually means you need a few shortcuts and modifications on the "usual" Lolita look. Find what works best for you, for your budget and your schedule. If you have the resources to go all out every day, by all means do so! But if you find that it's too much of a hassle and you want a more wearable Everyday Lolita style, check out some of these tips, which have made it possible for me to wear Lolita nearly everyday for several years now!

You're going to need a lot of foundation pieces- The most important foundation pieces, I think, for wearing Lolita every day is a couple petticoats that just don't deflate, and a ton of different socks or tights. Several pairs of longer bloomers are also pretty handy if you don't want to be washing petticoats every day. I cannot stress how many pairs of socks or tights you're going to need, unless you live somewhere that's just too hot for socks, you're going to need quite a few pairs. If you're like me, you're probably going to need even more than that because you're constantly losing them. Luckily, you don't actually need to have 2 dozen pairs of $30 brand socks, basic offbrand socks are going to be a million times more versatile and so much cheaper. Just start stocking up on OTKs and tights when you find them for a good price in basic colors that go with just about anything in your wardrobe (generally white, off-white, or black) and you'll soon find you have plenty of socks.
Have at least one pair of shoes and one purse that matches just about everything- Having perfectly matching accessories, maybe a bunny purse paired with a bunny print dress and a pair of shoes in the exact same shade of pink as the bunny's heart-shaped spots, is a Lolita's dream, but it's just not practical for wearing everyday. Of course, you can still have these things for meetups or days you just feel like going all-out, but for everyday wear you're probably going to want something you can put on without a whole lot of thinking about and something that's going to match just about anything in your wardrobe. A pair of comfortable style-neutral shoes (if you wear several styles, that is!) and a style-neutral purse that's large enough to fit your everyday items in, in a base color that matches most of your wardrobe are both vital pieces for the Everyday Lolita's wardrobe. For my own wardrobe, my go-to pair of shoes are a pair of black tea party shoes and a black h.NAOTO purse. The shoes are super comfy and I can walk all day in them, and the purse is large enough to fit all my stuff in and matches most of my usual wardrobe.
Cutsews are very useful- I love cutsews! I practically live in h.NAOTO cutsews. They're so much more comfortable and less stuffy than button ups, you can also just toss them in the washer and dryer and not have to worry about them so much. They can be dressed up with accessories and jackets or dressed down by just wearing them plain.
Look for pieces that have detachable parts or are convertible- Pieces with detachable sleeves, removable bust pieces, detachable collars, giant detachable bows, removable skirt ruffles and whatever else can be mixed and matched up a bit are a lifesaver in an Everyday Lolita wardrobe because they mean you can have more looks with less actual pieces.
Don't be afraid to be Lolitaesque- I talked a bit about the idea of Lolitaesque in this post, and mentioned how it has really helped me add a bit of interest to my everyday style. Even Lolita, when worn everyday, can get a little bit boring, so it's nice to be able to wear something that still has the same aesthetic as Lolita, but is more versatile and just plain ol' a little bit different. Consider other fashions that have a lot of Lolita overlap such as Fairy Kei, Aristocrat, Dolly Kei, Mori girl, Victorian Goth, or even Hime-Gyaru that can add a bit of something different to your wardrobe and still mix and match it with Lolita. Or even take a look at some of the "non-standard" Lolita pieces that various brands have put out, such as the various fishtail skirts, full-length dresses, A-line dresses, or casual cutsew dresses for inspiration on how to include some frills to your day-to-day wardrobe without wearing the usual Lolita.
Don't be afraid to leave out some of the basics- If you're going to wear Lolita everyday, you're probably going to have some lazy days where wearing full Lolita just isn't practical. If you don't feel like wearing a button-up blouse with a JSK, don't bother. If it's just too hot for sucks, screw 'em. Invest in a few dresses or JSKs that can be slipped on and worn as is. Find a couple good dresses that can double as a lazy day house dress and a "throw a cardigan over it and slip on a pair of cute shoes" out-and-about dress. For inspiration, check out some dresses and coordinates by Otome brands such as Emily Temple Cute.
Learn to deal with standing out in public- Learning to wear Lolita in public is a huge hurdle that some people who want to wear Lolita everyday have to get past, but a very important one. If you plan on wearing Lolita on a daily basis, you're going to have to get used to people's reactions to it. If you want to read a bit more about dealing with wearing Lolita in public, check out this post on just that!
Learn how to wash Lolita clothes at home- Knowing how to take care of Lolita clothes at home is very important if you're going to be wearing them on a regular basis. Check out this post for some tips and tricks when it comes to washing your Lolita.

I've been interested in Lolita for a pretty long time, and it actually took me several years to get to wearing Lolita on a daily basis. It took me quite a while to work up a large and workable wardrobe, and it took me a while to even just work up the nerve to start wearing it from day-to-day. But, this is just me. An Everyday Lolita wardrobe can be made much more compact than mine is, especially if you're dedicated to keeping up on laundry (which I am certainly not) and aren't afraid to step outside of the rules sometimes.

The new year is just a few hours away, and I know that every year, many Lolita's new year's resolution is to wear Lolita more often, and to even wear it everyday. It's not impossible to do so, if you are a bit creative when it comes to making the most out of your wardrobe and if you aren't afraid of a little bit of dedication.

Do you have any Lolita wardrobe specific resolutions for the new year? In 2012 I hope to wear more Classic Lolita and to add more lush antique details to my outfits, a sort of Dolly Kei inspiration to my outfits, and to have less lazy day outfits. Currently, my lazy day outfits typically include an h.NAOTO cutsew and a plain black skirt, which is awesome for a lazy day but not so awesome for... 5 days a week. Back in October I talked about a wardrobe makeover that I'm actually still working on, and getting rid of so many lazy day outfits is something I've been having a bit of difficulty doing. In addition to adding more Classic Lolita to my day-to-day wardrobe, I'd love to finish my wardrobe makeover within the first few months of the new year!

Back to Blogspot Winner!

2011-12-24T14:14:00.000-08:00

The entries have all been tallied up, made into a list, then randomized on random.org to decide a winner for the Back to Blogspot Giveaway! There were well over 400 entries to the contest, but there can, sadly, be only one winner and that winner is Sydney Ray from the charming blog A Sunny Doodle. I've already messaged her on Facebook, so I hope to hear back from her soon. If anyone out there knows her, tell her to check her Facebook messages!

Here's a screen shot of the first 10 entries in the randomly generated list. The rest of the entrants have been blurred out, because it would sort of suck to see that you just missed winning a giveaway by one spot.

Even though there could only be one winner, I would like to once again thank everyone who entered! Because the contest was let everyone know about a changed URL, I really appreciated every single entry! As a small thank you, I'm having a 15% off sale on the end-of-the-year items in my Etsy shop, Ophanim until January 1, 2012 with the coupon code "MERRYCHRISTMAS15". When the new year starts up again, and the holidays have stopped killing me, I hope to have a bunch of new items in the shop!

Thank you once again, and Happy Holidays to my readers!

Giveaway Reminder!

2011-12-23T14:56:00.000-08:00

Just a quick reminder that there are about 6 hours left to enter the giveaway! Contest ends at 11:59pm EST tonight! I'll be spending Christmas eve morning counting up all the entries to get the results as soon as possible.

Thank you in advance to all those that have entered and have updated their URLs! I really appreciate all the entries, and I'm pretty excited to choose a winner!

Lace & Petticoats: A Lolita Documentary

2011-12-18T12:24:00.000-08:00

Lolita documentaries are few and far between, but they are always fun to watch when they pop up! Sometime last week Lace & Petticoats was posted to EGL and I found it a very fun and quick watch.

It's a bit of a combination of peeks into various Lolita's lives (and closets!) and basic information on the fashion, and it's definitely a good video to send in the direction of anyone looking to know more about what the fashion is really about. Personally, I thought some of the editing was a little frivolous and distracting, but other than that it's a very well put together and interesting mini-documentary!

If you're looking for some more Lolita documentaries, Babydoll Princess has compiled a pretty comprehensive list in this post! Do you have any favorite Lolita documentaries? I'm pretty fond of the Japanese one titled "Lifestyle of Goth-Loli Girls" on Youtube because I love the glimpses of all the cool places in Japan the Lolitas hang out and and shop at. I would probably pass out from excitement if I ever got the chance to see that doll museum or step foot in that 4 floor Lolita department store!

Lolita Trends: Fawn Fur

2011-12-13T13:26:00.000-08:00

Fawn fur, sometimes referred to as bambi fur, is a trend that has been around for a couple years now but is slowly saturating the Lolita fashion. In Lolita, it started a couple winters ago, with Innocent World's winter line. They released a fawn fur cape and fur collar, both of which that quickly sold out and were nearly impossible to find on the second-hand market.

This year Baby thought to add a few more fawn fur options to the selection of fawn fur Lolita items with a few lovely winter pieces including capes with several different accent colors, ear muffs, a couple fawn fur trimmed coat, and a cute beret!

But still, these Baby items aren't exactly easy, or cheap, to get your hands on! So several Lolitas, ever being the crafty bunch, have managed to get their hands on some of this elusive fawn print faux fur and have released their own versions of the fawn collar or other fawn printed fur accessories.

Cutedeer on Livejournal, who runs the blog Bathina, makes lovely deer print collars (and other items, but I believe she makes the other accessories for herself). I was actually lucky enough to get my hands on one of these collars myself! I love the big scallops of lace and the velvet ribbon. I found the fur a little sparse, but it might be a bit of a trade off since the thinner fur allows the collar to lay flatter and look less "cozy" so it could be worn all year round.

Alice Doll on Etsy makes some lovely pom-pom collars out of fawn print. These are definitely much more wintery than the others but just as cute! I think these would look perfect over an ivory, or even dusty pink, winter jacket. Sadly these are all sold out at the moment, but you can keep an eye on her shop to see if she plans on restocking any time soon.

Over on the blog Miss Lonely, you can pick up one of a couple different fawn printed items, either a cute collar that ties with a bow, or a Baby the Stars Shine Bright styled capelet. These items might be out of stock at the moment as well, but it's worth checking out, because they certainly are cute!

On the appropriately named blog Fern & Fawn, the writer has found a clever way of getting her hands on cute fawn fur to make small accessories from. She scours places like Ebay for trendy fawn print jackets and even not-so-trendy toddler's Disney jackets, to chop up for accessories. If you want just a touch of fawn for your outfits, Fern & Fawn offers cute little fluffy cell charms (which are also pretty awesome for clipping onto purses!) for between $4 and $5.

If you really want some bang for your buck, but are willing to sacrifice a bit of Lolitaness for it, the Taobao shop Puree offers fawn collars for a reasonable price. Of course, like any Taobao shop, you're going to have to find a middleman to buy the collar for you and have to pay some extra fees for it, as well as shipping from China. Shape-wise, it's not the most Lolita styled collar, it definitely has more of a pointed collar shape to it instead of the wide rounded collar that the other, made-for-Lolita, collars have. But it's still a good choice if you're looking to spend about half the price of the other collars.

If you're looking to make some fawn fur accessories for yourself, your first step is going to have to be hunting down some fawn fur! I really wish I could help you here, because I would love to get my hands on some myself. Unless you know of a source, your best bet is to talk the Fawn & Fern route and search around for a reasonably priced jacket to cut up for spare parts. If you're looking to make a simple collar, it's not so daunting of a task, it's basically just a detachable collar made out of fake fur instead of cotton. If you have a jacket looking for a bit of a revamp, check out this tutorial on Violet LeBeaux for adding faux fur to a winter jacket.

I know that I'm loving this fawn fur trend. I think it's a very cute way to add a little something special to an outfit and it can even work with a variety of different styles, from Sweet to Classic to more Mori or Dolly inspired fashions as well. I would love to see this style of print on things other than just faux fur, personally, I would be quite excited to see a dress with a print styled to look like fawn fur without actually being fuzzy. I can imagine a dress like that being the perfect crowning jewel to a Classic Lolita's wardrobe.

Note: I hope this isn't something that actually needs to be said since it's really a matter of common sense, but all of these things are made with faux fur. Teeny tiny baby deers were not actually killed to make these things.

Translations from a Japanese Lolita Blog

2011-12-07T22:58:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, EGL user go_slow_ly posted a translation from a Japanese Lolita's blog. I'm not going to post the whole thing, for that check out the post go_slow_ly made, but instead, just a few bits and pieces from it. The translation is from the Japanese Lolita blog, Twilightrose.

"Lately lolita clothes all look the same!
It seems like all the brands are just copying each other.
If one brand releases a chocolate print, they all do - same with diamond prints..."

"Lolita of today is fragmented into so many types, and now you can't even tell what's lolita and what's not anymore."

"If you compare modern lolita with lolita from 2000-2007, it's become all about original prints while the dress designs have become more plain."

"Aren't there lots of people like me out there who instead of collecting tons of similar prints, prefer the solid color lolita dresses of the past?"

"Ahh~ there are so many dresses that I want like BABY's velvet dresses from 2000-2007 or inspirational old fashioned styles!!! That's the kind of lolita I've always wanted to be!!!!"

The reasons why I'm choose these particular quotes, or bringing up this blog translation at all isn't because these are some profoundly deep thoughts on the Lolita fashion, or a unique way of looking at it, but instead because when I read the translation go_slow_ly posted I was pleasantly surprised to find out that what this Japanese Lolita blogger was saying was pretty much exactly what Lolita bloggers outside of Japan are saying as well!

Sometimes the Japanese Lolita is glorified and idolized in a very peculiar way. Some people will justify their own sense of style by mentioning "I saw it in a Japanese street snap, so it's okay if I do it!" and comments such as "Well, in Japan they wear this and do that, so I don't see why we should do it differently!" are often brought up when the popularity/Lolita-ness of certain things is discussed. So it sort of comes as a strange shock to see the Japanese Lolita more humanized, so to speak, rather than some sort of faceless fashion idol.

Of course, the Japanse Lolita belongs to a very different Lolita world than the rest of us, besides the major cultural differences (which is a different blog post altogether, one that I don't feel like tackling quite yet!), the simple fact of availability makes for a sometimes startlingly different Lolita world. I was quite pleased to see that, despite the differences and even the mystery surrounding the Japanese Lolita, what really made this particular Lolita stop and voice her opinion was exactly the same thing that so many Lolitas from my particular Lolita world, and even myself, have thought about at one time or another. Even though sometimes the only thing connecting Lolitas from around the world is the fact that they buy their clothes from the same shops, it's still nice to hear that these shops are eliciting such similar emotions despite the different cultures.

If you're looking for more translated Lolita conversations and musings, check out this one. It's pretty old (2005!) and it's from the Japanese equivalent of 4chan, but even back then things were still pretty similar, especially when usernames are turned off and anon turns on. Favorite new pieces, where to get good offbrand deals, the endless "fatty" drama, cosplay vs. Lolita, random strangers popping by to tell them they look stupid, poking fun at Bodyline- these are all things that are no stranger to the Lolita who is familiar with the online communities!

Back to Blogspot Giveaway!

2011-12-03T18:19:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you've noticed, I haven't yet gotten my .com address back, and I have a feeling I wont be getting it any time soon! If you haven't yet heard me complain about this on Twitter, what happened was I let my domain lease expire and if I want to buy it back I'm going to have to cough up $8,800. Yeah, I was completely shocked when I saw the number too! Needless to say, I don't have almost 9k to blow on domain names so I'll be sticking to blogspot.

Now, I'm not going to be doing something silly and crying "injustiiiice!" because it was completely my fault for forgetting to renew my lease and it's not uncommon for domain leasing places to do stuff like this, as completely and utterly silly as I think it is. So instead of whining (any more!) about it, I figure I'll do something a bit more constructive and host a giveaway to help get the word out about my change of URL!

Up for grabs is a whole bunch of stuff I've made, stuff that normally ends up in my Etsy shop! I've tried to include some stuff for the Sweet Lolita and for the Classic Lolita as well in this giveaway and it includes:

pink & pale yellow fuzzy star dual brooch.
green & blue lollypop brooch
cookie brooch
purple/pink/yellow ice cream scoop ring
pastel rainbow star necklace
"Memento Mori" resin & rose petals lace bow brooch
antique brass rose & bow necklace
Alice resin & rose petals necklace
Mad hatter puffy cellphone strap/key chain

These are all things I frequently sell in my shop or at conventions, and this haul would cost you over $75 if you were to buy it yourself!

Some slightly better pictures of the things I'll be giving away! Sweet in the top picture, and Classic in the bottom!

Sorry about the fact that I just sometimes completely suck at taking pictures :(

To win this giveaway you earn points, and each point is one shot at winning! You can get a total of 27 points, that's 27 chances to win! There are lots of different ways to earn points and you can do as many or as few as you want!

Leave a comment on this post- 1 point
Tweeting about the giveaway and including a link to this post- 1 point
Reblogging this post about the giveaway on Tumblr- 1 point per reblog, max 5 points. Please don't spam your dash though :( Keep it limited to 1 reblog per day!
Make a blog post about the giveaway and the change of domain name- 10 points
Linking F Yeah Lolita on your blog's sidebar or link page with the new updated URL- 10 points

Since I can't be everywhere on the internet at once, and I'm certainly no psychic, if you do any of these you're going to have to let me know! In your comment on this post, if you've done any of the things to get extra points, please include your Tumblr username, Twitter username, a link to the post you made on your blog, and note whether or not you've updated your links, whichever you've done to get points! Just so I can check to make sure I'm giving you the points you've earned.

If you just want to leave a comment now and get your first point and then go do the other stuff later, feel free to! Just when you do do anything else to get points, please don't forget to comment again with the details in a reply to your original comment. Just click the little "reply" link on the lower right-hand side of your original comment!

Entries into the giveaway will be accepted until 11:59 Eastern time on December 23, 2011. After that I'll use a random number generator to choose the winner and announce the results on Christmas eve! I'll be contacting the winner (make sure you include your email in your comment! Either in the email field or in the actual comment!) and the winner has exactly one week to respond or I'll have to randomly choose one of the remaining entries.

Thanks again to all my readers for sticking with me through this obnoxiously confusing domain change, and thank you in advance to every one who enters! If you have any questions about the rules or how to get points, don't hesitate to ask!

Steampunk Inspired Lolita & Victoria's Clockwork Emporium Review

2011-11-30T21:24:00.000-08:00

I've been asked a few times to do a post about Steamlolita but I've been putting it off for a while because I'm by no means a Steampunk expert! Recently, however, I was asked by Victoria's Clockwork Emporium to review one of their gorgeous steampunk pieces and it has once again made me a bit intrigued by this odd combination of Victorian elegance and futuristic fantasy.

First up is the review piece from Victoria's Clockwork Emporium! I was sent a lovely hair clip with the iconic steampunk cogs and gears. The hair clip was sent very quickly, within a few days, and was packaged securely in a bubble mailer and slipped inside one of the most awesome bags I've ever seen.

The piece itself is very well made. The first thing I did, of course, was try to pull it apart. Well, maybe not, but I did test it a bit to see how well it was held together. Try as I might, none of the various little cogs fell off, it looks like they are held on with a pretty industrial strength glue, which is incredibly important on a piece like this, where all the more pieces mean all the more opportunities for something to fall off.

I loved the packaging! The piece was in this awesome skull covered bag!

The gears and cogs are in a variety of different metal colors: silver, bronze and brass. Making this piece easy to coordinate with other pieces of jewelery you happen to be wearing because you really don't have to worry so much about the metal colors matching.

I was very impressed with how beefy the piece was, this wasn't just a couple small cogs glued together, it was practically a layer cake made out of broken watch parts! It is by no means at all a heavy hair clip, but it's definitely substantial, which makes it feel all the more sturdy and unbreakable.

One thing I particularly like about the clip was that that the clock hand moves around! It's not exactly like I'm going to be fiddling around with it while it's clipped in my hair, but it's definitely a little touch that I really liked.

Victoria's Clockwork Emporium has a lot more to offer than just Steampunk pieces, although Steampunk clockwork pieces are their specialty, but they also offer a fair amount of pieces that are perfect for the Victorian inclined Classic Lolita.

Mixing Steampunk with Lolita

As I have mentioned, getting my hands on a cog-covered Steampunk piece really piqued my interest in this unique style mishmash. I certainly didn't magically transform into a master of steam-powered Victorian aircraft in the past week and a half, but I have spent much more time oogling Steamlita coordinates than I have in quite a while. Personally, I don't ever find myself too enthusiastic about the completely over the top Steampunk outfits, the ones that involve props and elaborate costume pieces (Although I would love to be able to try my hand at making some of them! I've secretly always wanted a steam-powered Pip Boy), as cool as they may be, I just prefer outfits that are more day-to-day wearable, despite how far out from the norm it is. Which is why a Classic Lolita with little Steampunk details- cog jewelery, utility belts, spats, aviation hats, etc. is definitely my preferred mixing of the Steampunk style with Lolita.

Some of my favorite Steampunk Lolita outfits are by AyraLeona on Deviantart. Her Steampunk outfits definitely have the balance of wearability and creativity that I really love! It doesn't look like she's in a costume, it looks like this is just what she wears. I feel like she's taken the Steampunk style and really made it her own.

I think that the Victorian nature of Steampunk lends itself very well to mixing with Lolita, and even if you don't want to go all out and build yourself steam-powered leather and brass gauntlets, you can still add a very obvious Steampunk touchs to your Lolita outfits that really adds something different from the generally girly and cute touches that you often find with Lolita.

Again, I am by no means a Steampunk expert, so I don't think I could really give any great advice on how to successfully mix the two styles other than "moderation!", so instead I'd like to ask how other people mix the two styles. Do any of you also participate in the Steampunk hobby/lifestyle/fashion? If you do, do you mix it in with your Lolita wardrobe? Where on the Lolita to Steampunk spectrum do you personally feel like is the ideal Steamlita? I might not be an expert on the style, but I do know that it's a somewhat hard style to get right. Go too much one way and you just get a Steampunk outfit with a shorter skirt, too much the other, and it's just Classic Lolita with maybe a pair of goggles.

Ask Miss Caro-chan: Where Are The Lustrous Fabrics?

2011-11-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

This edition of Ask Miss Caro-chan comes off my formspring from an anonymous asker, who wants to know:

What's with the lack of shiny fabrics in Lolita? I don't mean cheap costume satin, but lustrous silks and brocades and such. It seems that, since Lolita is inspired by luxurious and opulent fashions, it should include more than just cottons!

