‘60s stripper dress.

A few years back I was after a costume to dress as Pippi Longstockings for a school party, and I found this. It was in an op shop for 30kr (around NZD$10) and it was a perfect fit. I love it.

It’s since become known as my ‘60s stripper dress (and I’ve since gone from blonde to brunette) but I still love it.

Not gonna lie, it’s one of my faves.

The belt is a cheap chain store one, but it improves the dress, which has recently become a little too large for my waist, unfortunately (yay, more sewing!).

The hem sits not far below (3-4 inches) the bottom of this picture. I’ll publish a better photo if I can find one.

update.

Welcome to 2010, blog readers. I had a mean spike in views yesterday which is astounding considering that I’ve been sitting on one or two a day for the best part of this year (and yeah, I’m aware that it’s actually September and thus the phrase ‘welcome to 2010’ is a bit dated).

However, the reason I’ve been hitting one or two views a day for the best of this year is because my last post was in February. I’m sorry about that, if any of you have been checking back and hoping for something.

So here’s an update on where we are:

I now own over a hundred dresses, and I am well aware of how ridiculous that is. Eventually they will all show up on this blog.

I’ve an amazing boyfriend who I love. See photo above, that’s us on a volcano with a volcano in the background – love Auckland!

I’m working really, really hard at both uni and my job, and am therefore running out of time to do stuff like this – but I’m trying.

I still love and adore fashion, and I’ve picked up a few amazing buys recently – Dior, for $10, Armani, for $2, Balenciaga, $2 … I do well. Again, all of these will show up on the blog eventually.

I’m going to Australia soon for what will be both the most amazing, and saddest trip of my life: Powderfinger are disbanding. I wrote a post back in January about how much I loved them and how I hoped they’d play for another twenty years. They won’t. Burn Your Name was off the last album they’ll ever record. Sunsets is their farewell tour, which they’re running across Australia, and myself and my wonderful Prince Charming/Mr. Big/Insert Appropriate Pseudonym Here are heading over to see them out in a fairly small town called Mackay (12 hours drive from Brisbane). I can’t wait, but I wish it wasn’t for such a sad reason.

That’s about all I have for now – I’ll see about getting the proper posts up and running again soon. If you like this blog, please stumble me/facebook link me/tweet me/do whatever new fangled interwebs thing is going on at the moment, because the more views I get, the more posts I’ll make.

Love you all!

vintage tie-dye kaftan.

I always said I would never wear a kaftan, but while shopping in Havelock North one day a few weeks back, I found this for NZ$3 and just liked the material so much that I decided I had to have it. When I actually put it on I realised it was very cool, and extremely well-suited, with denim cut-offs, to long summer days spent on the beach. I loved it.

Havelock North, by the way, is a strange little town in the Hawkes Bay of New Zealand. It’s very quaint and very affluent and as a result it is full of beautiful designer shops and fantastic restaurants. I was there on holiday with one friend to visit another friend, and we spent a day cycling about and tasting things in the area – wine, schnapps, honey, cheese, olive oil, vinaigrette, fudge. It was fabulous and I loved it.

The morning we left, the Havelock North op shop reopened, having been closed over Christmas. I went, with my friend’s mum, to check out their wares, and hit the op shopping jackpot. Nothing I bought was over $5, but everything was wonderful. I walked out with something like six dresses, two cardigans, a coat, two pairs of shoes, two belts, a wallet, and this kaftan thing. Oh, and four scarves. I think that was all. Gosh!

My mother has since bought this off me, reasoning that ‘I could wear that. In fact, can I wear that?’

I would also like to say R.I.P. to the Jack Nicholsons. I lost them at the Big Day Out (see previous post). Though they survived eight hours of moshpit, they disappeared when I headed into the dance tent, and I’ll never see them again. I hope they’re giving someone the same joy they gave me for so many years.

(The Jack Nicholsons can be found at September 16, 2009.)

In another postscript, may I mention that: firstly, I have eighteen garments photographed, all up. I figure if I run them at one a week they will last me this first semester. Ideally, I will find another photographer to exploit – so if you know anybody in Auckland with a sweet camera, who doesn’t feel the need to – you know – get paid or anything, PLEASE HOOK ME UP.

Secondly, I have many, many new clothes. My wardrobe has expanded again. I could run at a garment a day for a year and still not run out of posts. That’s not, however, what I’m going to do. But you, faithful readers who keep this thing from flatlining, can look forward to seeing a lot more actual clothes in future.

the faroe islands.

Right, well, I am always whinging on about this place and I figured I should include something to let you all know what it actually is. It’s amazing, for a start, not so far from Iceland, owned by Denmark (they speak Faroese and Danish) and tiny, with a population of only 48 000 and the physical size of my home district in New Zealand (not very big). There are eighteen islands (I visited seven – or was it eight?), and only one of them is uninhabited. Many, however, are sparsely populated (one has eighteen people living on it, one has two), and all of them play host to a vast quantity of sheep (the name Faroe actually comes from the old Norse ‘sheep islands’).

I lived there for nine months on a student exchange that was (tragically) cut short, and I dream every day of going back. I arrived in August ‘07 and I left in May ‘08. It was the best time of my life so far. I made amazing friends and saw incredible things and I learnt a lot (about culture, about myself, about the regular academic things people study at school).

The islands themselves are of absolutely unimaginable beauty, so when I found this video I thought I’d publish it here. Please watch it and enjoy.

kelsy’s summer reading list 3: the beach.

OK. I just finished this book and I can honestly say it scared the living daylights out of me, and if I ever go to Thailand (seems actually quite imminent as my brother is marrying a girl from there) I will be going nowhere near the Gulf of Thailand, and I will certainly not be visiting any marine parks. I might even avoid the Khao San Road, just in case.

Before I launch into my complicated retelling of everything in the book I loved and hated, I must first say that the movie is a completely inaccurate summary of the novel. They eliminate an entire character, who is pivotal to the story. And they throw in a few completely unnecessary sex scenes that don’t occur in the book.

Anyway. The book begins in a fairly acceptable manner, and it seems legit. Everything makes sense and it seems like something an ex-backpacker could actually have written. In fact, it seems legit up until well past the point where the group actually arrive on the Beach, give or take a suicide and some crazy dreams which inform the narrator of things he wouldn’t have known otherwise.

No. The book enters into serious surrealism around the point that [SPOILERS AHEAD] Richard, narrator, is asked to ‘take care of’ a crazy Swede named Karl, who has been rendered insane through watching his two friends be mutilated in a shark attack. The book reaches the absolute peak of it’s peculiarity near the end, though, when one scene sees, firstly, several rigor-mortified corpses being deposited in the camp, and secondly, the [completely twisted] beach community taking to them with knives and dismembering them.

It’s basically Lord of the Flies, but with grown-ups and weed, and though it terrified me, I loved it. The concept is phenomenal, the characters are richly illustrated, the set-up makes you wish you could live in a similar community, and as I mentioned before, you believe it could be true right up until the end.

Probably the height of terrifying is the shark attack on the three Swedes (Sten, Christo and Karl, who seem like lovely chaps) which prevented me from sleeping for several hours after I forced myself to put the book away. It’s not made easier to handle by the fact that Richard tells you they’re about to get into trouble, but kindly leaves out details.

Anyway. READ IT. You … may well regret it, but it’s an achievement to have read and you will certainly enjoy it. It’s also relatively recent (only 1996) and so there are several pop culture references in there that even I (and I am rather young) understood. Lovely.

It’s by Alex Garland. Track it down.