I just want to start by mentioning that not all Lolita fashions are inspired by the luxurious and opulent! Lolita is actually inspired by many different things: cute, charming, old-timey, retro, are all just as equally inspiring to Lolita as opulence and luxury.

There are actually a fair number of pieces being sold by brands that are made with shiny or lustrous fabrics if you know where to look! Out of the big brands Baby's Alice & the Pirates line is probably the most well known for releasing a lot of shiny pieces. You can almost always find some blouse or dress made out of some lustrous fabric in their shop!

Some of A&tP's various lustrous pieces.

Lustrous pieces can also be found frequently by a few Gothic brands such an Antique Beast and Atelier Pierrot. Antique Beast is famous for using lustrous brocades while Atelier Pierrot is more known for using satins.

Antique Beast

Brocade helps break up the shine a bit and adds even more opulence. It also tends to come in a variety of different shine strengths.

Atelier Pierrot

Atelier Pierrot's single most popular design, that they have been making since the dawn of time and releasing in a rainbow of jewel toned satins.

If you want some luster in a way that's slightly safer than satin you can always try velvets! Velvets are a very lush way to add a slight luster to your wardrobe and, depending on the piece, can either be worn as a knock-out piece or something a bit more casual. Go for a more detailed OP in an interesting color, such as jewel tones or dusty pastels, for a fancier look or a simpler skirt in a more "traditionally" Lolita color, pastels, bold colors, or basic black or white, for a more casual way to wear velvet.

In the cooler months, nearly every brand puts out velvet pieces, and they can usually be picked up year round on the second hand community, so it's never really a difficult task to find a velvet piece to add to your wardrobe.

These pieces are all definitely show off the more opulent side of velvet!

Satin's Bad Rap and the Difference Between Shiny and Lustrous.

Similar to black and white color combos, satin or other lustrous fabrics have been done badly so many times and for so long that it's almost a knee-jerk reaction to automatically dismiss any lustrous fabric as "bad". But, just like with black and white, when shine is done correctly, and out of good fabric, it can be a gorgeous option for Lolita.

Spotting good vs. bad satin is sometimes hard to do in pictures. Usually it seems that cheap costume satin tends to be more contrasting, it has darker shadows and brighter highlights, you can even sometimes tell how thin the fabric is by the way it hangs or the fact that it is already covered in wrinkles just by existing. High quality satins often seem to have a more gentler shine and you can often tell by the draping of the fabric that it's a much more heavy weight fabric. If you have the chance to see the piece in person, cheap satins are usually incredibly thin (they're often almost tissue thin!) and incredibly easily wrinkled, whereas better quality satins are usually very thick and sometimes even textured.

This is bad satin. In fact, this is just bad all over.

In the Lolita fashion, the difference between something simply being shiny and something being lustrous can often make or break an outfit. It can mean the difference between something looking like a cheap costume (It isn't called "costume satin" for nothing!) and something looking like it stepped out of the opulent fashions of the past.

I'm a big fan of using lustrous fabrics and details within Lolita, I love the extra bit of depth and interest they add. I've mentioned before about my love of texture and detail that many Lolita pieces have, and I think that lustrous fabrics is just another way to add interest to a piece without exploding a rainbow print all over the dress and piling on the accessories.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T10:32:00.000-08:00

Just want to do a quick post to give a little shout out to everyone who's celebrating Thanksgiving today! I can't wait to dig into some pecan pie later tonight! As I mentioned last year on Thanksgiving, I am, of course, thankful for the little things, the day-to-day things, and the important things in my life. But, as I gather around my traditional Lolita meal of pink frosted cupcakes and bow my head to the great and powerful Mana-sama, bringer of all Lolita, what am I thankful for in the more frilly parts of my life? This:

Mana-sama sent his little Jrock angels down and made it so I chanced upon stumbling across this deal. A size 2 (which I am shocked and surprised to find fits me perfectly, as Juliette et Justine's size 1 seems to run incredibly small) Juliette et Justine print dress, covered in a gorgeous brown floral print complete with little cherubs. I got an incredibly good deal on it too, like BtSSB second-hand lucky pack old school style JSK good deal! I just got it in the mail yesterday, so I get to wear it for the first time for Thanksgiving today!

I also want to point out that for today until the end of tomorrow I'm having a little Thanksgiving sale over at my shop Ophanim. You can get a whopping 20% off your order with the coupon code THANKSGIVING20. Last year around this time I did lucky packs, but my scheduled has been so hectic I haven't really had the time to make any! I do hope to get some done for the Christmas season though!

I want to end this post by mentioning that I guess I'm officially going back to my blogspot address at fyeahlolita.blogspot.com. On the topic of thankfulness, I am truly thankful to all my readers who have stuck with me through this sort of confusing move, and all the people who were distraught at the thought that my blog may have just disappeared! I am very glad to know that those of you out there care as much as you do for this blog. As upsetting as it was to find out that I lost my dot-com due to my own forgetfulness, it really made me very happy to hear from those of you who were worried! Within the next week or so I plan on having a back-to-blogspot giveaway, to help get the word out about my url change!

What's That On Your Head?!- Odd Lolita Headwear

2011-11-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

Lolitas are no stranger to wearing odd headwear. Even the basic rectangle headdress is sort of WTF to most people (because, really, what is it?) or the mini hat or giant head bow are a bit odd if you really stop to think about it. But there have been things released and things that somehow got popular that have always sort of made me think "Who the heck thought this would be a good idea to put on their head?" Some end up being awesome, others end up looking just as ridiculous as you would expect them to.

So let's take a look at some of the stranger things Lolitas have decided to perch on their heads over the years!

Cake Hats

First up is what I like to think of as the original "weird Lolita headwear" the infamous cake hat. Cake hats come in a variety of different styles, from an individual slice of cake perched atop your head, to pieces that look a bit like mini top hats made out of cake, to just plain ol' balancing a wedding cake made out of lace on top of your head.

Angelic Pretty's Ice Cream Cone headbands.

A sibling to the cake hat would be Angelic Pretty's ice cream cone headbands. These come in two styles- upright, and spilled all over your head and dripping into your hair.

Angelic Pretty's Fluffy Bunny-chan Bonnet

I'm not being silly and making of dumb names for a dumb bonnet, that's actually what Angelic Pretty calls this monstrosity. While adding bunny ears to a bonnet is not something Angelic Pretty invented, they certainly took it to the extreme. The best part about this bonnet is the bunny ears sort of flop up against the furry brim, and look like shorter bear ears, so instead of a cute fluffy bunny bonnet, what it looks like is a giant bear sneaking up behind you.

Alice & the Pirates' Pirate Hats

Their name is Alice & the Pirates, so of course they are going to put out pirate hats! Although, maybe we don't exactly need a full size pirate hat covered in bows to go with our Lolita. I'm sure that these could work in some coordinate, and I'm sure they could look awesome, but they're just so wacky looking I just can't imagine any self respecting pirate would go for a giant pink tartan bow on their hat, or even be able to see out from under that one with the stars all over it.

Extreme Mini Top Hats

If there is a brand that has elevated the act of gluing pompoms and small toys to a mini top hat, that brand is Angelic Pretty. These mini top hats are usually a bit bigger or taller than your average mini top hat, but that's really only so you can fit more crap on them.

Angelic Pretty's Jello Mold Hat

When Angelic Pretty came out with Jewelery Jelly, the Lolita communities first reaction tended to be "Since when is jello Lolita?!" which quickly turned into "OMG GOTTA HAVE IT!" but as quickly as many of us changed our mind on jello in our Lolita, most of us still were a bit confused by Angelic Pretty's choice of headwear for the set. They released a headdress made to look like a glittery brick of jello, complete with frothy lace whipped cream. On first glance it might just look like yet another silly cake hat, but the jello part of the hat his actually made with some sort of stiff sheer fabric. I've always been curious what this hat was made of!

Antique Beast's Bat Maid Headdress

Definitely my favorite headwear on this list! Because it combines the kitchyness of Maid Lolita with Gothic elegance and bats. Because even Aristocrats need maids, and those maids are probably going to be dressed like frilly bats.

BtSSB's Usamimis

Usamimis were a trendy accessory for a little bit, mostly in the Gyaru fashion it seemed. They were little wired pieces of ribbon that were worn around the head and folded in a way that sort of made them look like lopsided bunny ears. They were cute and casual, then Baby decided to get their mitts on them. While some of Baby's usamimi's were just fine, some of them were completely ridiculous and ended looking giant and sloppy.

Very Expensive Hair Scrunchies

For some reason, a couple summers back, hair scrunchies got very popular in Japanese fashion. So brands started to jump on the scrunchie bandwagon and release their own versions of these little throw backs to early 1990's kids wear. Only, being from a Lolita brand, these hair scruncis (or "chou chou" I guess they are called when you want to pretend they aren't meant to be worn by an 8 year old in 1992 to decorate her side ponytail) tended to cost between $20 and $35. Hair scruncies are fine and all, especially with the often pigtailed-hairstylings of Lolita, but there's a limit to how much hair scruncies should cost.

Metamorphose's Gardening Teddy Kerchief

Sometime last year, when Metamorphose released their Gardening Teddy series, they really busted out some old school designs, but maybe went back a little too far into the old school, into the realms of Natural Kei, when it came time to think up some matching headdresses for the series. For whatever reason they decided a kerchief was in order. While it's certainly not awful looking, it's just an incredibly bizarre choice that seems several decades out of date.

Witch Hats

These are usually released around Halloween to go with whatever special Halloween set is being released that year, but I believe Antique Beast sells them year round. Personally, I like the idea of witch hats being worn every day. They're good hats, they've got a big wide brim to keep the sun out of your eyes, some flowers and bows for prettiness, and a point to show that you mean business.

Baby's Freakishly Huge Fur Bow

It seems like headbows have been getting larger over the years, but Baby, of all people, really took the cake when they released this monster of a headbow. To make sure that it will never stay up and probably even give you a neck ache at the end of the day, they decided to make it out of faux fur, which I'm sure you're aware is significantly heavier than cotton.

These aren't all the strange things Lolita brands have released as headwear over the years, and certainly not all the strange things individual Lolitas have decided would work best as a hat, but these are some of my WTF favorites. I really shouldn't be one to talk about wearing weird things on your head though, as I'm sure you all know, I have quite the fondness for oversized bonnets, and those of you that know me personally know that I keep a drawer in my armoire devoted to bonnets, which include a BtSSB bear eared one and a black and white bodyline one with huge awkward floppy bunny ears. And, as I've mentioned in this post, I would just love to see people wearing books as hats!

What do you think of out-of-the-ordinary Lolita headwear? Are you more of a tiny-side-bow kind of Lolita or do you like your headwear to be a bit more attention grabbing?

Moitie's New Alchemy Print

2011-11-19T12:12:00.000-08:00

Moitie is a brand that I definitely have a love/hate relationship with. Sometimes they completely blow me out of the water with designs that I find incredibly unique and cool, other times they release stuff that I find so boring that I begin to suspect that the whole brand is just an elaborate joke set up by Mana. I can imagine Mana in his mountain-top gothic castle cackling over designs for a pair of plain black pants, tie-dye shirts that look like they were designed for trendy grandmas, and plain black turtlenecks.

Their recent design was definitely something that really reminded me of my love/hate relationship with the brand. At first, upon seeing the design picture I thought "Oh wow! That is a really cool looking design! The writing in the background is so cool, and I like all the different images!" Then seeing it on an actual dress made me change my mind completely. What might make a cool border image turns into an awkward print on a ho-hum dress design.

Moitie is famous for making simple yet striking designs, and Gothic minimalism seems to be their motto, but, to me, the minimalist dress design, plus a giant cluttered print just looks like Angelic Pretty gone Goth. Which might be a neat thing, but I just find it really awkward coming from Moitie. I think it's almost like they're trying to jump on the OTT trend a year too late.

I would love to see an alchemy themed print from Moitie, with magic circles, alchemical symbols, and I'd even be cool with some crosses and roses thrown in, but I can't help but wish they used this idea for one of their more classic screen printed designs. I think that this way it would have definitely been undeniably Moitie and not so much Moitie does Angelic Pretty.

Temp Blog URL!

2011-11-17T11:07:00.000-08:00

I'm sure some of you have noticed, because practically as soon as it happened people started letting me know, but going to fyeahlolita.com just brings you to godaddy.com. Sadly, a major oops on my part (insert wacky tale of a credit card change and forgetfulness here) as lead to my domain name expiring. While I work this out, you'll still be able to visit the blog at my blogspot address!

http://fyeahlolita.blogspot.com

Hopefully I'll get this worked out soon enough! Sorry about the confusion!

Kokusyoku Sumire Style

2011-11-08T18:28:00.000-08:00

Kokusyoku Sumire is a band that many Lolitas are familiar with, for both their unusual music style and their quirky almost-Lolita fashion sense. Musically, they might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's hard to deny that their sense of style is amazing!

To add some Kokusyoku Sumire style to your coordinates try some of these tips!

Add some vintage style. Sachi and yuka are known for having something of a bit of vintage flair. From outright mid-century styled outfits (those nurse outfits!) to Victorian styles, to old school Lolita.
Try a bob, or alternatively, a super-teased curled wig. Either extreme- a sleek and stylish bob to an over-the-top wig full of bouncy tight curls are both trademark styles of this group.
Add a bonnet! Top off either of these hairstyles with a bonnet! The duo is known for their huge, satellite dish sized bonnets, but smaller, more manageable bonnets are also the perfect addition to a Kokusyoku styled coordinate. Big hats, mini crowns, oversized bows, and just about anything else you can perch on your head are other options!
Wear bold colors. Black and white and red, thrown together with polkadots, stripes, and harlequin diamonds are frequently seen being worn by the duo and is a sure fire way to add some Kokusyoku Sumire style to your own wardrobe. Other bold colors work just as well, but Kokusyoku Sumire are famous for these three colors!
Don't limit yourself to strictly Lolita. A quick glance through the gallery below will tell you that, despite the fact that people call them a "Lolita band" they rarely wear what is commonly considered Lolita! They have a bit of a mishmash of styles, from Classic to Ero to Sweet to Gothic and they often wear dresses that have unconventional shapes (for Lolita!) from full length gowns, to short shift dresses, to swishy babydoll dresses, to tutus! But it's obvious that Kokusyoku Sumire's style has a lot in common with Lolita- the frills, the motifs, the vintage elegance, and even some cute quirkiness. Fashionwise, the band is not tied down to a very limited definition of one style in particular, instead they take a theme or an idea and just run with it, wherever it might take them!

I want to talk a little bit more about their very loose definition of Lolita a bit more before I finish this post! Personally, I absolutely love their fashion sense (even the more ridiculous things!), and what I love most about it is how varied it is and how it's not always purely Lolita, and yet, it still manages to have a very Lolita sense to it. I think that any Lolita, especially those of us who wear the style on a very frequent basis or any other types who are prone to get into style ruts, can really learn a lot from their style, even if they don't particularly want to emulate it. It seems like so many Lolitas are very worried about being Lolita and terrified of being only sort-of-Lolita, of having outfits that aren't quite Lolita or aren't Lolita enough.

This idea of "Lolita-esque" has really helped me a lot when it comes to simply trying to find clothes for the day! I was never a big on worrying over how Lolita my outfits were but it is nice to have a style icon to look up to, and it's nice to know that too-long dresses, not wearing a petticoat, odd accessories, unusual prints, not-often-seen color combos are all perfectly okay so long as you love them.

These two lovely ladies can make things like aqua party dresses and white dual-afros or tutus and gigantic neck ruffs work because they are obviously having fun with it. If Sachi and Yuka came on stage and apologized because their pink socks weren't the exact same shade of pink as their dress, and gave you an excuse as to why their petticoat isn't as full as it should be, they probably wouldn't be as nearly as inspiring as they are now.

Ask Miss Caro-chan: Purple Lolita

2011-10-24T17:28:00.000-07:00

In today's Ask Miss Caro-chan, we're going to take a little peek at a color that is often considered unusual within the Lolita fashion! I recently found the following question on my formspring:

Do you have an example of a lolita wearing purple coloured coordinates? And I mean dark, jewel tone purple, not pastels which are easy to find for sweet and classic styles.

Even when you're talking about pastel lavender, purple is a sometimes hard to find color within Lolita, with even Sweet Lolita brands making a rare lavender colorway option. But, there are still a few pieces that are indeed made in darker purples. Your best bet, if you're looking for purple in your Lolita wardrobe, is to try to expand your idea of what range of colors purple encompasses, or to wear it as an accent color because purple, in the world of designer Lolita clothes, is not always the same color as the crayola crayon! It's usually quite a bit less saturated and is either a bit more on the red or blue side, instead of sitting comfortably in the middle.

Finding coordinates that feature bolder and more jewel-toned outfits in the Bibles, Keras, and various other Lolita mooks is actually really difficult! You can find a lot of J-Punk coordinates featuring purple tartan, but when it comes to Lolita, all I managed to find were these three coordinates!

Purple dresses for sale, on the other hand, are a little easier to find! It's a rare color for a brand to release, but not unheard of! It seems like, more and more, purple is becoming a more common colorway to find Lolita dresses in.

Top row: Emily Temple Cute, Metamorphose. Middle row: Baby, Atelier Pierrot. Bottom: Innocent World, Juliette et Justine.

If you want to add some purple to your wardrobe, but don't mind making it an accent color instead of the main color, there are a growing number of pieces that use purple as an accent color! Very recently it seems like purple has become to favored accent color of black colorways.

Top row: Baby, Putumayo. Middle row: Angelic Pretty, Putumayo. Bottom row: Baby, Metamorphose.

Bold purples do tend to get sort of a bad rap in the world of Lolita, and that's probably because they are often one of the favorite color choices of generic anime "Lolita" cosplays and questionable online shop alike. So, very often, when you come across a purple dress in Lolita, it's usually similar to one of the below dresses.

Not exactly the first thing you want to think of when you think "Purple Lolita"! But, of course, these kinds of dresses are more and more becoming an exception, and not the rule. As you can see at the top of this post, purple is sort of an underrated color in the world of Lolita but there are really a whole bunch of, somewhat hidden, gorgeous pieces that feature this color.

Coordinating purple

Purple can be coordinated just as easily as any other color in Lolita, my favorite color to combine with purple is good old fashioned black, as it usually really makes the purple pop and stand out more. If your purple is of one of the more desaturated varieties, then consider trying to coordinate it with cream. Personally, I am not a fan of purple and white coordinates, as I feel the colors look too primary together and sort of flat, especially if the purple is closer to a bright, jewel toned purple. Because of all the different shades of purple found within Lolita, I feel like purple is not meant for just one style of Lolita, I think it works very well with just about any of them! From the common purple tartan for punk, to deep jewel toned purples and blacks for Gothic, to a dusty amethyst and cream combo for Classic, and a bright magenta toned purple and black for Sweet Lolita.

Purple, as well as it's sister color, lavender, are relatively recent additions to the Lolita color spectrum (I remember when even a green dress would pop up it would make me do a double-take!) so who knows what future releases will bring in this sometimes odd color.

What are your favorite "odd" Lolita colors? Ones that aren't commonly fond in coordinates on in brand catalogs but you just can't help but fall in love with whenever you happen to see something made in it? I am a big fan of really deep forest green, but very few brands ever release anything in this color! I know that Baby has released a few gorgeous deep forest green velvet dresses in the past, but really, that's about the only brand I can think of off the top of my head that has even tried to give deep forest green a chance!

The Versatility of Lace Tights

2011-10-18T18:12:00.000-07:00

One of my all-time favorite accessories, something I always feel like I can never have enough of in my wardrobe, is lace tights. I probably have over a dozen of them in a few different colors, I really just can't get enough of them! And they can also be found really cheaply in mainstream shops. Being able to change up an outfit completely and add a little something extra to it for $4? Yes please! Any excuse not to find two matching socks? Oh, Hell yes.

Mana, proving sometimes socks over tights is perfectly okay!

When I first got into Lolita one of my big Lolita inspirations was Mana, who is quite famous for wearing lace tights under thigh-high socks. At the time, I was finding it near impossible to find even knee highs in mainstream shops but I was finding a ton of lace tights, so I figured, if Mana does it... I can too! (of course, I now know that this is not always, or even mostly, the case!). So, ever since those early days have I had a fondness for lace tights paired with Lolita, and I've tried to work them in with as many outfits as possible. I think that they can really change up an outfit as simply as slipping them on. A plain Gothic Lolita outfit becomes infinitely more elegant, relatively simple Kuro Lolita gets a hint of Gothic, they give Sweet Lolita a princess-like touch, and they turn the notch up on Classic Lolita coordinates.

To me, this is my ideal Gothic Lolita- A Victorian styled black dress, heels, a few Gothic accessories, and lace. Personally, I am a fan of mixing several different lace pieces in one outfit, in this one it has lace tights, gloves, and a purse with a lace overlay. They might all be separate lace patterns, but, with the exception of the tights, they're such small pieces it doesn't look too overly cluttered. On the other hand, I find that an outfit where all the lace is matched looks much too matchy-matchy. I definitely prefer the sort of rag-tag elegance of many different kinds of lace!

Knee socks and over-the-knees are usually the trademark of a Sweet Lolita outfit, so I find that taking a very traditionally Sweet Lolita outfit and adding lace tights instantly changes its tune. It somehow manages to be even more girly, but a little more grown up, and almost Hime. While I think this works best with more toned down Sweet Lolita, I think that if you found a pair of lace tights in a pale pastel color (pale pink is not too hard to find!) and layered them over a different pale pastel colored pair of opaque tights you could really make an interesting Fairy Kei inspired Sweet Lolita outfit.

Lace tights are swiftly becoming the legwear to wear with Classic Lolita, and I'm perfectly fine with that! Lace tights in Classic Lolita instantly add texture and opulence to a style that is often considered the most toned down of the Lolita styles. Cream, tan, and even black can easily be worn with a Classic Lolita coordinate. In Classic Lolita I absolutely love them paired up with Victorian styled boots, I think they practically define Classic Lolita this way!

One of the things I love about lace tights is the variety they come in. You can find tights with delicate little flowers scattered throughout, you can find them with huge ornate paisley designs, and you can find gorgeous vertical stripes made with lace! You can wear them alone, you can layer them over opaque tights, or you can wear them under over-the-knee socks. They're breezy enough to wear in warm weather, and paired with another pair of tights or socks they can easily be warm enough for cold weather. And best of all, you're never going to end up with a drawer full of half a pair of lace tights, or constantly have to adjust them into staying up.

What are your favorite ways to wear lace tights? Or perhaps, do you hate the look of even sort-of bare legs in Lolita? I guess this is understandable, since lace tights sometimes lend an air of eroticism to a Lolita coordinate, which I know is not everyone's cup of tea. Myself I love to wear them on days where I feel like dressing up fancily but don't actually feel like doing much else besides slipping on a black skirt and an h.NAOTO cutsew.

Near Complete Lolita Wardrobe Overhaul: Part 1

2011-10-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

For the past several months I've had a bad case of a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear. A scorching hot summer certainly didn't help this, it was too hot to even think about doing anything other than putting on a sundress and falling asleep in front of the A/C, let alone putting together interesting Lolita coordinates. This, combined with the fact that I rarely get rid of my Lolita clothes, made me think "Same old, same old" whenever I opened my closet. Don't get me wrong, I do love my Lolita wardrobe, I have so many pieces I just love, well, to pieces. But I also have so much that has just become very ho-hum to me. So, what's a Lolita to do? Out with the old, in with the new is the best solution!

First step: What do I want from a wardrobe? What kind of change to I need to see in my current wardrobe?

Well, first of all I want something that thrill me and makes me giddy with possibility when I go through it. I want something that has a lot of possibilities and different ways of coordinating. I want something that suits me, and fits me. At the moment my closet is feeling very stagnant because some pieces have simply been in there, unworn, for so long that I feel like I have to sort through so much to find what I like. I also happen to have a lot of things that only match one or two pieces in my wardrobe, and that's just no fun at all. I started adding to my Lolita wardrobe around 6 years ago, a lot can change in 6 years! Honestly, my personal style hasn't really changed a whole lot since I was in middle school and first discovered black clothes (it's simply gotten better!), I feel like my everyday Lolita style has changed a bit and it's simply time for me to refine it, instead of just making do with what I have.

Generally, my Lolita wardrobe is divided into the 3 styles I wear most of all: Gothic, Sweet, and Classic. Currently these sections are a pretty much complete hodgepodge of random things, and that is something that I really think needs to change! Let's talk about each one a little bit more in depth!

Gothic Lolita- I really think that this section needs the least work, I just think it needs a little bit of a re-imagining. Currently, when I wear Gothic Lolita it is often a lot of Kuro JSKs with Gothic accessories and styling or a whole lot of h.NAOTO at once. While I love me some Kuro, and Naoto, I have become a bit bored with them an just sort of tired of seeing the same pieces again and again. Instead, I would like to have a Gothic Lolita wardrobe that focuses on elegance and texture. Chiffon, brocade, velvet, embroidery, things like that. I would also like to be able to incorporate more of my regular, "Western" Gothic wardrobe into my Gothic Lolita wardrobe, this isn't something I really need to make a wardrobe change to do, really just something that I need to force myself to do. In regards to inspiration, I want my wardrobe to be more Antique Beast, less h.NAOTO.

Classic Lolita- I would simply like to wear this style more. I currently have a fair amount of Classic Lolita pieces, in a style I particularly like, but I have so few foundation and basic pieces that match that I get very little wear out of it. I'd like to add less main pieces to my Classic Lolita wardrobe and more things like boleros, Classic appropriate shoes, blouses. I don't really have any specific colors in mind, as I think that Classic Lolita doesn't really require a lot of matchy-matchy, but I would like to keep burgundy, cream, black, and a few dusty pastels in mind when shopping for new Classic Lolita pieces. Inspiration wise, I would like less Innocent World does Country Lolita and more Juliette et Justine meets Dolly Kei.

Sweet Lolita- I have so much of this, and it's currently my go-to wardrobe simply because I have so much of it and it's so easy, and I think it's the wardrobe that needs the most work. Right now, it's definitely all over the place from years of being able to pick up stuff for relatively cheap. My Sweet Lolita is very black-centric and has a lot of pink and black and cutesy prints. Much to the surprise of many Lolitas I'd actually like to get rid of nearly all of my Sweet Lolita prints. Instead, I would like to focus on solid colors and old school inspired pieces, maybe a few Sweet floral prints and a couple tartan pieces. I'd like to limit my colors to mainly black & white and red & white, with a few pink pieces thrown in for variety. I'd also like to get rid of all my Peter Pan collared blouses and instead focus on square necked and high collars. I'd also like to bring in some more screen printed pieces instead of any more prints. Inspiration- more 2004 era Baby, less Metamorphose prints.

Second step: Deciding what stays, and what goes.

Quite possibly the most difficult step! Certainly harder then the upcoming tedious and annoying step of cleaning and selling everything. I decided I wanted to narrow my entire wardrobe down to 3 piles: Things I wear frequently and fit the styles I would like to have, things I rarely wear but are special or novelty pieces, and pieces I either haven't worn in a long time or pieces that just aren't what I would like my future wardrobe to look like.

Going into this task I started with a huge pile containing 25 dresses, 31 skirts, and probably between 30 and 40 tops. I managed to whittle this down to 12 skirts, 16 dresses, and 18 tops. That's half of my wardrobe!

This is my to-go pile!

I was happy to see that what I decided to whittle it down to, more or less, fit just what I was looking for. And I was even happier to find that I could actually close my armoire without jamming everything in and then closing the door really fast!

The next step, the step I haven't gotten to yet, is to actually sell off this to-go pile, as well as a few miscellaneous accessories. Whatever I make selling off the to-go pile will go into building my wardrobe back up again. I wear Lolita on a near-daily basis, so it is a little scary cutting my wardrobe in half for a while but I've really needed to do something a bit drastic to my wardrobe like this for a while. Like I mentioned, I've been building up my Lolita wardrobe for a long time now and the thought of having some fresh pieces and fresh possibilities in my wardrobe is a really exciting idea!

Lolita Blogspiration

2011-09-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

I am pretty addicted to the world of cute, creative, and Lolita blogs, I love spending a few hours browsing around them, reading new articles and exploring new blogs by clicking around on links. I've tried to find ways to promote the various blogs I love, and articles I find interesting, from occasional shout outs, to the short lived "weekly prompt" thing that you may or may not have noticed on my sidebar. But I think the best way to send some blogging love out there is just to make a post about it. Will this be a new series? I have no idea! I would like to do this regularly, but, as I am sure you have noticed on here, I love to drop new series just as quickly as I start them.

Even if I just do it this one time, or every now and then, I hope you'll check out these blog posts and hopefully get as inspired by them as I have been!

Over at Cupcake's Clothe s check out this amazing shooting star nail tutorial! It's done on fake nails, but it's simple enough to do on your own nails. While my own Lolita wardrobe is not exactly the most colorful one, I am a complete sucker for cute pastel combos, and an even bigger sucker for stars!

Being Badass: Having Self Confidence is a post over on Geekminina (formerly Ramble Rori) about, you guessed it, being badass and having self confidence. It has some great tips for those of us that sometimes feel like we are not being the awesome person that we could be, as well as some tips on walking the fine line between believing in yourself and being a jerk. Christina has actually started a series on being badass, something I will be looking forward to more posts about!

Over at iHanna, which is a crafty blog filled with eyecandy that I love to browse, she made a post about a neat little internet gizmo that makes fancy color splotches based on search terms through an image bank. Using things I don't quite understand, like technology and math and the internet, you just punch in a word and it makes instant art! I had fun punching in a variety of Lolita words, trying to guess what the resulting picture would look like, then being surprised at how wrong I usually was!

This post is a bit old, but even though it's from a blog I follow I somehow managed to miss it until now! Over at Moss Garden, Martha posted a wonderful Brothers Grimm fairy tale with a Mori Girl inspired coordinate. Her coordinates are definitely some of my top favorites, so this post was a real treat. Check it out for both the fairy tale and some more amazing photos of the coordinate!

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am sort of a craft fanatic. If you can make it, I want to learn how to do it and make it for myself. My newest craft obsession is perfume oils. Some time ago I was trying to hunt down a very specific scent and was turning up empty handed so thought "Hey, why don't I just... make it?" so I did a bunch of googling and found that it was something I figured I might be able to do. I now have a small army of single notes and plans for releasing some signature scents in my Etsy. My experimentations are on hold for about a week though because I managed to spill a bunch of oil on my desk, so now my work space smells like a cupcake, making blending quite difficult! For those of you out there who want to possibly try this somewhat daunting task (It's not really harder than it looks, just more time consuming and fiddly) check out this tutorial over on Indie Fixx for making your own signature scents. I'm actually really loving Indie Fixx for their tutorials right now, I'm practically drooling over this one on infused sugar!

That's it for now! I am constantly reading blogs and hunting down tutorials and finding things I want to share with everyone, so hopefully I'll remember to feature some of the more fantastic finds on my blog here!

Ask Miss Caro-chan: Why is Lolita so Expensive?

2011-09-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

I haven't answered an Ask Miss Caro-chan on my blog in a while! For those of you that are unaware, I do a lot of the answering straight on Formspring, but I do always tell myself "I need to post more of these to the blog!" especially the ones that get asked again and again! Today is a good one though, a question that has often befuddled many a new and even seasoned Lolita, a question EmilyRamones asked with:

Do you have any reason as to why lolita attire is so expensive?

It's a question as old as Lolita itself: "Why can't I afford all of this!?" Because let's face it, Lolita is sometimes prohibitively expensive. Now, for this question, I'm going to assume EmilyRamone is asking why is brand new, brand name Lolita attire so expensive, because, truthfully, not all Lolita is expensive. There are places like Bodyline and Taobao where you can pick up a well made dress for $45 and you can easily pick up second-hand brand dresses from various sales communities and auction sites for under $75. But, again, I'm going to assume that she didn't mean "all Lolita ever, regardless."

Brand new, brand name Lolita is priced the way it is for a variety of different reasons. I know that some people take the price tag on brand pieces as a personal insult to them, but I feel that the price is pretty reasonable when you stop to consider the reasons why.

First up, let's talk a little bit about what "expensive" means to some people. Personally, I feel like it usually means one, or a combination, of three things: It is out of my personal price range, it is priced higher in comparison to other things, or it is unfairly priced and is simply not worth it. When people lament the high cost of Lolita I feel like they are often feeling a mix of these three things: they can't easily afford it, it's much more than they are used to spending on clothes, and there is a good chance they simply don't understand the difference in quality between brand Lolita and "normal" clothes, and thus don't understand why it's so expensive. Lolita is a fashion aimed at younger people, teens and early-twenty-somethings (of course, that doesn't mean Lolita is only for people in that age group!). Take a look at the average fashion aimed at this age group, it's cheap and trendy, and not really meant to be worn, or sometimes even stay together, longer than the few brief months that the trend lasts. Check out this interesting article for a little bit of the history behind cheap clothes. In comparison to what are essentially throwaway clothes, Lolita pieces are meant to be worn for years and are intended to be cleaned and cared for carefully, instead of just tossing it into the washer until it falls apart. If you try to view the value behind clothes as how long it lasts and it's quality, rather than the price on the tag, the price of Lolita becomes much more justifiable.

There are, of course, more easily defined and calculated reasons behind the price tag on Lolita pieces than just perceived value! One of the major reasons why Lolita is so expensive is because of the material cost. Some people who question the price of Lolita, and use the excuse "It's just a gathered rectangle and some lace! I know someone who made a complete Lolita outfit for $5..." probably haven't had many closeup experiences with brand name Lolita. I know that this is going to make me sound like the dreaded brandwhore, as if this whole article isn't already making me sound like that, but unless you live around some really amazing fabric stores, you're not going to be able to walk into a Jo-ann Fabric and walk out with the same quality materials used in brand name Lolita. The cottons are generally much, much thicker and more finely woven, and the lace is just in a completely different world than the lace sold at fabric stores. This doesn't even take any custom fabrics into account, custom woven lace, custom printed fabrics, appliques, embroidery, etc. These are all custom designed by artists exclusively for the brand to use. Along with all of this, Lolita clothes often use a deceptively large amount of materials. Ruffles, rows of lace on every hem, gathers, pintucks, all of these add onto the amount of fabric used a little at a time until you might end up with a single dress with yards upon yards of high quality lace and fabric.

Another factor in the price of Lolita is the fact that Lolita is a relatively small niche fashion. The dresses in Lolita stores are not being mass produced on a large scale, they are being sold on a very small scale, thus the prices tend to be higher. When you buy a dress from a brand, you are often times buying one of only a few dozen of that particular dress. What you are buying is something very exclusive, which is something both intentional and simply a by-product of buying from a brand that caters to a non-mainstream fashion that doesn't mass produce their products.

A third reason why Lolita is priced the way it is is because it comes from Japan, which doubly raises the price. The most noticeable change in price is that we are buying imported products, and have to pay for all that that entails. We are paying for the vast difference between our currency and the price of the Yen, we are adding on shipping costs, shopping service fees, and even when buying second-hand we are factoring in rarity and how difficult that particular piece was to acquire. A final addition to the cost of buying clothing from Japan, that might not be so readily apparent, is that things in Japan are often times simply expensive. Again, this is something that has a whole lot of reasons behind, more so than I feel I am qualified to talk about in-depth, but here is a pretty good article about exactly that (despite the very mid-90's web design, it was actually written only a few years ago! So I swear it's not a decade out of date!).

Lolita sticker shock is something most all of us in the fashion have faced, especially in the beginning, and especially if you have never regularly wear anything more expensive than a $50 pair of shoes and have a fondness for shopping at thrift stores (which was how I was before I found Lolita! Although, I still shop at thrift stores, constantly). After a while, you get used to the price, you come to realize that clothes are only worth as much as you make them worth. If you come into the fashion with the notion that no clothes could possibly be worth more than fifty bucks, and everything above that price is a rip-off, you're probably going to get ripped-off. But, if you do a little bit of research: learn what quality fabric looks and feels like, how to tell the difference between cheap lace and beautiful lace, where to find a second-hand bargains, what to look for in a seamstress, when brands have sales, or even learn to sew, you're going to find that Lolita is not at all an impossibility, but something that just requires a little bit of hard work and commitment, but if you love it and it makes you happy, it's really worth it.

Quality over quantity is something that has always been stressed within Lolita, and it's a notion that many people find laughable when we are being told that we should, instead, be focused on buying what is trendy now and think not about what what we are buying is worth, but how much cheaper it is than everything else. Lolita doesn't have to be $400 dresses, it can easily be a relatively affordable fashion, but what it shouldn't ever be is a cheap throw-away fashion. What Lolita is, at it's very core, is the very opposite of that idea.

Innocent World's Rose Stained Glass & Some Various Stained Glass Accessories.

2011-09-06T20:31:00.000-07:00

Up for reservation on Innocent World's webshop is a new print, Rose Stained Glass. I'm really loving this new print for how unique it is! Sure, there have been prints in Lolita's past with stained glass inspired art, but I believe this is the first time a print that just looks like real stained glass has ever been made. Take a look at the closeups of the print!

It comes in 3 colors, apricot, bordeaux, and blue. Bordeaux and apirot looking very similar, one just being a little more pink toned than the other, which, while a bit strange (it would be nicer if apricot was more of a... well, apricot color) it is nice for people who like their reds to match exactly to be able to have their pick for the one that matches their wardrobe better.

Innocent World is currently taking reservations for this print, which comes in 3 colorways and a skirt or JSK option, both of which come in short and long lengths, it is expected to be released in late September.

I've always had a soft spot for stained glass, it can be both charming and breathtaking, and it's impossible not to love they way it catches the light and makes any room look magical. So, needless to say, I was quite excited to see this print. While not always seen in the world of Lolita, stained glass themes can be a nice touch to a Lolita wardrobe, if you're currently missing out on this release, you can easily (and affordably, in most cases) add a little bit of stained glass to your wardrobe in the way of jewelry.

As you can see, there is a huge selection of jewelry and accessories on Etsy made with real stained glass. I would really like to showcase something a bit special and striking in this treasury though, and that is the ruby red stained glass purse!

While I would be terrified to be carrying around a glass purse, for fear of shattering it to a million pieces, I can just imagine how perfectly something like this would go with any Classic or Gothic Lolita coordinate, stained glass print or not!

If you're looking for something a little more affordable, the above small purse is actually a fancy decor box, but since it has a working clasp and chain, I don't see why the brave couldn't carry it with them as a real, if a bit small (but not much smaller than the inside of a Bunny Bear!) purse.

Trends of the Past: Camouflage Lolita?

2011-08-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

Cruella De Vil wigs, mismatched socks, pastry hats, applying your false eyelashes about halfway down your face... Lolita definitely has it's fair share of odd trends that come and go with the times, but I think that one of the weirdest and most inexplicable ones to hit the fashion was the trend of Camouflage Lolita, from back in the old school days. Yes, that's right, quite possibly the least elegant thing in the world managed to become a Lolita trend, albeit not a very widespread one.

I'm honestly not sure how this happened, it probably happened with a somewhat strange Angelic Pretty collaboration in 2005 with the Jrock band Psycho le Cemu, in which they designed this set, complete with old school giant ruffly headdress, for the musician Aya.

The elegance! The mystery! The crossdressing!

This was not a one-off, a just-for-Aya-to-dance-around-in costume, but something actually released by Angelic Pretty. Believe it or not, Aya was something of a Lolita idol, a pink-haired second-rate Mana, who often appeared in the Gothic & Lolita Bibles, usually wearing, or doing, something questionable. I am particularly fond of a picture of him posing with a vacuum cleaner, pretending to be some sort of Punk Lolita housewife, and one sort of awkward Wizard of Oz photo shoot that involved drawings of bishounen Scarecrow. I honestly have no idea what ever happened to Aya, I seem to recall some sort of brief career as a Halloween themed costumed rock star, but for whatever reason, he seems to have slipped from the pages of the Bibles, and from the Lolita timeline.

Angelic Pretty's stock photos for this set.

When most people even recall that camo-print Lolita was even a thing, they usually think back to Metamorphose's Punkma Camouflage set released a year later, in 2006. After all, Meta tends to be the odd ball in the Lolita world, no one would have really expected Angelic Pretty to make something like this, it seems to have Meta's shenanigans all over it. Maybe Meta didn't invent camo-loli, but they certainly jumped all over that bandwagon with Punkma and released a surprisingly large amount of pieces, in a wide range of styles, in their particular brand of camo-print, which featured cute silhouettes of their bunny and bear mascots.

Believe it or not, there are actually a few more pieces in this series!

While this is Meta's most famous camo-print line, it certainly wasn't their first! Before this bunny and bear covered camo-print came a more generic print set. As far as I know, it came in grey and pink, had 2 different styles of skirt, and a heart-shaped apron. At least, these are the only pieces of it I have ever seen online.

A couple pieces from the original Meta camo-print set, complete with matching heart-shaped apron. Because just a camo Lolita skirt is never enough.

Did it come before the Psycho le Cemu Angelic Pretty set? Did Metamorphose, in fact, invent such a thing as Camouflage Lolita? Honestly, I have no idea, as there is very little information about Meta's first camo series online. All I know is that, just like all the other camo-print Lolita pieces that have released, it is pretty awesome, for it's equal parts of badass and tackiness. I actually used to own one of the pink skirts from this set! I loved it for it's tackiness, but never quite knew how to wear it so, regrettably, I sold it. I would probably pick it up in a heart-beat if I saw it for sale again, that is, if it was for the $35 that I paid for it and had been making the rounds through the second hand Lolita community for.

Sometime last week I was tweeting around Twitter and was conversing* with a fellow old school Lolita/fashion-in-questionable-taste fan about the old camo-loli and wondered if this weird trend could ever get revived for current generations of Lolita fans. Conclusion: probably not, but wouldn't it be wacky if it did? So, I coaxed some life out of my dying Wacom tablet and doodled up what I thought a print would look like this trend happened today in Lolita.

Awful? More like AWESOME-FULL.

First thing to change, from the old style, would definitely be the colors, they're just too bold and monochromatic for the modern Lolita. Drawing inspiration from Angelic Pretty, I made a pallet of all the pastel colors I could think of (Which is apparently just four colors...) and made a big pastel mess of a camouflage print. If you squint your eyes and think about bunny rabbits, it sort of looks like what a lot of relatively recent Angelic Pretty prints look like to me. But, still, it was too plain. All-over prints are so Baby the Stars Shine Bright, and that's just not what we were going for. Knowing that Lolitas can't ever get enough of irony (Guro Lolita, anyone?) we decided to bust out the big guns. The big cookie guns, covered in frosting, and made into a frosting sandwich, that is. And some grenades and tanks and hearts for good measure too.

My tablet managed to give out on me while I was trying to draw up some outfits with this print, which is a shame, because they were actually really fun looking, if a bit completely an utterly silly. They involved hats shaped like tank cookies and machine gun cookie purses. And the dress came in 2 styles, typical Angelic Pretty OP, and a more Fairy Kei styled empire waist mini-dress with matching bloomers. I think I hear Maki and Asuka knocking on my door now, just begging me to fly to Japan and design dresses for them now!

That's about the short-lived and weird trend of Camouflage Lolita in a nutshell. What do you think about it? Did you not even know about this skeleton buried deep within the Lolita closet? Or maybe you were actually a fan of it at one time? When I first started buying Lolita pieces, this style was in full-swing, well, as full of a swing as it ever was, and I was a bit baffled by it, this manly and inelegant print, so out of place in a time when nearly all Lolita prints were classical and elegant florals, but I enjoyed it for it's silly irony, and I still do. When I hear people complain about some new trend being un-Lolitalike, or someone not considering something part of the Lolita fashion just because it doesn't follow their idea of elegance, I tend to think back to these camo-printed pieces and wonder how they would react if they knew that brands used to put out pieces like this.

*the following story is a bit over dramatized, the conversation basically went Her: "Remember Meta's camo print?" Me:"OMG LOVED IT! It should come back in OTT!" Her: "OMG WITH COOKIE GUNS" Me: "I'M GONNA DRAW IT!" But that's not very fun to read, or write about.

Sweet, Gothic & Classic Lolita Etsy Treasuries

2011-08-24T16:27:00.000-07:00

It seems it's every Lolita's dream to one day be able to sew their own clothes, but sadly, it's a talent that not all of us have. I am sure that if I were pressed, and had a pattern, I could sew up some fancy clothes for myself, as I do know my way around a sewing machine, but I'm simply to impatient to ever sit down and actually finish anything I can make under a sewing machine. So, instead, I like to spend time oogling the things various other Lolita seamstresses make and wistfully think to myself "One day..." On of my favorite places to do this is through Etsy, probably because I'm just a little bit addicted to making Treasuries! In my last Etsy lurking adventure, I made three treasuries, one for Sweet, one for Gothic, and one for Classic Lolita. These are all relatively simple treasuries, just some nicely made cute clothes by various Lolita seamstresses, with a few crafty accessories thrown in for good measure.

Looking at some of these gorgeous clothes really makes me want to at least try to ever finish anything on the sewing machine. It just seems like there's so much unlimited potential when you can make your own Lolita pieces!

Why have I been lurking on Etsy a little more than usual lately? Because I've spent the last week and a half getting my Etsy back in gear! It is nowhere near complete, there are still a number of things that I still need to get in my shop, but for now, it's at least a little bit full. For the next week or so, I'd like to offer free shipping as a little "Thanks for being so patient with me while I get everything back up", just use the coupon code WELCOMEBACKSUMMER and you can get free shipping on anything in my shop. I hope you don't mind this little aside to mention my shop update!

I'm sure you've noticed how quiet it's been on the blogging front for me! I just finished up my "vacation". Quotes because, while it was my vacation from my full time job, I still worked every other day at my part time job! There were several days in a row when I didn't even bother to turn my computer on, which is very rare for me, as I'm pretty obviously internet addicted. I hope you all can just bear with me for a bit while I get back into the swing of things, yet again!

My Lolita Playlist

2011-08-08T19:34:00.000-07:00

Art by Kira Imai

I haven't forgotten about the 30 day Lolita meme! I just took a break from it for a while, but I'd like to resume with day 8 (even though it's very much past 8 days!) with "10 songs that inspire you for Lolita" I've actually been meaning to make a real-life mix CD of Lolita songs for a long time now, but have never really gotten around to even making a play list on my computer until now. These aren't necessarily songs that seem to directly reference anything Lolita-like but are more like what I like to listen to when I am in the mood to lounge around in a frilly dress.

Rasputina- 1816, The Year Without A Summer. I am sure I have mentioned on this blog before that I'm a pretty big Rasputina fan, and I tend to like to associate them in my head with Lolita. This is a song off of one of their more recent albums about, you guessed it, 1816, also known as the year without a summer. Not necessarily Lolita, but the historical imagery, of a pretty gloomy nature at that, is fitting for my own ideal Lolita aesthetic.

Nine Inch Nails- The Perfect Drug. Okay, so maybe this song is on this playlist because the scenery is like my dream house and gardens and I have never been able to separate the song from the music video after seeing so long ago, I also like to pretend that this song is about vampires, which it probably isn't. Scary hedge mazes, vampires, mandolins, these things are Lolita to me.

Cinema Strange- Catacomb Kittens. Another band that I have mentioned on this blog before! Again, picked for it's gloomy lyrics that are reminiscent of times gone by. A song about orphans who run away to live in catacombs, definitely more on the Gothic side of the Lolita spectrum, but still very Lolita to me.

Tori Amos- Raspberry Swirl. Tori Amos is another musician that I have always just sort of put on when I am in a particularly Lolita mood, but no real one song in particular. I just so happen to like this one at the moment.

Sopor Aeternus- Hades Pluton. This is actually the first Sopor Aeternus song, which I actually heard when I was first starting to get into Lolita and trying to create (not always successful) coordinates with the goth clothes in my closet, so this particular song always sort of reminds me of that time in my Lolita timeline. Also, it's a great song, even if it took a little bit to grow on me, as I had honestly never heard anything like Sopor Aeternus before this song. I had absolutely no idea what to make of it!

Malice Mizer- Beast of Blood. Another song that I discovered when I was first getting into Lolita, so it instantly reminds me of the fashion. And how could it not? A Jrock song about vampires with Mana pretending to play a violin while twirling around in an Aristocrat dress, what's more Lolita than that?

Darren Hayes- Waking the Monster. A little different from some of the other songs on here, but really on here mostly because my friend Janet and I are both huge Savage Garden/Darren Hayes fans, and the soundtracks on the way to many a far away Lolita meetup has been Savage Garden. Plus, this song is about a mad professor building a time machine, that's sort of cool and fitting I think XD

Schwarz Stein- Release Me. I was never really big on Jrock, with the exception of the first summer I discovered it, which was the summer of 2003, and also the summer after I decided I wanted to be a Lolita for reals this time. So, the few Jrock songs I still listen to really make me feel all fuzzy and nostalgic inside towards Lolita.

Aqua- My Mamma Said. Aqua is such an ultra girly band, mostly known for Barbie Girl (quite possibly the girliest of all songs?), but they make a few really great songs along with all the goofy ones. This is one of their best I think. Not particularly Lolita, besides the fact that they are generally a girly band.

Taking Classic Lolita to the Next Level. Dare I say, OTT Classic?

2011-07-28T19:51:00.000-07:00

When people hear "OTT Classic" there are a lot of mixed reactions, from "OMG that sounds awesome!" to "Impossible! There's no such thing". Personally, I feel that anything, with proper styling, can be made into a nicely put together over-the-top outfit, after all, OTT simply means that a style is a little more excessive than it usually is. To call a style of Lolita "Classic" we are simply implying a general aesthetic, one that typically is styled after elegant times gone by, not that there is some sort of cap to how many accessories you can wear. And after all, many fashions of the past are known for being very opulent and over-the-top in pretty much any sense of the term, so why should Classic Lolita simply mean "those plain Lolita dresses that sort of look like grandma's couch?" Just because Classic Lolita is generally thought of as the more "toned down" Lolita style that doesn't mean that there is a limit to how excessive the style can be, in fact, I think that because Classic Lolita is a bit more toned down that means that it doesn't take much to push it into the realm of over-the-top.

OTT Classic as the next big thing?

"OTT Classic" has been talked about on the sidelines of Lolita for a while now, usually when people are predicting the next big trend in Lolita. I can easily see the next big thing in Lolita being an over-the-top take on Classic Lolita! Classic Lolita has almost always been talked about as being the next big thing, and with people still hopped up on the over-the-top trend that came along a few years ago with Sweet Lolita, it only seems natural that the next must-wear style in Lolita will be just as outrageous.

It might seem a bit of blasphemy to those that love the simplicity of Classic Lolita, but OTT Classic is a style that seems to have everything that OTT Sweet had that made it pretty much sit on top of the Lolita world for the past 4 years. So, what makes are some of the things that make OTT Sweet so beloved that can easily be applied to Classic Lolita?

Print overload- One of the things that made OTT Sweet Lolita very popular was the abundance of cute prints coming out for Sweet Lolitas, and the same can be said of OTT Classic. Instead of prints featuring toys and cute animals, an OTT classic enthusiast could have her pick of any of the various Classic prints, from Juliette et Justine's opulent Rococo cupids, to more traditional clusters of huge floral bouquets. One upside to Classic that Sweet Lolita's rarely get the luxury of is the fact that floral prints can typically be bought domestically, either easily and relatively online or through local fabric shops, while finding a good Sweet Lolita print in a fabric store is nearly an impossible task and many Lolita seamstresses have to import fabrics from Japan, at a considerable cost.
Accessory overload- While the OTT Sweet Lolita can load up on hair accessories, wrist cuffs, fuzzy brooches, cute rings, and all sorts of other things they can clip to themselves and their clothes, Classic Lolita has it's own version of accessory overload. Faux rose clips, fancy Victorian-esque jewelry, cameos, and pretty much any other jewelry element that is normally used in Classic Lolita can simply be multiplied and worn like it is in OTT Sweet. Take a cue from the Sweets and add some jewelry and accessories in places they weren't originally intended for, clip a cluster of cameos on a bonnet, pin a necklace fancifully on a bodice bow, or wear brooches in your hair.
Mixing in other Jfashion styles- I think that one of the things that made OTT Sweet so popular was it's versatility when it came to outfits outside of Lolita. Many Lolita's are sometimes a bit lost when it comes time to wear something other than Lolita, but OTT Sweet lovers had their pick of a variety of non-Lolita Jfashions to pick from that had a similar aesthetic, such as Decora, Hime, and Pop Kei. These styles could either be worn completely separately from Lolita, or even mixed and matched together to create outfits that were trendy and original. The same can be said of Classic Lolita, since both Mori and Dolly Kei are more and more frequently mixed in with the style and both share a similar aesthetic to Classic Lolita all while having much more relaxed rules.

So what makes a Classic Lolita coordinate OTT?

As I have mentioned, Classic Lolita is generally thought to be a much more toned down and refined Lolita style, so, personally, I feel that anything that is a bit fancier or more decorated than is usually seen in Classic Lolita could be called OTT Classic. This includes things like extra poofy skirts, excessive and opulent jewelry, purses shaped like fancy things, bold prints, extra layers (longer skirts worn under shorter skirts, boleros over blouses, jabots and wristcuffs added to blouses, etc), large bonnets, and non-cotton materials such as silks, chiffons, brocades, velvets, and gobelins. These are all things that, while they are undoubtedly a part of the Lolita fashion and aesthetic, are not often combined all at once in one coordinate, thus adding several of them to one outfit is usually enough to make it a bit more over-the-top than is normally seen in Classic Lolita

Much like with OTT Sweet, it is not just a matter of the dress alone making a coordinate, but rather how that dress is put together with other pieces and accessories. It is a combination of not just a prettily patterned dress, but the addition of accessories as well as hair and makeup styling. A dress with a Victorian wallpaper-esque print paired with a plain cream blouse, cream tights, a matching rectangle headdress and brown mary-janes is undoubtedly Classic Lolita, but pair that same dress with a chiffon blouse with billowing sleeves, a couple extra petticoats, a huge flower covered bonnet, lace tights, Victorian boots, a long lace underskirt, oodles of antiqued gold jewelry, and doll-like flawless makeup job and it just seems like the same dress has become something else completely, not necessarily something better, just something more extreme and definitely over-the-top in terms of elegance.

One of the Lolitas who I think is a perfect example of taking Classic Lolita to the next level is Steph from the blog Moar Lace Please. The following outfits are all from her blog, for more, definitely check out her blog!

Styles like this are also featured several times throughout various Gothic & Lolita Bibles, both in street snaps and photoshoots. Please excuse this very sparse sampling of examples from the Bibles! I have recently lost my folder full of every G&LB scan ever in a computer move and am still trying to get it back together!

A brief note about the phrase "OTT Classic"

I would like to add, one final time, that I am really just using the phrase "OTT Classic" to describe a style of Classic Lolita that is a little bit fancier and more decorated than Classic Lolita is usually perceived as being. If you think that these styles should only be called regular old Classic Lolita, that is fine. If you prefer to call them Neo-Rococo Phantasmagoria Opulent Antiquated Lolita, that is just fine too.

I'm not necessarily saying that every time a Classic Lolita dons a bonnet with a few extra roses clipped to it that she is being "OMG a totally over the top wacky princess just like those OTT Sweet Lolitas!" I do not necessarily believe that every deviation from the standard idea of Lolita needs a very specific sub-style name or that things that deviate from the Lolita norm and do not have a very specific community approved sub-style name are all the sudden new and strange and no loner Lolita, but I do believe that, as a blogger, it's a hell of a lot easier to use buzzwords and brief descriptive phrases to describe things. You probably wouldn't have made it this far into this post if, instead of saying "OTT Classic", I said "This style of Classic Lolita, that, while still considered Classic Lolita, has leaning towards poofier petticoats and more accessories than what most people consider Classic Lolita".

Lolita sub-style names shouldn't limit what can be worn in said sub-style, they just make it a heck of a lot easier to talk about the things we enjoy.

Bodyline's Like Brand Looks

2011-07-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

The last time I really wrote about Bodyline was quite a while ago and they have definitely changed since then, and luckily that change has been for the better! For those you you who aren't too familiar with Bodyline, they are a very cheap and easy source for Lolita (dresses costing between $30 and $65) that started off as a costume shop knocking out cheaply made and overpriced Lolita-inspired lace monsters but they soon discovered that there was quite a huge market in selling "real" Lolita clothes for a fraction of the price of brands. True, Bodyline Lolita pieces are also a fraction of the same quality as brand Lolita but they usually look nice and hold up well to wear, and for the price, who's going to complain?

Over the years Lolitas have had many different feelings towards Bodyline. The relationship between Lolitas and our favorite discount dress store is sometimes complicated. They started out the butt of everyone's joke, then they shocked and divided the Lolita community when they released nice quality print replica's of highly sought after brand dresses for $50, then very slowly they started releasing better and better pieces with better and better original prints. I think some of their recent additions are seriously on par with brand, at least as far as design and print goes, and are often even a bit inspired by various brand prints. I have been considering these new Bodyline pieces something like the "Runway looks for less!" features you can often find in mainstream fashion magazines, the ones that show off a runway look and then feature similarly styled look-a-like pieces from department stores for much, much less.

Stripe Balloon Bears is a cute print featuring cute bears all lined up around the hem of the skirt. The print design is a bit reminiscent of Metamorphose's Honey Picnic or one of the many other bear prints that Metamorphose and even Innocent World has put out. Design wise, I think this is a very solid dress, it's a pretty standard OP style with a few extra bows and lace thrown in for good measure, and I'm such a fan of square necklines with the criss-crossing ribbon!

This perfume print is reminiscent of Angelic Pretty's famous Rose Toilette, only instead of a series of pastel colors, it comes in a variety of deeper jewel tones, perfect for the Classic Lolita who flirts with Sweet Lolita (or, if you will, the Sweet-Classic hybrid), which is something I think that the Rose Toilette print could have definitely used. I would actually love to see this in a JSK, because I am not too much of a fan of the OP styling, it's cute, but it doesn't seem very versatile. Bodyline often releases several different versions of their prints on the English webshop at different times, and this dress just hit the English webshop from the Japanse one, so, who knows, a JSK version could easily be on the horizon. I hope so, because I do really enjoy this print.

This macaron and dessert themed print is undoubtedly cute! The styling of the print is very Angelic Pretty, and even features the desserts AP helped make famous in the Lolita community with Dreaming Macaron, in fact, the print is a bit reminiscent of it, only featuring a polkadotted background and coming in much bolder colors than the AP print.

Sweet Cream is another adorable and relatively new Bodyline original print. This one, I do not believe, was not meant to pay homage to any particular brand print, but I think it definitely has a Baby the Stars Shine Bright feel to it, especially with the ice cream's neatly lined up along the bottom with the little ribbon swags. Ice cream and ribbon swag border prints are something that always reminds me of BtSSB. This is another piece from Bodyline that I think gets the Lolita JSK design down perfectly, it's simple, but it's elegant and can work well however you want to wear it.

This Bodyline Strawberry print instantly reminded me of the new direction Angelic Pretty has been going in, and even features strawberry slices along the border like in the recent Triple Tart print. I actually like Bodyline's version of the style much better! The print has much more details and gone are the questionable giant gingham blocks.

This Jewelry themed print practically screams Baby the Stars Shine Bright to me! Especially the pink and black colorway! I was instantly reminded of the black and pink colorway of Salon Music, a bit of the styling from Dripping Lace, and even a little bit of Metamorphose's Perfume Bottle print. Needless to say, this is one of the new Bodyline prints that I want to get my hands on most of all, even if it does seem a bit lacking in the poof department.

This waffle and fruit themed print is another print that reminds me of some of Angelic Pretty's more recent prints, the ones where they go a bit Emily Temple Cute. There's no directly similar piece to this dress that I can think of, but it certainly does remind me of something along the lines of AP's French Cafe or even Honey Cake, if simply because of the use of a more breakfasty looking print in a styling that is a bit simpler than most AP prints.

I'm not actually sure if these are supposed to be balloons or lolly pops, but this print reminds me a bit of Candy Treat, only with stripes, because of the use of such bold colors. Angelic Pretty is known more for their soft pastel, sort-of-blend-together-into-a-big-pastel-blob styled prints and Candy Treat was one of the first of their recent prints to start featuring bold pastel colors in a way that Metamorphose is more known for.

Could this print be any more Angelic Pretty in the height of their pastel-explosion-o-rama? From far away it could be anything from Toy Parade to Dreamy Dollhouse or any number of their other cute animal and/or dessert themed prints. It even comes in a lavender colorway, which is a lovely, but infrequently seen color for Sweet Lolita prints.

These are actually just a few of the new prints that Bodyline has come out with in the past few months! There are a bunch more on their webshop and hopefully there are more prints like this on the horizon for them. Now that Angelic Pretty seems to be going in a bolder and almost Otome inspired direction (at least as far as prints go!), Bodyline is a nice alternative for those not yet ready to let go of their love of pastel rainbows. I think any of these dresses would be an excellent way of building a print-based Sweet Lolita wardrobe on a budget or even for those of us who enjoy Sweet Lolita, but not really enough to fight girls for the newest Angelic Pretty release, who are looking to add a few creative Sweet Lolita prints to our wardrobe.

Personally, I hope to pick up a few of these! I have a very limited number of Sweet Lolita main pieces in pastel colors (I think I have exactly 2 pink skirts and 1 pink JSK I'm in the process of selling!) and at between $37 and $62 dollars a piece, these Bodyline pieces are the perfect way to add a little more color to my wardrobe for cheap!

Your Lolita World: Starting a Local Lolita Community

2011-07-13T19:07:00.000-07:00

This Saturday I had the chance to hit up a local convention and get together with some of the local Lolitas that I haven't seen in a few months and catch up as well as getting a chance to meet some Lolitas I have never seen before. Even though I'm sometimes the hermit of my local Lolita community I really do love my local Lolita scene, it's full of fun people who like to do fun things while dressed fabulously, I really do regret that I cannot make every single meetup and casual get together in frills that our small state happens to have!

I do realize that not everyone is lucky enough to live in an area that has a large and friendly Lolita scene, but I do feel that there are enough Lolitas out there that pretty much no matter where you live there is at least someone else familiar with the fashion near you, sometimes it just takes a little hunting!

So, how do you find local Lolitas?

The Western Lolita scene mostly revolves around the internet, since we Lolitas are few and far between in the real world. EGL on Livejournal is one of the biggest English speaking Lolita communities on the internet, and you can find many offshoot communities on Livejournal, including communities for Local areas. So if you're looking for a place where Lolitas in your area might congregate online, scan the list of other communities to see if your area has a group of it's own. There are also a few Lolita forums sprinkled throughout the internet such as Dressed to a Tea and the My Asian Fashion forums.

Suggestions to liven up a dead community

So, you found you already have a local online community for Lolitas in your area, but, to your dismay, no one has bothered posting in it for the better half of a year (or more!). Don't despair, this doesn't necessarily mean that all the Lolitas in your area have just vanished off the face of the earth, it might easily be that they don't all know about this community or that everyone else is sitting around watching the dead community thinking the same thing as you, just waiting for someone to say something. So, what can you do to help bring some life into a dead Lolita community?

Post! A pretty simple solution is to make a quick intro post, a quick "Hey! How is everyone, I'm new here, anyone else from my area/any plans?", if anyone is lurking, they will most likely let you know they are there with a comment or two.
Post some more! Maybe your intro post brought out a few lurkers, but it still hangs there at the top of the community for almost a month and no one else is bothering to say anything. If that is the case, try posting a little more, but don't go crazy. Post cute local Lolita finds, suggest a good movie, ask what they think about something in the world of Lolita, whatever really gets people talking to each other, which is really the important part.
Recruit others. If the community is a bit dead, try to find people to join it! If you have a couple friends who are also interested in Lolita, ask them to join the community so it is a bit more active to people passing by who might be checking it out. If you don't know anyone who is willing, maybe people don't know about the community! With the permission of the mods of whatever larger Lolita community you happen to be a part of (be it EGL or a forum) make a post letting people know that you're a Lolita from wherever it is you are from and point everyone else who might be from your area in the community's direction.
Move to Facebook or another place more of you frequent. Our states Livejournal community was a pretty desolate place for a while, sure, we had meetups, but a big chunk of our locals weren't very active on Livejournal any more so meetup news traveled more by word of mouth. But, one day we decided to move our community over to Facebook and, like magic, the community seemed like it was instantly revived.Our old LJ community was averaging a handful of posts a year, but now there are always new posts happening on the Facebook community, group orders, possible meetups, silly things people find online, and it's especially nice to sometimes pop onto Facebook and see a little local Lolita community chat window flashing away! If most of you are on a different social networking site, or even a different online journal, consider switching to that one instead of Facebook, whatever is more convenient for your group. Be sure to put a notification about it on your old Livejournal community after the switch, since many Lolitas use Livejournal for community purposes, they will probably stumble across your old community first and wonder where everyone went!
Host a meetup. Once you found yourself a group of local Lolitas, even if it's only a very small group, consider hosting a meetup to meet everyone in person!

Finding Lolitas at conventions

If you frequent anime conventions, you'll find that one of the easiest places to meet new Lolitas is at local (or non-local, if you like to travel!) conventions. Pretty much all you have to do is keep your eyes open and you're bound to come across one or another. If you're a bit shy about going up to strangers and saying hi just because you're wearing the same kind of clothes as them, consider going in Lolita if you weren't already, and they will easily come to you! An easy way of letting people know "Hey, you're a Lolita, I'm a Lolita, let's be friends!" is to whip up a batch of calling cards (I happen to love mini moo cards! They're such a unique size and shape!) with your Livejournal, Twitter, Blogger, or even Tumblr username so people can get in touch with you. Simply slip them a small cute card when you meet them or when you say goodbye.

Anime conventions often have Lolita panels or even hosted tea parties which act as a great way of getting a group of Lolitas to all gather in one place. If the convention you plan on going to lacks either of these, consider making a post on the convention forums asking if any Lolitas will be attending and host a very small, casual get-together at a convenient time and place inside the convention center. Something as simple as "Hey! Let's all meet at the couches near the cafe at 3 on Saturday!" is usually all it takes to host a small and casual meetup at an anime convention.

Some quick Lolita meetup tips and ideas.

Hosting a Lolita meetup on your own can be a big task, sometimes trying to get a group of Lolitas in the same place is as difficult as trying to herd cats. Your best bet would be to ask around your local community and see what it is they are all interested in doing, try to take their opinions into consideration. A local group that is mostly vegetarians and vegans probably isn't going to be interested in a meet at a steak house, locals who aren't fabulously wealthy probably aren't going to be able to go on a week long Disney cruise, and a group of Lolitas who are fancy ladies probably aren't going to want to go to a meetup that involves moshing at a concert. Try to find a meetup location that is either in a centralized area or is easily reached by public transportation. For example, myself and several other Lolitas in my state find it easier to take a train all the way to New York City for events than it would be attend a meetup that is geographically closer in my own state that happens to be in the middle of nowhere.

There are a lot of different places to host a Lolita meeup, all meetups don't have to happen at a fancy tea house or some other "traditionally" Lolita location. Consider any place you like to spend time at as a possible meetup location, it can be anything from a gallery or museum to dinner and a movie to a picnic in a park. You should also try to calculate how much any meetup is going to cost, including transportation costs, admission, food, and extra spending money, and let everyone who is interested in attending how much the meetup could potentially cost beforehand. No one likes to get somewhere to find out that they don't have enough money to afford it! If you're looking for meetups that are a bit on the cheap, that don't involve living near amazingly fun and interesting places, consider one of the following ideas:

An evening in- If you're very familiar with your local Lolitas, and you have enough room at home, why not invite them over for an evening of movies. You don't have to just watch Kamikazi Girls all night either! If your locals are more into cheesy 80's horror or sci-fi alien conquest movies, there's nothing stopping you from watching whatever it is you all want to watch!
Lolita craft-a-thon- I love Lolita crafts, and crafting with a group of other Lolitas, preferably making cute Lolita accessories, is pretty much my idea meetup! This can either be done at someone's house, or if the weather is nice, and your crafts don't require power outlets, a nice park bench somewhere. Pack up a bunch of cute craft supplies and encourage everyone coming to donate a few of their own craft supplies, pool them together, and spend the day making accessories to match your outfits.
A themed dress photoshoot meetup- Many times all it takes to get a group of Lolitas to gather somewhere is the promise of getting lots of pretty pictures taken. Find an area with a nice backdrop, such as a park or fancy tourist building and ask everyone dress up following a theme such as favorite fairy tales, children's book characters, everyone wearing a different color of the rainbow, or whatever would make a great picture. A fancy camera or a budding photographer friend is a plus to these kinds of meetups, but is hardly necessary.

For a bit more of an in-depth how-to on how to host, and even attend, Lolita meetups, check out these two posts, this one on EGL (it's an old post but it's still very relevant!) and this one on Lolita Fashion. They both contain great information on everything from meetup ideas to what to wear! If you feel as if you are very shy and might be uncomfortable at a meetup, but you're very interested in going to one, check out this post by Her Curious Elegance with tips for the shy Lolita.

Keeping the community strong

Even though I was terribly shy when I first started going to Lolita meetups, I found a few of my best friends by not letting shyness get in my way and just going to the local meetups, why else would it be called a meetup if you weren't there to meet new people? It's not called a Lolita stand-around-and-stare-at-each-other. One of the most important parts of building a strong Lolita community is keeping up with everyone and forming genuine friendships, not just saying "Bye, see you at next year's Lolita meet!" and going on with your life. If you have a somewhat active online community, join in with the conversation between meetups, talk to people on instant messenger, and just generally be friendly with them. Of course, if you don't click with the people in your local group, for whatever reason, you don't have to force it. But if you do attend a Lolita meetup in your area or two and decide that these are your kind of people, there is no reason that they have to be people you only see a couple times a year at meetups.

Your local Lolita community might not be perfect, you don't have to be best friends with everyone in a petticoat who sits down to have tea with you, but so what? Even if the only thing in common you have with some people is you happen to wear the same fluffy undergarments and buy your socks from the same brand I still think that's something special, even if just because we Lolitas are such a rare breed. After all these years I still get excited when someone else even knows what Lolita is, not to mention has the guts to wear it. At the convention I went to over the weekend Christina of Ramble Rori hosted a Lolita panel and said something to this effect, about how excited she is to meet other Lolitas too, Lolitas of any experience or dedication level. "Oh my God, yes! You know what this is all about too!"and I really feel the exact same way, like meeting another Lolita is like finding someone else who is in the know about this wonderful, sometimes secret or misunderstood, world or frills and elegance, and fabulousness.

Metamorphose Temps de Fille Old School Lolita Elegance

2011-07-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

Sometime last week I was on Twitter, tweeting about some older Metamorphose pieces that I loved when a couple other Lolitas joined in and we exchanged a few tweets about how elegant the older Meta pieces used to be. Metamorphose used to be my number one favorite brand, but a lot of their releases in recent years have sort of made me ask myself "Wait, why do I love them so much?" Not that their newer pieces aren't often lovely, they are simply quite a bit different from the older pieces that I fell in love with, and it seems like they changed so gradually that it was hard to notice when I started to fall out of love with them.

Older Metamorphose pieces, and I'm talking early to mid 2000's, even late 90's in some cases, have such an air of Victorian elegance that their newer pieces usually don't have. The lush floral prints, bonnets, great big bell sleeves, rich velvets, stark black and whites, and excessive use of lace were my ideal Lolita for years, and honestly, still is, even if it is a bit outdated.

I usually like to use GLB scans and "official" brand photoshoots and ads for examples, but instead, here are some of my favorite real life coordinates based around older Metamorphose pieces. These are all from Flickr, so credit goes to the photographers and models in each of the photos, click on the thumbnails to get to the original photo!

What makes older Meta pieces so special, to me at least?

Floral prints- I am a big fan of floral prints, if you couldn't tell! Even the grandma's-sofa-and-curtains-matching-set sort of florals make my heart flutter. I think a big part of it has to do with the nostalgia factor for me, since a lot of Lolita dresses when I first got into the style were made with floral fabrics, seeing just about anything in a pretty floral print instantly reminds of of the elegance of Lolita.
Bold colors- While nowadays Meta is fond of using bold colors in their custom prints, before the days that nearly every release was a print, Meta often used bold color solid pieces, as seen above in the jewel toned velvet dresses and richly colored floral prints. Rarely does Meta ever come out with a dress in a soft baby pastel!
Lots of lace- Older Meta pieces were known for having tons of lace, many of them were even made with complete lace overlays! But more often, they happened to have lots of lace details, either criss-crossing around a skirt or an extra wide ruffle of it about mid-skirt or even on hems. Believe it or not, much of lace Meta used back then was actually raschel lace, not all raschel lace is created equal!

Detail overload- I've talked about this a bit in my older post, Angelically Sweet, but I am sort of a sucker for detail overloaded Lolita dresses. Not necessarily accessory and print overload, but dresses that contain rows and rows of lace ruffles, extra wide bell sleeves, bows at every corner, and pin tucks all over the lace. Even a plain colored cotton dress gets kicked up to a sort of insane level of decadence when all of these are added to one dress.

Simplicity- I know, I just said I loved the overloaded details in the point above this! But on the opposite end of the Old School Meta scale is a much simpler elegance. Relatively plain jumper skirts with a bit of elegant embroidery, pleated minimum-poof skirts, and even simply styled hair and accessorizing.
Old School headwear- Big floppy bonnets and extra ruffly headdresses were seen a lot in older Meta coordinates, and while they took a bit of working to look right, they really do look stunning.

With the apparent decline in OTT Sweet and rising interest in Classic Lolita I can easily see styles like this coming back in an updated version, maybe details will be a bit more refined, the lace won't be so ruffly, the headdresses and bonnets will be neater, and the colors might be a bit more muted. I think that this sort of elegance, whether it comes directly from Metamorphose or elsewhere, is just the sort of thing to add a little bit of both Classic and Old School flair to a wardrobe. It's a style that really helped define Lolita for a lot of people, not just for myself, and I think it still can still hold itself up to today's trends!

Metamorphose is sort of an in-the-middle brand for some people, it seems like you either love them, hate them, or tend to forget about them completely. So, what do you think of these older Metamorphose pieces? Do you think styles like this, extra wide raschel lace ruffles and all, could make a comeback? Or are you pretty happy with it staying in the past?

10 Misconceptions About Lolita

2011-07-02T15:09:00.000-07:00

Lolita is often a very misunderstood fashion, a lot of different people think a lot of different things about it, not all of which are anywhere close to true! I am sure anyone who has worn the fashion a fair amount in public, or even someone who simply loves to do the occasional Google search for "Lolita" has heard any number of these applied to themselves and the fashion they enjoy so much. The following misconceptions are ones that I have often heard, either told directly to me, or talked about in forums where people didn't think Lolitas were listening! Of course, not everyone outside of the Lolita fashion feels this way, but these are just some of the more negative or generalizing misconceptions that some people seem to have about Lolita fashion, as well as a little bit of musing, and a little bit of ranting, about why people feel this way about Lolita.

1) It's named "Lolita", which is also the title of a fictional book about a sexually promiscuous young girl, so that must mean that people who wear Lolita are doing it because they want to attract pedophiles!

Probably the #1 misconception about the Lolita fashion is that we must all be pedo-bait simply because of our name. Hearing things like this always sort of makes me shake my head in disbelief, even though I had been hearing a very similar complaint before I even discovered Lolita, the good old "Goth?! You're so stupid, don't you know that Goth means a style of architecture/was a tribe of invaders? How can you wear architecture/invaders!?" Honestly, the disbelief comes from the fact that I find it hard to believe that people who say things like this have ever even read the book Lolita, or know anything about classical architecture or Roman history. Am I going to be lectured on the original meaning of "decimate" as well?

Here's the thing, I know what the book Lolita is about, I have actually read it. I also know that the term was coined years ago in a non-English speaking country that often uses English words in ways that we don't. I also know that sometimes words have multiple meanings and that sometimes, over the years, words change to mean different things.

Years ago, for whatever reason, the world "Lolita" was coined to describe our fashion. Why? I honestly don't know. Speculation is that "Lolita" got loosely translated to mean a young girl and thus got applied to that group of girls dressing in what looked like young girl's fashion, "Lolita" being a foreign girls name and the fashion often taking inspiration from more Western and less traditional Japanese youth's fashion, the name just clicked. For the record, Lolita looked significantly different in the mid 90's (which is the earliest I have noticed the term "Lolita" used to describe the fashion) ago than it did now, so the current idea of what a Lolita should look like, actually looks very little like whatever it was that made people want to call it Lolita in the first place.

2) Lolitas love anime, they must if they are always dressing up as anime characters!

Believe it or not, Lolitas actually have many different interests. Some love anime, some don't particularly care for it, very few of them are wearing Lolita simply for their love of anime.

Lolita is not an anime invention, quite the opposite actually, Lolitas are in anime because it was a real-world fashion first. To say that people wear Lolita because it is occasionally featured in anime is the same as saying that people dye their hair unnatural colors just because anime characters frequently have naturally colored hair.

3) Aren't all Lolitas completely obsessed with the fashion to the point that they've built a lifestyle around it? Don't they all wear it constantly while sipping tea on their pink stuffed animal covered bed while listening to classical music?

No, not even close. Again, Lolitas actually have a lot of different interests, just like regular people, no two Lolitas are exactly the same. While some Lolitas choose to wear the fashion as much as they possibly can and live the Lolita Lifestyle, to most Lolitas the fashion is really just that, just a fashion. A fabulous and frilly fashion that they spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on, but a fashion none the less.

4) I thought Lolitas are supposed to be polite and nice all the time!

This is often the cry of someone who, upon joining an online Lolita community for the first time, somehow manages to get into an argument with someone and is completely shocked to find that *gasp* Lolitas are arguing back and generally not being cupcakes, kittens, and rainbows. Yes, believe it or not, most Lolitas are not in perpetual polite mode, at least not any more than any other regular human being is.

This fact is often used to shame Lolitas "For a bunch of girls dressed so pretty, you sure acted ugly, tsk tsk." Frankly, this assumption is complete BS. Not only are we Lolitas, but we are also just, more or less, regular people. We're not playing some sort of strict roll-playing game when we slip on a petticoat. You wouldn't shame a Goth for smiling, a Hippy for wearing shoes, or a Punk for engaging in an activity that doesn't involve throwing bricks through windows, so why shame a Lolita the instant they steps outside of the Lolita cliche?

5) Lolita came from Japan, therefore it's only okay when Asians wear the fashion.

I really hate to hear this. I especially hate to hear this from what are, otherwise, perfectly pleasant to be around people. It always sounds so, well, racist. "Oh, well it's okay when those wacky real-life-anime Japanese people wear Lolita, it is just what they do over there, but when normal people wear it, it's just weird!" There is absolutely no reason why non-Japanese cannot wear Lolita. Lolita is, by no means, a traditional Japanese style of dressing, even if it is heavily embedded in their pop-culture, so you can't even make the argument that it is disrespectful towards their culture to wear it (side note: here's an interesting blog article about "borrowing" cultural dress as a fashion statement!). People all around the world, of all different races, wear Lolita fabulously.

6) Most Lolitas don't have the confidence, aren't fashionable enough, or don't have the right kind of looks to wear "normal" clothes, so they wear Lolita to feel pretty, because they can't any other way.

A misconception that many alternative sub-cultures face, not just Lolita. When someone dresses strangely, some people feel that it is because it is the only option for them, for whatever reason. Even if this was true, that Lolita was only worn by people just trying to find a way to feel pretty or special, what would be so wrong with that?

Many of us want to feel special in some way or another, why should someone get to say that there should be a line (at least, within the realm of fashion) that you cannot cross to feel that way? If wearing Sugary Carnival and a hat shaped like a merry-go-round is the only way you can think of that will make you happy, no one really has the right to say "No, that's just too far! Wallow in your misery until you find something socially acceptable that will make you happy."

While Lolita might not be popping up in mainstream fashion magazines, urging everyone to buy the newest Angelic Pretty dress, or how to get that Juliette et Justine look for Bodyline prices, it can still be just as challenging to create unique coordinates in as it is in any currently trendy or even high-end fashion, and it usually takes twice as much guts to rock even the simplest Lolita look with confidence as it does more mainstream fashions. So, to say that a Lolita knows nothing about fashion just because they're not wearing a fashion you're familiar with is just silly, and I'd like to see the fashionista who who sneers at the Lolita try to put together a creative coordinate using a Lolita's wardrobe and not come out looking like a hot mess.

7) Lolitas are people who are trying to relive their early childhood. Either because they were picked on and abused as a child, or they have a sexual fetish for it.

Things like poofy dresses, the color pink, and pigtails are often synonymous with little girls clothes (regardless of the fact that, more and more, it seems like little girls are just dressing up like little grown-ups nowadays!) some people make the assumption that we must, therefore, want to be little girls again. The truth is, most Lolitas are perfectly content with their current age, and the ones that do dress childishly, are just one of many facets of the Lolita fashion.

I really don't know why people often assume that the childishness in the fashion is either the result of a dark and buried past, or a secret fetish, but this is another thing that seems to often be the case with alternative sub-cultures and fashion, that when someone sees someone wearing something strange it's for a strange reason, not simply because the person wearing it happens to like the way it looks.

8) Lolitas love attention and just want people to stare at how strange they look, why else would they wear something like that?

This is another one of those things that makes shake my head in disbelief, the idea that only people who are dressed "strange" want people to look at them. Nearly every fashion trend in casual mainstream fashion seems like it was meant to get people's attention. Walk into any clothing store and you'll find tons of tee shirts either with witty sayings meant to provoke a response from people, blunt proclamations of what you think about yourself, what kind of significant other you're currently on the prowl for, or to loudly proclaim your favorite bands/movies/hobbies; open up any fashion magazine and you'll find it filled with articles about how to make yourself stand out in a crowd in the trendiest way possible. If standing out is such an apparent crime, why aren't more fashion magazines talking about the most inconspicuous shapeless sack dresses to wear this summer and why aren't there more clothing stores devoted to completely utilitarian extra large plain grey sweatpants?

Everyone seems to be obsessed with drawing attention to themselves, but if that attention comes from an out-of-the-ordinary fashion, then it's all the sudden bad attention. Except that, most of the time, those of us who put ourselves out there and dress "weird" are really doing it only for ourselves, not so that others will look at us, but because we truly love the way it looks and feel our best when we're wearing something we completely love. Most of us don't actually love it when strangers yell obscene and stupid things at us, in fact, some people hate that kind of attention so much they are afraid to wear what they love.

9) Only spoiled rich girls can be Lolitas! They must just sit around all day buying clothes online with credit cards mommy and daddy pay for, how else can they have expensive things that require more than a minute to put on?

Believe it or not, some people actually have jobs. Jobs they use to help fund things they enjoy, like wearing clothes. Life is not spent either working 24/7 or completely devoted to playing dress up. While Lolita does take a bit of dedication, most Lolitas are completely capable of managing their money and their time so that they can fit the clothes into their budget, and the fashion into their lives. Besides, Lolita doesn't really take that long to put on!

10) Lolita fashion is way too strict! There are rules for everything! How can you express yourself at all if you have to remember about a thousand stupid rules about how you're supposed to look?!

I feel like this might be the opinion of someone who thought they might be into Lolita, tried it, and found it too difficult, and now they have quite the bitter outlook on the fashion. While, yes, there are "rules" to Lolita, there are also "rules" to every other possible fashion style out there. After all, you wouldn't say you're a "jeans and tee shirt kind of gal" if you rarely bothered to wear jeans and teeshirts, so really, there are rules to something as simple as that as well. While the guidelines for Lolita are sometimes a little more complicated than other fashions, they are fairly generous and can easily be bent and even broken if you have even a moderate grasp on the fashion.

In regards to expressing yourself while being limited to a certain set of rules, well, the Lolita fashion is not the only way Lolitas express themselves, in fact, most everyone finds other ways besides just their clothes to express themselves. Just because it's hard to work a hoodie announcing your favorite band to the world (see misconception #8) doesn't mean that Lolita is necessarily trying to stifle you underneath a layer of lace, petticoats, and strict rules about skirt length.

Gothic & Lolita Bible Volume 40

2011-06-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

The 40th volume of Gothic & Lolita Bible hit jmagazinescans just the other day, it's really hard to believe that there have been 40 volumes of this out so far! In general this issue, like always, was filled with tons of gorgeous eye candy. The summer theme was evident in the vast amounts of flowers and pale, muted tones. My prediction about the Bibles (and thus Lolita in general) leaning more towards the Classic end of the spectrum, and leaving OTT behind, was apparently correct, because this volume is filled to the brim with Classic Lolita coordinates and toned down Sweet Lolitas. Maybe it's the summer heat, but even the Angelic Pretty ads passed up the opportunity to deck them selves out in accessories and extra petticoats.

The one thing that this volume seemed to be lacking was, believe it or not, patterns! I looked through it three times but I couldn't find any patterns in the whole thing! I think the patterns were replaced with a little mini-booklet of different ways to style wigs, which is hardly a compensation. I prefer patterns I can't read and craft tutorials I probably won't try out a million times over "How to make a braid" or "How to clip ponytail falls onto your wig" tutorials.

Check out some of my favorite pages from the 40th Gothic & Lolita Bible! Click to get a larger version.

While this issue was filled with gorgeous outfits, and I am happy to see a return to the art-based covers, this volume felt a little empty. Maybe it was the lack of the patterns and tutorials, which has always been a staple of the Bibles, but maybe it was missing something I just didn't pick up on? Looking back, I can't recall seeing any multi-page editorials about something cute like flowers, art, tea or something like that. Not that I can read them, but they still feel like they give the volumes some sort of substance. This volume was pretty much 100% clothes and coordinates. I'm certainly not complaining! I was very pleased and inspired by a lot of the coordinates in here, but I still felt like "That's it?" when I got to the end. If you want to pick up your own scans of the magazine (because you don't have a single local place that sells the Bibles, right!? You know you should be buying them if you can find them!) you can check out the Jmagazinescans community!

I'm doing a bit of blog housekeeping at the moment! Just straightening stuff up and doing some layout rearranging. I'm still trying to find a way of tackling the tags, a tag cloud is just so ugly, and the list just takes up too much room. I am thinking about streamlining the ones that are listed onto the side into a few very basic groups, all the tags will still be there, and accessible in individual posts (and maybe in a drop down box too), but a visitor to the blog wont need to sort through a sea of tags to find all the how-to posts, or all the lifestyle ones, or the ones labeled "inspirational" or one of the other big tags. What do you think? Is the tag cloud just fine the way it is? Or do you think things need to be a little bit more at-a-glance?

I also added a "Weekly Lolita Prompt" box on the sidebar! I plan on changing it every week with something cute and Lolita related to do, whether it's tutorials, a cute new trend, a Lolita related quote, or some sort of frivolous activity for you to do to add a bit more Lolita in your life. Once I get the second one up, I plan on having a separate page to list all the previous weeks prompts, just in case you miss one. It's just a little something extra I've been thinking about doing for a while!

Completely Ridiculous Lolita Trend Predictions!

2011-06-22T13:39:00.000-07:00

Lolita is known for having some ridiculous trends, everything from wearing hats hat look like cakes or melted ice cream headdresses, to pastel afro wigs, to mismatched shoes, to even the more mundane trend of encrusting everything you have in rhinestones and fake whipped cream. So, I got to thinking, is there anything that might be just a bit too weird to become a Lolita trend? I hope you don't mind this no-I-am-not-serious (so no hate mail, please!) prediction at a few trends that I really hope don't plan on hitting Lolita anytime soon. Well, maybe I wouldn't mind some of these!

Wig overload!

With the wig trend at it's peak, wig enthusiasts will start to look for ways to wear all their wigs and hair falls all at once. It will start with wearing more than 2 curly hair falls on your wigs at one time, Lolita's will start clipping at least half a dozen wig falls onto their base wig. Soon a famous Lolita model is spotted in a Gothic & Lolita street snap with one of her falls clipped to her purse, and another clipped to her waist-tie bow, and yet another wrapped up around her wrist. The rising popularity in the new My Little Pony cartoon will cause Lolita's to exclaim "OMG! It looks like she has a pony tail growing out of her butt! THAT'S SO CUTE!" and Lolita's everywhere will at least start clipping their extra wig falls to their purses and to their waist ties. Brands will soon release big detachable butt-bows complete with an attached pony tail, and smaller pony tail purse charms. Some will complain that the trend makes us look like furries, but no one cares because we all are too excited about My Little Ponies to give a fuck.

Super hero styled capes.

Not necessarily capes in general, or those fancy historically correct Rococo cape-ish things that are on the back of Baby's $800 super special dresses, but capes that look a bit like a super hero cape. For some reason, it starts becoming popular for Lolitas to don frilly, lace edged capes that tie in the front in a big ruffly bow. Soon enough, brands start putting out capes that feature their logo or a cute screen printing from their most recent print on the back. Many arguments break out because a lot of Lolitas find it "too costumey". The trend eventually subsides and super hero Lolita capes are generally only worn around Halloween, or at meetups that involve going to the newest comic book based movie.

Wearing a fancy bra outside of your clothes.

A trend like this- completely ridiculous, mildly offensive, and just so out of left field- I can only imagine Metamorphose starting. Perhaps one day, on their site, they offer a Lolita-esque bra, it's really cute and ruffly, and everyone loves it, but for some reason it's being modeled on the outside of a blouse. Are they asking us to wear it this way? Did they just not feel like undressing their mannequin? Are they trying to troll us? Whatever the answers might be, the trend catches on and a few daring Lolitas start wearing fancy bras over their clothes and then next thing you know, you can't go to a meetup without at least half the Lolitas there wearing bras on the outside. Arguments will break out on EGL, with anti-outside-bra complaints of "It looks like you're trying to be the other kind of Lolita" while pro-outside-bra supporters will remind everyone that they are wearing a bra under their outside bra, so it's not really their underwear that everyone is seeing.

Kawaii meat prints.

Sometime this Summer, Angelic Pretty will discover the traditional picnic or cook-out and will fall in love with plaid tablecloths, cute country styled plates and cutlery, and even potato salad and hot dogs and hamburgers. They'll release a border print featuring cute cut crystal bowls piled high with potato salad, links of sausages piled up on china plates, juicy hamburgers stacked 3 patties high, and hot dogs with a squiggle of glittery golden mustard going down the middle. Of course, everything will be printed in pale pastels, creating a nauseating raw-hamburger and un-cooked hot dog effect. But Lolita's will eat it up (har har) anyways and the next thing you know Baby will be putting out a sort of retro styled print with hot dogs and hamburgers and Innocent World will be releasing a print featuring a fine line drawing of marbled T-bone steaks.

Over-the-top Classic book hats

I imagine a brand like Alice & the Pirates or Juliette et Justine would start this trend. They would release a really fancy, really expensive, book hat and everyone would have to have it, but it would be too expensive and too daring for all but the most courageous Lolitas to try. Crafty Lolitas would figure out a way to make their own versions of book hats using either old books (and a lot of neck strength!) or those cardboard fake book boxes you can pick up at home stores, a tutorial would hit EGL and then everyone would rush to make their own.

Bubble Bath Lolita

Baby will release another version of those weird terry cloth material dresses and a famous Lolita model will appear in a G&LB street snap wearing it with a pair of fuzzy slipper shoes, a cute little shower cap tilted at an angle, and carrying a cell phone with a bath pouf clipped to it. Soon everyone will start buying up Baby's terry cloth dresses and wearing them with cute shower caps, the less daring will simply clip pastel bath poufs to their purses and cellphones. Shortly after, Metamorphose and Angelic Pretty will each release a bubble bath themed print and a matching colorful towel, both of which will sell out almost instantly. A more "toned down" version of Bubble Bath Lolita will appear, which just involves wearing a bubble bath themed print and wrapping a cute towel around your hair. Arguments will break out over who is the real Bubble Bath Lolita. Baby terry cloth dress purists will exclaim to the print lovers "There's nothing bubble bath about your outfit at all! You're just wearing a print and have your hair wrapped up in a towel! you look stupid!", and the print lovers will exclaim "You look so boring! Your shower cap looks more like grandma's night cap! You look like grandma shuffling around in a bathrobe!" The trend eventually dies, but Lolitas continue to clip bath poufs on purses and cellphones. Two years later, Bodyline releases a bubble bath print dress for $15, EGL is flooded with noobs asking how to coordinate it in a proper Bubble Bath Lolita coordinate.

Chimney Sweep Loli

A photoshoot posted to EGL of a Lolita in an all white outfit, adorably smudged with soot, this becomes a huge hit. Lolita's soon start snapping up cheap white Lolita dresses with the intent to cover in artistically placed smudges of soot. Cute little soot hearts are drawn on cheeks. This trend soon dies out as Lolitas find that the soot has managed to get all over their white blouses, white socks, shoes, purse, and just about everything else the dress touches, ruining much more than the cheap white dress they intended. EGL is flooded with "How do I get soot off Angelic Pretty prints if I can't wash them!?"

So, these are my ideas for trends that might be too wacky even for Lolita! True, some of these might work, the book hats and bath pouf cell charms and maybe, if we're really lucky, the pony-tails-on-your-butt. Who knows though, someone might prove me wrong soon enough! Lolita always manages to surprise me with it's sometimes completely strange trends. Trend that, I must admit, I sometimes find myself falling into as well. It's just really hard to resist something that's completely out-there but everyone else is doing too!

Do you think super hero capes and soot covered dresses could be a possibility in Lolita? Or do you plan on rushing to clip your extra wig falls onto your butt? But, what I'd really like to know, is what kind of weird trends could you imagine being the next big thing in Lolita? I'd love to hear your ideas! I'll be making a list of all the best ones to add onto this entry!

Reader suggested trends!

Laurette "Big chunky metal armour size jewellery. Even metal bows with black and white poke a dot skirts."
Cherie "HIKING LOLITA! With fanny packs, duck boots and nordic print cardigans!"
OfstaALaSheep "I think it would be funny if you had a giant fake lolipop that was attached to a headband, and you wore that. Then, you rat the hair around it, and it looks like you a giant lolipop stuck to your head! 8D"
Queran "Viking Lolita. Of course it would be started by AatP with a trendy viking ship print and soon every Pirate Lolita, who lost her respect for pirates due to "pirates of the carribean", will wear cute little horn helmets and wild red wigs to match her newest "plunder and rape"-print."
ConstanceHOUANG "Decoden dress, obviously! A dress covered with rhinestones, whipped cream and teddy bears"
Watercat8 "How About a SUPER crazy trend, like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory themed coards! but not just prints of the factory landscape oh no, they would be girls with orange-y spray on tans wearing green wigs, brown blouses and white skirts with overalls (Oompa-Loompa, doompadee Doo!) Other girls would paint their faces and hands violet and wear blue wigs, blouses, and JSKs. Kodona lederhosen coards covered in chocolate, you can see where I'm going, right?

Keep them coming! I'd love to hear more trend suggestions!

Unicorns? In My Lolita? Baby's Newest Print!

2011-06-16T21:03:00.000-07:00

I was getting my much needed dose of Lolita news when I stumbled across a picture of Baby's newest print and was completed delighted to find that it featured my favorite animal in the magical animal kingdom, the Unicorn! I really don't understand why unicorns aren't a more common theme in Lolita prints, they are pretty much the perfect Lolita animal- they're magical, they're elegant, they're a princesses best friend, and they can come in rainbow pastel colors, what more can you ask for? But, for whatever reason, very few Lolita brands, indie or otherwise, have even ventured into the magical realm of unicorns. Metamorphose's Twinkle Journey is pretty much your only big brand unicorn release, and the indie brand Pink Macaroon has released a unicorn themed print, but that's really your only options when it comes to unicorn-centric Lolita prints. But now we can finally add another unicorn print to our closets since Baby has decided to finally bust out some unicorns with Unico in Bloomland.

Unico in Bloomland comes in a few choices, two different styles of JSK, a skirt, a pair of print socks, a headbow, and even a printless blouse meant to complete the set. Printwise, I think this is completely adorable, it includes Baby's typical flower swag garlands, bows, crowns, and other more elegantly styled motifs, as well as a liberal splashing of pastel pink baby unicorns. While this is sort of their trademark style (of the moment) it does get a bit boring sometimes, as the general print layout is very similar to a number of prints they have done in recent years, but really, the unicorns make up for that. So much so that the pink version is really tempting me as being one of my very few "fancy pink prints" for the rare occasion when I feel the need to go out in all pink. But, perhaps I'm letting myself get carried away with uniconlust.

What do you think of this print? Does the mere fact that it's covered in little pink unicorns make you want to bust out your wallets and throw money at your computer screen? Or maybe it's just not your style? It is awfully pink and adowabuwle, and I do think that unicorns can be so much more than just cute fuzzy animals.

More of the 30 day Lolita meme! I obviously haven't been doing of these every day, so I'll just be grouping a few of them together for missed days whenever I post. This way this meme wont drag on for half the year, and I wont have to bore you with daily posts about silly meme things!

Day 6- 10 things in your Lolita wardrobe you can't live without.

♥ A black chiffon petticoat, setting this day's unintentional theme of black Lolita clothes! ♥ Simple black underskirt because without it so many things would be too short! ♥ A comfy h.NAOTO cutsew to throw on over JSKs on lazy days ♥ A big black head eating bow ♥ My black and pink crown emblem Emily Temple Cute purse ♥ A pair of simple black Tea Party knockoffs that I can throw on and pretty much match everything, they're comfy and I don't have to worry too much about wearing them down to the soles ♥ Lacy tights, for extra fancification and when I can't find matching socks ♥ Bloomers! ♥ My Stained Glass print skirt, I just really really love that print! ♥ My very first brand dress, a black BtSSB shirred JSK, it's comfy, fancy, and can work it's way into just about every Lolita style out there! ♥

Day 7- 10 5 people who inspire your Lolita style

I think a lot of people are finding this day very difficult! It's so hard to pick out 10 people who you know inspire you, inspiration sort of comes from all over! So instead of 10 Lolitas, here are 5 Lolitas who's style I find very intriguing, I might not draw direct inspiration from them (that is, wear clothes because they do), but I certainly admire them and their styles!

♥ Sachi from Kokusyoku Sumire ♥ Maria of Paperlace ♥ Hitome of Grimoire fame ♥ Martha of Mossgarden ♥ Mana, by no means am I a Manatard, but the dude's got style ♥

Etsy Treasuries Inspired By Fellow Lolita Bloggers

2011-06-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I discovered the joy of making Etsy Treasuries. If you don't know what they are, an Etsy Treasury is simply a collection of cute things to be found on Etsy, arranged with some sort of theme in mind.

I decided to smash two of my favorite things together, blogging and Lolita, to create a few Etsy Treasuries inspired by a few fellow Lolita bloggers! Can you guess who these Treasuries are inspired by? Give them a glance over and then try to guess!

Do you give up? The first two should be pretty easy. Blue, White, & Bronze is inspired by Miss Lumpy, which should be evident by the copious amounts of blue, as well as all the vintage hats and flowers. Pink Kei is inspired by Victoria Suzanne of Lolita Charm, if all the pink, fairy kei, and cute dog accessories didn't make it obvious enough. Finally, Red Fox might be a bit of a head-scratcher to some, but it's inspired by my friend Erica's blog, Darkly Darling. These were all really fun to make, and maybe sometime in the future I'll try making a few more Lolita blog inspired Etsy Treasuries!

Day 5- 10 items from your wishlist.

My wishlist is hardly a static thing, it changes pretty much all the time, and I've really never been one for dream dresses that I pine away for years over. At the moment I'm actually not really looking for anything that I feel like my closet is missing, but instead I'm buying much older pieces that feel nostalgic, or represent, to me, the ideal old school aesthetic. That being said, a lot of the follow items would fall into that category!

Angelic Pretty Cross OP, I would loooove to own this in black! I think this is the archetypal Gothic Lolita dress, even though it's Angelic Pretty.

Metamorphose Antique Bouquet. Any color, and any of the various releases of this dress, although I would love the bonnet, capelet, skirt set,

I forget the name of this Baby dress! I love it in the red colorway, but black and pink is nice too. It's like the ultimate brand whore dress XD

OK, so I don't know the names of most prints I like! I usually have to look them up. I've always wanted this Baby dress, and I regret, years ago, not buying it when I had the chance.

Angelic Pretty Heart Cut-out. Oh God, it's so tacky! I can't help but love it.

Any of Angelic Pretty's older classic floral releases!

I love Metamorphose's swan logo, and, while it's a little plain, I've been dying to get my hands on one of their pieces featuring the embroidery of it around the hem.

I sort of love Lolita aprons, and I really like this Meta one because it says "METAMORPHOSE" in giant letters across the chest. I loved the fact that older brand releases often printed their name hugely across their pieces.

Baby's Marie Antoinette, in red. It seems like whenever I have the cash to spare for this I can never find it, and then as soon as I go broke, someone finds my super old WTB posts and offers it to me T_T

Baby's Afternoon Tea, or really, just like with Angelic Pretty, any of Baby's older classic floral prints.

What Goth Has Taught Me About Lolita. Plus: More Meme!

2011-06-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

While it might not be apparent from this blog, it being a Lolita blog, but regular old Goth has always been my first love. It started growing up around movies such as Beetlejuice, The Addams Family, and Edward Scissorhands, and then finally manifested sometime around 8th grade when I got my first pair of black stompy boots and started wearing my younger sisters old witch Halloween costume as a blouse (to be fair, it was a black 1970's era silk dress with billowing sleeves, not an off-the-Walmart-rack kids costume). While I have been something of a poor Goth for the past 4 or so years, having pretty much given up a mostly Goth wardrobe for a strictly Lolita wardrobe, it still holds a special place in my heart. Nowadays, the closest I really get to actually looking like a Goth is Gothic Lolita but I still love to, I guess you could say, "Live the Gothic lifestyle", which is pretty apparent by my questionable tastes in decorating, a predilection towards gloomy music, and a general all-around enjoyment of the spooky and macabre.

The point of all of this is that I came into Lolita no stranger to standing out in a crowd but being part of an alternative subculture. By the time I got my first "Hey little Bo Peep!" shout from a stranger I was already an expert at dealing with "Hey Elvira!" calls. I feel that coming from a Gothic background, if you will, had really made me prepared for anything Lolita could throw at me, from cat calls, to internet drama. Some of these things should be common sense, or are things most Lolitas eventually figure out on their own, but these are all things that Goth taught me before I even donned my first petticoat.

Trends aren't to be taken seriously and are best for adding to the ever-growing pot of cool stuff to wear. We Lolitas love our trends, I am not going to lie and say I don't usually love whatever silly new trend comes along, but I feel that all too often, once trends are over with many Lolitas are pretty much done and completely over them. I like to think that we should be able to just keep dipping into the great big well-o'-Lolita-trends without people feeling like they need to suggest ways in which they can update their outfit. While Goth has it's fair share of trends, I feel like they stick around for a much longer time than Lolita trends, and don't start getting labeled as "old school" 3 years down the road.
Respect your elders. What gothling doesn't one day long to be an Eldergoth, or look back with admiration to the long ago days of Old School Goth? I feel that within Lolita the opposite often seems like it is the case, younger Lolita's always debate about how old "too old" is for Lolita, and giggle at how ugly things used to look. My feelings on the subject can pretty much be summed up in this Lolita Secret that popped up a few months ago. While you don't have to love what the Lolita fashion looked like in the 90's, and it's up to you to decide when you personally want to stop wearing Lolita, there's no reason to scoff at your own most-favorite-fashion-in-the-whole-wide-world's roots.
Some strangers are going to hate you and think you're ugly, stupid, and worthless just because of the way you dress. It's a sad fact, but it's really just something you're going to have to learn to live with. The best thing about this is that it is a pretty quick and dirty way of separating your real friends from people who are hardly worth your time, and especially not your friendship.
You don't like it when people judge you, so stop judging other people. This goes hand-in-hand with the above lesson. You don't like it when other people make assumptions about the way you dress, so why start making assumptions about other people based on how they dress?

To "normal" people, we all look equally silly, so stop squabbling about who looks better than whom. A Vampire Goth and an Ethereal Goth are going to look like pretty much the exact same thing to the average person, so what's the point in pretending like one is better than the other if they're both going to face the same prejudices from outsiders? The same can be said of Sweet Lolitas and Classic Lolitas, or any of the other common Lolita verses.
Clichés are fun, but not something to base your life around. With Goth, sometimes it is fun to get excited about vampires, or to gloom around a cemetery, but it's certainly not mandatory, and if it's just not your thing, there's no reason to pretend it is. The same can be said of Lolita, a fair number of Lolitas feel like if one does not love tea, have manners that would put Emily Post to shame, and are fluent in Japanese, then, why, they are simply not a proper Lolita. Luckily though, these notions that the cliché is not only the norm but the only way are often newbie misconceptions that are frequently shattered by spending a few months in said subculture.

Despite some overlap in the aesthetics and interests, the Gothic subculture is pretty far removed from Lolita(Arguments of "Lolita is just frilly clothes!" vs. "There's more to Goth than just wearing black!" for starters) but I still think they can learn a lot from each other!

I had mistakenly credited one blog for coming up with the 30 day Lolita challenge, but it turns out it was actually posted on The Random Lolita, which is actually a blog I'm quite fond of (and this has nothing to do with the fact she's wearing one of my bonnets in her banner : 3), but I've been out of the blogging loop for the past month so the original post completely slipped past me!

I'm really loving this challenge, not just because it gives me an excuse to use some silly .gifs and super-kawaii lolita blog graphics, because it's a nice mix of personal and typical Lolita questions and it gives a little sneak peak of what the person is like without all their frills.

Day 4 – 10 different kinds of food you like.
Honey Moxie Cola Curry Rose flavored anything Guacamole/avocados Falafel Sushi Salads French fries Cotton candy

30 Day Lolita Meme: Lolita Love & Hate

2011-05-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

This post is going to be all meme! I'll be doing day two and day three combined, even though it's been a number of days since my last post, but these two questions sort of go together. It was actually really hard to come up with 10, or really any, things that I flat out hate about the fashion, so my 10 "hate list" is more of a 10 "pretty damned annoying" list! I sort of feel that if you can easily tick off 10 things you absolutely hate about any hobby/group/interest you are a part of you should probably reconsider being a part of it!

Detail overloads- pintucks and ruffles and lace and embroidery, all on one dress!
Crown motifs- they're just so cute, definitely one of my favorite motifs in the fashion.
Brand loyalty- not to an insane extent, but I love getting excited about new releases from my favorite brand and the warm fuzzy feeling you get just because you have something with their logo on it.
Platform shoes- I just can't resist a platform shoe! Never could. In middle school, even my gym sneakers were platform sneakers.
Fancy underclothes- ruffly petticoats, and fancy bloomers, even camisoles and corsets! It's fun to make everything you're wearing extra fancy.
Meetups and the community- I've met so many awesome people at meetups, and I love killing time browsing Lolita blogs, forums, and communities.
Japanese fashion magazines- when looking at pictures on blogs doesn't do it for me, I can always find a Bible at a comic book shop. So satisfying to flip through!
The rarity- even though it sucks I can't just walk into the mall and walk out with a perfect coordinate, that makes it all the more special, and even more exciting to come across someone else who loves Lolita.
The relative simplicity of putting together a good looking coordinate- petticoat, bell-shaped skirt, puffy sleeved blouse, knee socks, cute shoes, hair bow. In theory it's just that simple, and sometimes it really is! I think it's satisfying to basically be able to just buy everything you need to be the perfect Lolita.
High quality lace- It's just gorgeous! I never really saw good lace until I started wearing Lolita, and now I can't get enough of it.

The price- of course! It's not the most expensive fashion out there, especially with the emergence of Taobao and Bodyline, but it's still really pricey.
The drama- everywhere has drama, and I'm not going to be one of those people who says that Lolita drama is the worst drama, because it doesn't hold a candle to some of the other drama-o-rama places I've been, but it's still really annoying that it's there at all!
The fact that so much of the community is internet based- this sort of goes hand in hand with the above annoyance, I feel like the internet magnifies drama and announces it for the world to see. So a stupid squabble at a convention or meetup all the sudden turns into an international incident, and then Lolitas argue amongst themselves, and non-Lolita spectators tsk tsk them for doing so as they sit and watch on the sidelines. Haha, maybe this annoyance should just be "The internet. Period."
The mega trends- Lolitas love to get caught up in new trends, which is fun, but sometimes it goes a bit far, especially when not-currently-trendy things are pushed aside by the majority (or, more likely, a vocal minority) as no longer being Lolita.
The people who are too rigid with the rules- Lolita is a vast fashion, and not everything within it fits easily into the Lolita box, and it doesn't have to. Some people get way too caught up in what is, or isn't, Lolita.
Shopping services- I just hate paying extra fees on top of retail/second-hand prices! I pretty much avoid using a shopping service whenever possible.
Lack of brick and mortar shops- I'm not asking for a brand shop in every town, but it would be nice if there were more places to actually go and buy nice Lolita clothes.
Drawing your lower lash-line way too low- I don't think I've ever seen this done in a way that doesn't look like their makeup is melting off their face along with their eyeballs. It's a weird trend that I believe got carried all the way from Manba to Gal to Lolita that got a bit lost in translation on the way.
Knocking stuff over with your petticoat- it's so annoying!
Shipping costs- even within the same country, some things are just so heavy that you have to spend much more on shipping than you normally would! When ordering things overseas I always have to remember to tack on about $50 to the price just to cover shipping.

Angelic Pretty: Re-releases and Reimaginings.

2011-05-24T17:54:00.000-07:00

In the past few months, it seems like Angelic Pretty has been doing a bit of switching up their style, while at the same time, revisiting some old favorites. It started sometime in the last year, when they started to release prints that were a bit bolder in color, and simpler in print design instead of the pastel jumble of cuteness that made them so popular in recent years. Angelic Pretty also gave everyone quite a shock when they announced that they had decided to re-release Sugary Carnival, a print which is definitely one of their most sought after pieces and was recently made into a replica. With this, it almost seemed as if Angelic Pretty realized "hey, we made some awesome stuff in the past that people still love, let's do that again!" so shortly after Sugary Carnival was re-released they came out with Aqua Princess, a print that looks surprisingly like Twinkle Mermaid, a print that was, at one time, another one of Angelic Pretty's most popular prints.

Left, Aqua Princess; Right, Twinkle Mermaid

Aqua Princess is very different from anything Angelic Pretty has released in a long time simply because the print is a simple 2 color print, reminiscent of some of their first custom screen printings in the early 2000's.

Left, Toy Fantasy; Right, Toy Parade.

While Toy Fantasy isn't a direct re-release, it is very reminiscent of Toy Parade, which was one of Angelic Pretty's very first custom fabric prints, from 2007.

What does this mean for Angelic Pretty and even Lolita? Does it mean that Angelic Pretty has simply run out of different combinations of candy and cute animals to add to their dresses? I doubt it. Angelic Pretty has been on the cutting edge of Lolita fashion for the past 4 years, or at least, the cutting edge of Lolita has been Angelic Pretty. I, and many other Lolitas, feel that the trends in Lolita are beginning to shift away from the over-the-top-rainbow-explosion-glitter-extravaganza that Angelic Pretty has popularized, and, at least a little bit, has started focusing a bit on the nostalgia of Lolita trends gone by. To me, it seems like Angelic Pretty is, instead of trying to come up with The Next Big Thing, grabbing a hold of this new trend for the old and making it their own. "Remember this?! If you liked it you're going to love this!" they seem to be saying.

Will this trend of re-releases and reimaginings continue for very long? Will other brands start to take heed? Baby has already re-released a couple popular prints this year, Stained Glass and Vampire Requiem, but, while popular, neither of which are as iconic as the Angelic Pretty prints that are getting a second go. Many Lolitas have been practically begging Moi Meme Moitie to follow in Baby and AP's footsteps and re-release what is quite possibly Lolita's most sought after print, Iron Gate. Will MmM listen and give in? MmM is known for being one of Lolita's most "exclusive" brands, priding themselves on high prices, limited runs, and nearly impossible to get a hold of pieces, so it's highly unlikely that the old Iron Gate print will ever see new life, but perhaps Mana has heard these cries and listened because a recent print of theirs is a bit reminiscent to the Iron Gate styling.

This re-releasing of older prints is something of a double-edged sword and within the Lolita community there are people who feel very strongly about both sides of the argument. There are those who long to get their hands on a long ago released print and would prefer not to simply buy a replica, even if one were available; and there are others who enjoy the collecting aspect of the fashion and would be crushed to find that a print that they spent a lot of time and money to own could now be so easily, and cheaply, bought. Myself, I'm a bit torn. I have several older prints that cost me an arm and leg and I would be a bit annoyed to find out that if I had only waited I could have gotten them for retail price, but there are even more prints that I know I'll never be able to get my hands on because they are just too rare. I think that when it comes right down to it, I am more of a fan of the reimaginings of prints rather than the re-releases. I feel that this way there is always something new coming out, even if it's heavily inspired, or just a rearranged version of something old.

What about the rest of you? Do you like the direction backwards some brands seem to be going? Or are you always craving something new and exciting from your favorite brands?

I also would like to start doing the 30 day Lolita meme that has been going around in the community! I don't know how I'll go about doing it, maybe I'll actually do a post every day, or every couple of days, or just answer all the questions for any missed days between blog posts. However I decide to do it, today is the first day, so let's answer the first question!

Day 1 – 10 things about your Lolita bubble.

I fell in love with Gothic Lolita first, and consider myself a Gothic Lolita, but I really enjoy most all of the sub-styles and wear several of them pretty frequently.
That being said, I don't really worry too much about if what I am wearing doesn't exactly fall within one sub-style, or sometimes even completely within the usual Lolita definition.
I wear Lolita as much as possible, on a near daily basis. When I get home from work I typically change into a Lolita outfit even if I'm just planning on a night of playing on the computer and reading.
I love pink and black! I am a complete sucker for pink and black colorways and I have a ton of pink and black pieces.
I have a love/hate relationship with print replicas. I think they're great for people who can't otherwise get a hold of their dream print, but besides the couple of Bodyline ones that I already own and were the first print replicas to really make a splash, I can't really see myself buying any more. Even though I'm always just on the verge of jumping on some sort of group order to get some for cheap.
I don't have many Lolita purses. I usually just carry one of my h.NAOTO bags with me, regardless of how well it matches what I'm wearing.
I don't have many Lolita shoes either, at least compared to my clothing wardrobe. I usually match a pair of black tea parties with nearly everything, just because they are really easy to walk around in all day. Come to think of it, I really need to invest in a brown and a white pair!
Lolita has made me learn, and want to learn, a lot of things! From sewing, to hat making, to doll customizing, to a million more little mundane things. I really love being inspired by Lolita!
Baby the Stars Shine Bright is definitely my favorite Lolita brand. They were the first brand I feel in love with and one of the brands that continues to amaze me with their quality and designs. I also really love their little "B" logo.
My wardrobe turnover isn't very high. Some people are constantly buying and selling, but I tend to just buy. Even things I rarely wear I don't want to part with because I know they can be made into really cute outfits, even if they aren't really my style.
*Super Special Bonus Bubble* I love those completely tacky animated .gifs. Kitten that float up and down for no reason, winking bears, glittery flowers, random bobbing exclamations of "cute!", I love them all, but I never get a chance to use them in my blog!

If you want to join in on this meme along with everyone else, you can check out this post by Sweet Lolita On The Go to get all the questions!

A little note: I just got a new laptop (since my old was was on it's last leg!) and I decided to switch over to Chrome because everyone else is, and I, for whatever reason, can't figure how the heck to resize my images in blogger! So... until I figure that out (or just switch back to good old familiar Firefox) pictures are going to be a bit randomly sized around here!

20 More Things Every Lolita Should Have

2011-05-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

I'm still getting back into the swing of things after a pretty busy month, I guess my announcement about being back from my break from blogging was a bit premature! I hope to get back to a more regular schedule sometime this upcoming week. I hope I haven't left some of you wondering where I was!

Back in February I made a list based on another blogger's post of 30 things every Lolita should have. I thought 30 should be plenty, but ever since I wrote the list I have been wanting to expand it, just a little bit. So with this post I'll be adding 20 more things to my list, to round it up to a nice even 50 things every Lolita should have. It sounds like it might be a whole lot of stuff, but really, lot of it is quite easy, and just like the first list, is probably stuff you already have but never realized it was a necessary part of your Lolita life before!

A headband with a subtle corsage or side bow, something you can easily slip on your head without much hairstyling or worrying about.. Suggested by Seitou.
A cute purse that works well in and out of Lolita, because constantly switching purses is annoying. Suggested by Seitou.
At least one pair of elegant lace tights, this is great for making Gothic Lolita more elegant, making Sweet Lolita look a bit more princessy, or just making Classic Lolita a bit more fancy! Suggested by Seitou.
A couple pairs of solid colored knee or over-the-knee socks. They're easy to coordinate with just about anything, cheaper than brand or even knockoff printed socks, and much easier to just toss out and get a new pair when you wear them out!
A beauty routine. It doesn't have to be circle-lens-and-fake-eyelash full-face makeup routine, but it's a good idea to have some sort of routine, even if it just involves your favorite moisturizer and a little bit of mascara and some lip gloss.
A versatile shade of nail polish that matches your style, so you can easily give yourself a quick and cute manicure.
Some lace print nail decals or stickers, for when a simple coat of nail polish isn't going to cut it, but you don't have the time or patience to go all out with fake nails. Sephora carries Hello Kitty lace decals for a reasonable price, but you can pick up lace printed nail decals just about anywhere.
A Lolita friend! Either online or in real life, it's always nice to have someone to share the frills with. If your friends aren't really into wearing the style themselves, at the very least hopefully you have a friend who is supportive of your frills and who will let you ramble to them about brands and new releases and give you support and suggestions on coordinates.
A couple pairs of bloomers. They're great for warming up in the winter, looking cute peeking out from hems, or making sure you avoid flashing people! They're also easy to make!
One quick and tasty recipe that is sure to please everyone the next time you go to a pot-luck picnic meetup. If you don't exactly know your way around a kitchen, then switch this to a good local deli or bakery!
A "Lolita" perfume or scent. Whether it's a special perfume in a fancy bottle who's scent goes well with your style that you only save for special Lolita occasions, or a whole arsenal of different scents that you wear with different styles or to different places. I tend to like to wear sweet candy scents with Sweet Lolita, dark and musky scents with Gothic, and flowery scents with Classic.
A relatively simple, solid colored skirt, in the perfect length, that works well with most of your wardrobe. This is a great addition to a Lolita wardrobe because you can do so much with it! Besides just wearing it on it's own, you can use it as an underskirt to add a couple inches to too-short skirts, wear it with an open dress or skirt that's meant to have a separate bustle, or you can wear it under a regular Lolita skirt and gather the top skirt to create a bustle effect.
A favorite easy hairstyle that looks great with most any style you wear and you have perfected doing in about 10 minutes. Something you can do on days with minimal time to get ready but still look polished.
A cute Lolita themed set of stationery or notebook, so you have something cute to write on!
A folder filled with cute and inspiring Lolita pictures, or even an inspiration journal or sketch book.
A favorite "secret" place to shop. Maybe it's a cute store in the mall or a local vintage store, but knowing about some place to pick up unique and cute Lolita accessories or even pieces you can mix in with your wardrobe is something every Lolita should try to find!
A lint roller! Especially if you have pets and are fond of dark colored velvet, but even otherwise, it's a good idea to invest a couple dollars in a lint roller.
A good, trustworthy, seamstress. Either a Lolita with sewing skills or a local tailor, it's always good to know of a seamstress just in case you need something altered, or made from scratch.
Knowledge of how to make an LJ-cut. A lot of Lolita business is done through Live Journal, and knowing how to make an LJ-cut can really save your hide!
Confidence! It's so obvious that I completely forgot it in my last list! Suggested by Julie Doll.

I hope this didn't add a ton more things to some of your Lolita to-do lists! But, just like the first list I made, I do think that a fair amount of the things that every Lolita should have are very basic things that most people have anyways (nail polish, lint rollers, the ability to learn an lj-cut) but just used in creative ways with the fashion!

Do you think that these 20, plus the original list of 30 is enough for any Lolita? What do you find most vital in your daily Lolita life?

Why I Hope to Add More OPs to My Wardrobe This Spring & Summer

2011-04-27T17:54:00.000-07:00

Ah, the long break from blogging is over! Not that it was anything at all like a break for me, as I have mentioned it was spent in a tizzy of sewing, crafting, and all sorts of slaving around the clock to create stuff at the last minute for my table at Anime Boston. I am happy to say that I had a blast and it was all worth it! I met a ton of new people and got to catch up with some familiar faces.

Well, this isn't an OP, but this is how the nice spring weather is making me feel!

As the days are getting warmer (or really, I'm just anticipating warmer days, there have still been some chilly ones sneaking in) I have been dreaming a bit of OPs, or, for those of you who don't know the abbreviations too well, one-pieces, or the Lolita name for dresses with sleeves. It might seem counter productive to think of looking forward to wearing sleeves in the heat of summer, but these don't have to be long, fussy, hot-and-sweaty sleeves, I'm in love with the little puffy elastic almost-cap sleeves that many Lolita dresses have. I am beginning to think they are the perfect summer wear! No need for extra layers like a blouse or a cardigan or a bolero to cover up bare shoulders, just slip it on over your head and add a petticoat and, tada! instant Lolitafication.

But, not all Lolita OPs are the perfect slip-it-over-your-head-and-be-on-with-your-day wear, many OPs out there are probably going to be just as hot, if not hotter, than wearing a JSK with a blouse, or a skirt and a cutsew. Consider these tips before buying the perfect warm weather OP.

Keep the sleeves short and easy to move in. Fully elastic sleeves are a godsend if they fit you right. They're comfortable to wear and don't feel as stuffy and hot as sleeves with cuffs can. Angelic Pretty is the brand that probably has the biggest selection of dresses with this style of sleeve.
Look for a lower neckline. When keeping the sleeves short and easy, you might as well keep the neckline that way too! Avoid a high and often stuffy collar and stick for a lower neckline. A lot of dresses that have the fully elastic sleeves also feature an elastic neckline, making a dress really easy to slip into and move around in.
Try lightweight, natural fabrics. A light and breathable cotton is the perfect fabric for summer! If you are looking for something super casual and comfy to wear in the heat, Baby the Stars Shine Bright often makes dresses out of their cutsew material, which is just a fancy word for a nicer weight t-shirt jersey knit.
Avoid a ton of heavy weight ruffles, scallops, tiers, shirring, or other heavy decoration. These kind of things will just weigh the dress down and add unnecessary layers, which is what we are trying to avoid in the first place! You can still have a lot of details in a dress without adding on yards and yards of extra fabric; lace, prints, and even just textured fabric can be a good way to keep a dress interesting without the extra weight and layers.

Keeping a few of these tips in mind, I created a few, rather simple coordinates with OPs that I think are suited for summer wear. Again, these are very simple coordinates, no accessory over load or lots of extra stuff to carry around, the point being that it's going to get hot out and on warm days I think you shouldn't have to bother with all the bells and whistles that sometimes go along with Lolita. I feel that now that the weather is nicer, I want to just be able to slip of a pretty dress, put something cute in my hair, and grab a purse and go out and enjoy the nice weather.

This Classic coordinate is so simple and sort of borders a bit on the Country Lolita side of things. A Metamorphose dress with an ornate print and a very simple cut combined with a big straw hat and some lacy gloves and tights and brown accessories give this a little bit of a Victorian appeal.

While this Moi-même-Moitié dress might not be as light and breathable as other dresses, as it's made out of polyester, a low neckline and short elastic sleeves make it bearable, accessories are kept to a minimal few pieces of jewelry. A parasol might be advised if the weather gets too hot!

I love this chiffon dress from Metamorphose! It's so light and fluffy looking! I love the fact that it's also such an intense blue, as you usually see these chiffon pieces in pale colors or blacks. I've coordinated it very simply, with white accessories, to keep the focus of the outfit the gorgeous blue of the dress.

Some tips on coordinating with an OP

For years I was sort of uninterested in the OP, I thought there wasn't much coordinating possibility to it, but what I didn't know that it's charm was in it's ease and simplicity. I've learned to experiment and coordinate with accessories and styling, rather than adding more clothes to a coordinate. Try to make the dress the focus of the coordinate, not a color combo or a style fusion. Add some interesting jewelery in matching or complimentary colors. Style your hair and makeup to either match your OP or to try to sway it a little bit in another style's direction. Or, just enjoy being able to slip on a pretty dress and let the dress do it's thing.

What are your favorite ways to wear OPs? Do you love to dress them up with accessories, or do you only really wear already extravagant OPs? Or perhaps you're one of those who finds them too limiting and would rather stick to the JSK or a skirt combo?

Hello Hiatus!

2011-04-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Well, I've gone on a little bit on an unannounced hiatus this month! So i figure I might as well announce it. I honestly didn't even notice how many days have gone by without an update because I have pretty much been sewing and crafting non-stop in preparation for my artist alley table at Anime Boston. I am hoping to get at least a few bonnets done for my table and they take an ungodly amount of time! My days, at the moment, are pretty much a blur of buckram, lace, pricked fingers, and episodes of Avatar and The X-Files playing in the background to keep me from going crazy. I will probably have a somewhat sporadic update schedule until the first week of May, after Anime Boston, and after NYC's Sakura Matsuri.

Until then, I'm sure I'll see some of you around! If you happen to be going to Anime Boston this upcoming weekend, stop by the artist alley, row T, to find me! I'll be selling under my shop name, Ophanim, and on Saturday Miss Lumpy will be there at my table with me selling Amaranth Opulent jewelry!

Sweet-Classic Lolita

2011-04-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

"Sweet-Classic" is a phrase that I've noticed popping up in the last couple years that describes, exactly as it sounds, a style that's not quite Sweet and not quite Classic. I like to think of it as the modern Lolita's answer to Country Lolita.

Sweet-Classic is one of those "sort of" styles, it's by no means considered "official" so some people disagree that it's even a style in the first place, and will either consider it to be regular Classic Lolita, just in lighter colors and with cuter prints, or regular Sweet Lolita, with a more sophisticated design. But I feel that it's slowly becoming it's own sub-style, and while it may never be an "official" style, I think it definitely does have an aesthetic of it's own.

If you're interested in some coordinates that blur the line between Classic and Sweet Lolita, check out these scans from some various G&LBs! Click for a bigger picture.

Prints seem to be the big defining factor of this style, both custom brand prints and more generic off-the-fabric-bolt prints. Although brand, many of the following dresses are made with relatively generic all-over floral fabric, and can easily be replicated with easy-to-find commercial fabric and offbrand dresses with similar fabrics can be found at places like Bodyline and Taobao. Keep an eye out for pale pastel colors, not necessarily the muted colors of Classic or the bold and multiple colors of Sweet, but simple pale and pretty pastels. While floral prints still abound, often in vertical or horizontal stripes, there are also prints much more reminiscent of Sweet Lolita, such as cute animals and toys. But the difference is that while most Sweet Lolita prints featuring animals and toys are very cartoony, the Sweet-Classic print features much more realistic illustrations, giving the print more of a Victorian story book look.

Innocent World's Sweet-Classic

Innocent World is probably the brand that first popularized this look, back when they started jumping on the cute border print trend that Angelic Pretty started. While AP was out making prints with toys and cuddly bunnies frolicking and having fun, IW followed shortly behind with more sophisticated versions of cute prints. They often came in more muted pastels and featured much more Victorian styled toys and cute animals, if not just florals.

Baby, the Stars Shine Bright's Sweet-Classic

While Baby didn't really help popularize the Sweet-Classic look, they have been making dresses with a similar aesthetic for a long time, and are always a nice choice if you're looking for a piece featuring pretty Classic florals with a Sweet color scheme and a sophisticated, yet cute cut.

Angelic Pretty's Sweet-Classic

While Angelic Pretty has made the occasional classical floral piece ever since the beginning, they have sort of come full circle with a couple recent custom print additions such as Vanilla Chan or Sugar Pansy, both of which are a huge step away from some of their recent prints, as they are much neater and more sophisticated looking. Even though Vanilla Chan features big headed kittens and bows, the fact that the print is much more orderly looking gives it a completely different aesthetic than some of their other recent prints.

Okay, so I think I know what kind of dresses make for a Sweet-Classic dress, but how do I coordinate it?

Well, since it's not really an "official" style, more of a descriptive phrase, it's sometimes a bit hard to pinpoint what makes something Sweet-Classic, but there are a few key points to the outfits that help define the style.

Limited color pallet. Many Sweet-Classic prints already have all the colors an outfit can need in them already! The Lolita interested in this tends to choose not to pick out multiple colors from the print to incorporate throughout the outfit and instead lets the dress and the style be the focus of the outfit, not the color scheme.
Minimal and "grown-up" accessories. The Sweet-Classic look isn't about wearing as many matching accessories as possible. In fact, many Sweet-Classic looks seem to exclude wearing any jewelry at all, at the most, possibly a ring or a simple necklace.
Simply styled hair. Gone from this style are the huge teased pigtails and wigs that are usually seen in Sweet Lolita, instead the Sweet-Classic enthusiast would wear her hair in a very simple, yet elegant, hairstyle. Such as a pair of braids, buns, or loose in a very gentle curl.
Heels. Flat and cute shoes, while an option in Sweet-Classic, aren't seen nearly as much as a pair of cute heels, either heeled mary janes, or a pair of Victorian boots. Matching the color of your shoe to the color of your dress is not necessary, a white or cream pair of heels does just fine.
Small hair accessories. Since the Sweet-Classic Lolita's hair is styled simply, without massive amounts of volume, hair accessories are kept simple as well. A small Alice bow, a round headdress, or even simply a cute clip or small hair bow is all that is needed for this style.

Of course, I don't believe that Lolitas should worry too much about fitting the perfect label onto themselves or their outfits, and they certainly shouldn't limit themselves or even individual outfits to fitting perfectly within one style. But I do think it is nice to have a tangible name to go with a particular style, especially if you really enjoy it! What do you think of the style? Do you simply consider it to be merely Classic in softer colors, or perhaps just Sweet with flowers? Or, like me, are you enjoying watching what could possibly be a new Lolita sub-style emerge and make it's own place in the world of Lolita?

Before I end this post, I would also like to point out that in the last post of mine, some people seemed to misunderstand what I was saying. I was not necessarily predicting the rise of the Classic Lolita, so much as I was the decline of the Over-the-Top Sweet Lolita. There is more to Lolita than just OTT Sweet & Classic, and Sweet Lolita certainly isn't going anywhere! There were just as many Lolitas in cute, light pastels in this volume as there are in many of the other recent spring volumes of the G&LB, they just seemed to have ditched the clustery unicorn-and-bunnies-baking-glittery-cupcake prints for elegant florals and decided to leave gigantic pastel wigs at home. That is why I made this post, to remind some that Sweet Lolita isn't ever going to go anywhere, and that OTT Sweet Lolita isn't the only kind of Sweet Lolita out there, even though it may have seemed that way for the past few years! I did not mean to imply that Sweet Lolita is, or ever will be, dead and gone, just that it seems to be growing up a bit, at least for a little while!

Gothic & Lolita Bible 39

2011-03-31T19:53:00.001-07:00

It's hard to believe that the Gothic & Lolita Bible is almost at issue 40! I remember, when I first discovered it, volume 10 or 11 was fresh off the press and getting excited about finding scans of it!

I definitely enjoyed this issue a lot more than the previous 2 volumes! The photos were all gorgeous and the patterns and crafts look fun. As for patterns, this volume contained a whole dress and a few random crafts that basically involved gluing cute things to accessories, but looked cute none the less!

When volume 38 came out, I had noticed that there were a lot less OTT coordinates and sparkle covered photoshoots than there had been in previous volumes. I wondered if this could be the beginning of the end of the OTT trend, which, while alive and well in the English language Lolita communities, seems to be fading a bit from popularity in both Japanese street snaps, and the Bibles. Fall/Winter volumes of the Bible (and many other fashion magazines!) have always been darker and more subdued than other season's volumes, so I wasn't exactly ready to make any bold statements, but the Spring/Summer issues often use the bright colors of the new season as an excuse to design some rainbow prints and bust out the glitter brush in Photoshop, so I was actually a bit excited to see that in this volume, instead of bunnies and unicorns I noticed much more pale pastel florals! So, I think I am ready to call it, as far as the Gothic & Lolita Bible is concerned, OTT Sweet seems to be old news now. Even Angelic Pretty, the brand that pretty much started the trend, has been releasing bold colored, almost ETC styled prints and simply designed "Sweet-Classic" prints.

Even the street snaps only contained a handful of Sweet Lolitas, and most of them were quite toned down, or even wearing very old school styled outfits, although, there was one girl who looked like she was trying to make up for the lack of OTT all by herself! Overall, there were much more Classic Lolitas, Gothic Lolitas, and regular old Sweet Lolitas in these street snaps! There was also something I don't think I've ever come across before, that sort of makes me feel a bit hopeful:

Mary Magdalene clones! Well, not quite, but while pictures of groups of Sweet Lolitas wearing the same Angelic Pretty print are a dime a dozen, I don't think I've ever come across a picture of multiple girls wearing the same Mary Magdalene dress!

I am sure you're sick of me rambling about my "the future of Lolita trends" predictions, I know you probably are all just interested in seeing some pretty pictures, so here are my favorites from this volume of G&LB. Click on the thumbnails for larger pictures!

So what do you think about this possible trend of more elegance, less kawaii? I think it's pretty much inevitable, many people feel a bit burnt out with OTT Sweet Lolita, and if you pay any attention to the online communities, you've probably noticed that for the past couple years people have been hoping for a return of the Classic Lolita. So far, I'm enjoying it, although I am sure, just like any trend, too much of a good thing can be bad. I think that a lot of people still have a bit of the Over-the-Top bug in them and I can easily see Classic Lolita going the way of the Sweet Lolita. Everyone having to have the next big Innocent World print, everyone needing to have the same wig with those little braided loopy pigtails, loading up their Classic Lolita with tons of must-have accessories, and I can even imagine some wacky OTT trend happening in Classic, like instead of cake hats we all want to wear hats that look like stacks of books. Hopefully though, the need for OTT will restrain itself with Classic Lolita, or will simply begin to become less and less the norm.

Lolita Fashion Generator

2011-03-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

I was looking around on DeviantArt and I came across this generator. You press a button and it gives you a random assortment of Lolita related words. It was pretty fun to click it and see what I got, and it started giving me a few generated phrases that I thought actually sounded pretty fantastic! So, I busted out the Photoshop and drew some little fashion sketches of the phrases it gave me.

Enchanted Rhinestone JSK

Why don't more brands use rhinestones on their pieces? Some brands are pretty liberal with the glitter, and a few elegant rhinestones are just so much more classy looking than plain old glittery paint!

Spotted Castle Cardigan

Pretty self explanatory! Polka-dots and castles on a cardigan, with some glitter to make it even more OTT.

Poodle Romance Headdress

I was going to just skip over this one because I couldn't think of how to put a romantic poodle on your head and then I realized that the answer was pom-poms! A simple pink headdress with 3 big white pom-poms on either side, to make you sort of look like you have poodle hair. Nothing says "romance" like sharing a hairstyle with a dog!

Kitten Parade Skirt

Has this been done before? A kitten parade seems like such an obvious choice for a Lolita print, that I would be surprised if someone hasn't done it some where. I had Innocent World in mind when I drew it.

Mermaid Diary Blouse

I don't really know if mermaids keep diaries, or how to include that subject on a blouse, so instead I just opted for a fancy Victorian blouse (Diary=Fancy=Victorian was my train of thought) in a mermaidy color with some pearl details.

Cherry Choir Bow

I love that bright magenta color that Baby the Stars Shine Bright sometimes uses, I am pretty sure they refer to it as "cherry", so inspired by that color, and including some cherries as well, I drew this little bow.

Cake Cherub Stockings

This one had me thinking for a little bit! There were so many different ways to depict "Cake cherub", cherubs holding cakes, cakes with cherubs flying out of it, cherubs made out of cake (that thought kind of disturbs me actually), cherubs dancing all over a cake, a cake decorated with frosting cherub designs. I quickly decided on cakes with cherub wings, as that seemed the most logical choice.

Fantasy Glade Nightgown

If I didn't have the word "nightgown" at the end, I probably would have drawn a deep green print of trees and a stream, but it just seems too frivolous to wear a brand print to bed! So I just chose a nice forest green and a romantic styling.

Some other great ones that I didn't get a chance to illustrate were Marie Antoinette Heart Apron, Stripey Coffin Bloomers, Rose Ace-of-spades Wristcuffs, Gothic Dove Sunhat, Precious Orchard Coat, and Floral Chandelier Maiden. I can really imagine all of those as being something actual Lolita brands release!

I love silly generators like these, they sometimes can really help to inspire you, try clicking around on it and see what you can come up with!

Interview with Tyler of Lily of the Valley

2011-03-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

A while ago I got the chance to interview Tyler from the indie Lolita brand Lily of the Valley. I've always been a fan of Tyler's work. Back before I had a fairly large Lolita wardrobe, I used to download her KiSS dolls to give myself a Lolita dress up fix!

Tyler's brand, Lily of the Valley, is a brand that often focuses on historical inspired designs and prints, and has a very charming, somewhere between Sweet, Classic and country styling, with touch of old school Lolita. Her recent print, Sweet Matryoshka, is a little bit Otome, a little bit Mori, and a little bit Sweet. I am definitely a fan of the versatility and blurring of the edges between styles that her designs feature!

Besides being a talented designer, Tyler is also a very prolific seamstress. She sews nearly all of her Lolita clothes! All of the coordinates from her in this interview feature clothing she has made for herself.

How long have you been into Lolita? Since 2003, so err 7 years. I kinda feel like an old fogey sometimes. Like when someone asks about "old" Angelic Pretty dresses like Sweet Macron, and I'm think: "wait didn't that come out not too long ago? ...oh it's been a couple of years!"

What are your favorite styles? Most probably classic, although I like to try many of the styles and mix them. My current style is something like classic/sweet/mori/otome/natural-kei. haha. I enjoy wearing a lot of layers and using vintage accessories. I still have a place in my heart for old school sweet, although I can't seem to stop adding more and more layers and accessories.

Tyler in a dress of her own creation.

How long have you been sewing and wearing your own clothes? Since the beginning. My first lolita outfit was an off brand blouse with a blue rose print skirt remade from a longer skirt I got at a local thrift store. In the early years of lolita on livejournal making or remaking your clothes was really the only way to wear the fashion. None of the brands shipped out of Japan, and even "In the Starlight" didn't exist yet.

Another reason I think I make my own clothes has to do with my childhood. My mother is a fine arts jeweler and my Dad is an electrical/systems engineer. Growing up around a lot of crafty and DIY people, I heard quite a bit of "Oh, you don't need to buy that, I'll show you how to make it yourself." Once you get used to being able to make a lot of your own things it's hard to go back to buying things that aren't exactly how you would have done it. The only brand I currently own are some very lovely socks!

I think this delight in versatility of design is why I try to allow my customers as wide range of custom choices as I can with my lines and hats. I would like them to have a dress or hat that feels like theirs, rather then something just off the rack.

Tyler in a dress of her own creation.

You seem to make a lot of your own accessories and use a variety of different handicrafts in your pieces, do you have any favorite handicrafts? Oh that's a really hard question. I'm always trying new techniques. Well to start off; jewelry has always been something I've been interested in because of my Mom; it's a nice break from sewing. I am really hoping that the Sweet Acorns jewelry line does well, because I want to continue to offer matching jewelry for my lines.

Tatting is something that I have picked up this year. I enjoy it a lot because it's something you can do on the fly; pull it out during car trips or while watching movies. Also tatting is very fussy and feminine, and that appeals! It's almost a lost art, when I was trying to learn it I couldn't find anyone to teach me how. To this date I haven't found anyone outside of the internet who does it too. I really love old needlework techniques and like to do my own part to keep them alive. I wish it was something I could work into my lolita lines, but it's so time consuming it would be exorbitant!

When it gets down to it I think my favorite handicraft is making hats. There is something very exciting and satisfying about making one. The stiff lines and structure, figuring how how to trim it just so. Plus you can put a lot of trimmings on hats that you could never put on a dress! Feathers, silk flowers, birds! I have a bag of straw braid taken from a thrift store hat stashed away for when I have a time to make it into a spoon bonnet. I'm really looking forward to (and dreading) soaking the straw braid in hot water and seeing if I can fight it into a hat shape!

When did you start your own brand, Lily of the Valley? My first line "Keys to the Kingdom" was released in 2006, but before this I had done quite a few commissions. The line was skirt with a castle screen printed around the hem. It sold well, but not as much as I would have liked at the time. The continuous print was very hard to do and my friend who was doing the screen printing had real trouble with it. We filled the orders but ended up with a lot of misprinted material and frustration. That left me feeling a bit discouraged about future lines.

Keys to the Kingdom

So instead of trying a new one I came up with the idea for the Admiral Tricorn hats. They went over very well, and I still get a good number of orders, even 3 years later. This really encouraged me and I got used to taking several custom orders at once. Looking back to the "Keys to the Kingdom" line; while I think I was ready to do it, I don't think I had a good idea of what doing it entailed. I over reached; something that was feasible to do for one skirt was trouble for several. It was a good experience and really taught me that you have to be circumspect when making such large plans.

In 2009 I decided to make another go at it, putting up the Lily of the Valley website and my inaugural line "Excerpts from a Victorian Cookbook". I am very happy with how it came out and the response. It is great being able to get custom printed fabric in small amounts. I had considered getting fabric printed with my own designs before but it was never possible because of the very large amount you had to buy.

Tyler in a dress of her own creation, the Sweet Matryoshka print fro Lily of the Valley.

What are the ideas or aesthetics behind Lily of the Valley?
I am inspired by a lot of different things, so this is a very difficult question to ask! I'm rather influenced by fairy tales and their beautiful illustrations, I grew up reading them rather then watching the sanitized Disney versions, and I think they are really delightful, and sometimes quite dark. I remember reading the story "The Red Shoes" when I was little and being horrified for months because of it. That sort of thing appeals as well, because life is like that, it's very bright and rather magical; but there are those dark places that make the bright parts that much brighter.

Haha, I guess I haven't done many prints yet that have that feeling, I have so many ideas and it's hard to decide which ones to do. But I think I want my prints to invoke a feeling or story. "Excerpts from a Victorian Cookbook" was inspired by the illustrations from "Mrs Beeton's book of Household Management", and I was delighted by the idea of Victorian confections. When making a cake or pudding was time consuming, and strictly for special occasions; so they molded and decorated them until they looked like something fairies would make. While my newest line "Sweet Matryoshka" reminds me of a walk in the woods as a child. Birds to be looked at in delight, flowers and berries to be picked, mushrooms to be examined for pixies, and acorns and other treasures stuck in your pocket to be enjoyed later.

In all this I want my pieces to be very wearable. To be able to be dressed up to the nines as lolita, or dressed down with a little cardigan to stroll around town in. I hope I am successful at this!

What's the most difficult thing about having your own brand?
The scrutiny of being an independent brand in the both very large and rather small English speaking online lolita community. If I do something that flops, it's a much bigger deal for me then the established brands. I can only put out one line at a time, and pretty much have one customer base; who mass communicate very easily and quickly. If the Japanese brands put out something that the EGL community doesn't like, they still have the Japanese and other markets; as well as other lines. I don't have that luxury.

I do think that this really pushes me to work that much harder and try to think outside of the box; come up with motifs that haven't been done before, or haven't been done in that way before.

Tyler's illustration for her Excerpts from a Victorian Cookbook print line.

What is your favorite thing about having your own brand?
I think hands down my favorite thing is seeing my dresses being worn and enjoyed, it's a kind of excitement that's hard to describe. I remember years ago when I was taking commissions; seeing one of my dresses on a girl at Otakon and thinking "I don't remember that Baby dress..." before realizing it was something I made. I wanted to break out into dance I was so happy!

Being able to design the prints for my pieces makes it that much more special. I drew for years before I started sewing. The prints are almost a kind of story, in colors, symbols, and emotions. When someone decides to buy and wear a dress that I designed; they are sort of sharing that story, like we both read and enjoyed it. Hopefully in a non-cheesy way!

Where do you see, or where would you like to see Lily of the Valley in the future?
I would like to be able to come out with more lines more quickly. I have at least 20 different design ideas clamoring in my head and I'd like to make them all! This of course depends on how quickly I get orders and fill them. My current day dream is for my lines to sell out the day they are released!

I just got an embroidery machine so I am planning some embroidered lines. I'm really excited by the idea of doing a redux of the "Keys to the Kingdom" line as an embroidery, or a variation of the very popular prototype "Admiral Pirate Set".

Excerpts from a Victorian Cookbook

I guess in short I would like to see Lily of the Valley become a more prominent brand. I don't expect to mass produce like the Japanese brands, but I would like to have a comfortable niche, for those who appreciate the options and aesthetic Lily of the Valley is offering them.

You can find Lily of the Valley's shop page here, or check out her blog!

I have a dress set made by Tyler, I actually got it second hand and snapped it up pretty quickly because it was a really good deal and made by someone who's work I've always enjoyed. It's definitely a gorgeous piece! The design is awesome and the construction is just perfect. If you're looking for an indie brand, especially an indie brand with prints that are both Sweet and Elegant, I would definitely recommend Lily of the Valley!

Lolita in Black & White

2011-03-18T08:36:00.000-07:00

The black and white color scheme is one of Lolita's most infamous color combos. To some, black and white is the quintessential Lolita, to others it is an instant faux-pas, and to many it is a very nostalgic color combo. I've seen a lot people instantly write off black and white dresses, even of very good quality, simply because of the color combo, which is incredibly unfair. While black and white might be a bit played out at times, there's no reason why it should be avoided at all costs. In fact, there are a lot of different ways you can wear the color combo to create a few different kinds of looks, from Sweet and ruffly to Gothic and elegant.

Black & White's Bad Rap

Two traditionally Ita black and white dresses. The first one a classic lace monster, the second, it's nega-even-eviler twin. Seriously, WTF is up with that second one?

Cheap Ebay dresses labeled as "Lolita" sort of ruined black and white for a very long time because they were just that bad. The skirts were often mini-skirt length, the construction and materials usually horrible, the designs too over done and not well thought out, and they tended to be covered in yards-upon-yards of the cheapest lace possible. Soon enough, for most people anyways, just staying away from all black and white dresses became something of a reflex, and even nicely made black and white dresses made people sort of shudder. People just wanted to distance themselves from the look. Which is really a bit sad, because there are a lot of different ways that black and white can be really gorgeous.

Black & White, the Right Way

Top left, Bodyline; top right, Anna House, even offbrand black and white can be nice!; Bottom left Mary Magdalene; bottom right Baby the Stars Shine Bright.

There are lots of ways that black & white can be made to look good! The easiest way is simply to to look for dresses made of good materials. White lace stands out really well against black, so if the lace is cheap, it's going to be very noticeably cheap. That doesn't mean that only brand dresses in black and white are going to look nice! There are many off brand black and white dresses that look fantastic! You just have to look for ones made with nice materials and lace.

Different Ways to Wear Black & White

A black dress with white lace, or even a white dress with black lace certainly isn't the only way to wear black and white color combos! That that may be the most "traditional" way to wear the colors, there are still many other ways you can combine the 2 colors.

Keep the two colors separate.

Both Mary Magdalene

A sure fire way to wear black and white, especially if you're unsure of lace quality, is to wear either separate pieces of all one color, or a dress that keeps the colors separate. The two pictures above are from over-dress type pieces, but a similar effect can be achieved from wearing an all white blouse with an all black skirt or JSK.

Black & white prints.

Left, Moi Meme Moitie, a black and white print that was recently going for auction for around $1200!; Right, a rare and very sought after Innocent World print. Not all black and white = cheap!

If you like the style of black and white, you can always go for a brand print. Brands often release prints in black and white colorways. It's a very simple color combo, but it's always very striking! Black and white prints are often used in Classic and Gothic pieces because the color combo is usually very elegant. But, it's also often used on sweeter prints to give them a simple, yet cute, charm.

Black & white fabric.

Left, Angelic Pretty; center, Baby the Stars Shine Bright; Right, Mary Magdalene

Another option, instead of having a custom brand print, would be to have a dress with a black and white all-over patterned fabric. To me, black and white stripes are just to die for, and I think they are one of the ultimate Gothic styles. But, polka-dots (both big and tiny!), plaid, gingham, and even classical florals are all options for black and white fabrics! Because there are so many different kinds of black and white fabrics, they can really create so many different looks! Sweeter prints in black and white, like polka-dots and gingham, can tone down a Sweet and make it look almost retro. Classical florals in black and white can make a Classic Lolita dress much more versatile and can easily slip between Gothic and Classic and sometimes can even be worn as nice formal wear in the real world.

Appliques, embroidery, and other embellishments.

Left, pretty white pearls decorate this Angelic Pretty dress; Right, Innocent World often uses embroidery on their pieces.

There are also a number of things you can do to a plain black dress to add some white to it. Appliques, embroidery, pearls, ribbons, and anything else that you can decorate a dress with can be used to add some white to it! You can even add white with some clever coordination in an otherwise all black outfit. A pair of black and white harlequin tights are a current favorite way to add some white to an outfit, but a long string of pearls, a white detachable bow attached to the waist or neckline, replacing any corset lacing with white ribbon are all simple ways to add some interest to a plain black outfit! If you're really daring and creative you can even sew on some of your own pearls or do your own embroidery.

For me, black and white is a very nostalgic and elegant color combo. It's definitely one of my favorites, and it's always a bit sad when people instantly write it off as being Ita even when it's made of very nice materials and has a cute design. Black and white can be a lot of things, it can be cute, or elegant, or mysterious, or OTT, but it doesn't always have to be Ita!

What are your thoughts on black and white dresses? Does it make you cringe a bit? Or does it make you want it for your own? If you love it, what are your favorite ways to wear black and white? Perhaps you're a more traditional Lolita and you love a black dress decorated with white lace, or maybe you prefer a delicate and elegant print?

Ask Miss Caro-Chan: Wearing Lolita in Public

2011-03-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

Today's Ask Miss Caro-chan features a question I got on my formspring regarding wearing Lolita in public for those who might be a bit shy about standing out.

Any tips for going out in public dressed in lolita? Especially if you are by yourself? How should I react if I get mean comments? What is the best way to try and to help ignore some odd stares?

This is something nearly all Lolitas have to deal with, even the ones who don't mind the odd stares and sometimes mean comments. It takes a lot of courage to go out in public wearing anything out of the ordinary, and even the most toned down Lolita is considered strange by many. There's no real sure fire way to make sure you have the courage to prance around outside with a cake on your head, but there are a few things you can do that can help you work up the nerve to do so.

Personally, I've been dressing, well, let's just say "abnormally" or "with questionable taste" since I was in middle school, so wearing Lolita was really not that big of a step outside of my comfort zone. But that doesn't mean I am always prepared for the attention that outlandish fashions tend to attract! There are a number of things I've learned in my years of wearing weird clothes and I'd like to share them with you all in this post.

Pretend a little bit. If you're really stressed out about being out in public dressed strangely, play a little imagination game. Pretend that you're completely alone wherever you are, you're a fancy princess in a time travel mishap, or whatever you think can help you overcome how uncomfortable other people's opinions might make you feel. It sounds completely silly, but sometimes focusing on the silliness can really take your mind off of sticking out, and that's all that really matters.
Ignore people, or just don't react. If you do notice people staring, pointing, or worse yet, yelling or making rude comments, just ignore them. If you can't actually ignore them, and are noticing every comment, don't feel you need to react to any of it. Usually people make comments expecting you to react in some way, and if you just ignore them, it's all about them making a fool of themselves, not them pointing out how silly they think you look to everyone around you. Just think about it, if you're at some people filled place and someone yells something stupid at you, everyone is going to look at the person yelling, not at whatever it is they're yelling about. Just go on your way and most likely no one will even notice you, just the jackass yelling "LITTLE BO PEEEEEEP" for apparently no reason.
Wear earbuds or headphones. Having some music on can help you block out a lot of things and be a bit in your own little world. Even just having them in your ears, with the sound off, or very low, is a good excuse for ignoring people who make rude comments.
If ignoring doesn't work, try to brush them off. Sometimes people are just bent on being annoying and you end up in a situation where you simply can't pretend they don't exist. An example of this might be someone who started talking to you and you respond but the situation quickly turned into them belittling you, extremely rude cashiers or shop clerks, or people who you are somehow interacting with. In this case, if you don't feel like you can muster up the courage to simply tell them to mind their own business, the best you can sometimes do is just act like what they said was a somewhat lame joke. Give them a half-assed "Heh heh, yeah" and usually they're satisfied. I'm not going to lie, it is passive aggressive and I do this sometimes to people who are rude to me in public, I act a bit confused when they say something rude or stupid to me, like I have no idea what they could possibly be talking about, "Sheep? What sheep? I don't understand what you mean, I'm not a farmer, and this is a mall, why would sheep be allowed in here?" and the person making the comment often gets a bit embarrassed for even saying anything at all.
Be polite to people who are kind. Not everyone is going to be rude to you! Wearing Lolita will often get you a fair number of compliments. Now, to the extremely shy person, this can often be just as worrisome as rude comments, but in this case, you should really just give a polite "Thank you!" to anyone who goes out of their way to let you know they like what you're wearing. Sometimes the curious and genuinely interested will ask questions about what you're wearing, you don't have to go into in depth answers and explain the history of the Lolita fashion to them if you don't feel like it, most people are usually just satisfied with "Oh, it's just a girly/fancy/cute fashion that I like to wear". You usually don't have to even say "Lolita" or name-drop Japan if you don't feel like it.
Work your way up to more outlandish outfits. If you can, you might want to wear some "practice run" Lolita outfits, whatever you might feel is less extreme than your normal style of Lolita. Maybe this means wearing a modest petticoat, skipping the over-sized headwear, or wearing a simple cutsew instead of a blouse. Whatever makes you feel a bit more comfortable!
Be safe. Lolita is an attention grabbing fashion and it's going to make you stand out so you should know when standing out is a bad idea, whatever your idea of a "bad idea" might be, even if it's something as simple as going somewhere where you just know you'll be getting dirty looks about the way you're dressed. If you can, avoid going to risky places alone while wearing Lolita, try to grab a friend to go with you, or consider bringing a change of clothes to spare yourself the unneeded stress.

There really is no "right" way to react to mean comments, because mean comments aren't right to begin with. But generally, it's best to not make a huge commotion about them. Most people who say nasty things to other people are just trying to feel superior in some way or to start something, and the best you can do in that situation is to refuse to even acknowledge their "superiority" and to deny them the satisfaction of a reaction. With that in mind, I've found that I actually get many more positive comments and compliments than negative ones while out and about in Lolita!

How do you deal with the stares and comments of wearing Lolitas in public? Do you find that ignoring it is the best option? Or are you much more vocal about letting people know you don't care for comments!? Or, perhaps, are you lucky enough that no one really bats an eye when you go out decked in your frills and ruffles?