SparkyFizz

Vintage mood...

One of my almost 15 year old daughters is in vintage mood and has taken these pictures with a Fuji Finepix of her latest acquisitions.  The red leather gloves from e-bay are amazingly soft, but now she has to put them away until winter.  

She's bought some lovely clothes and accessories on e-bay very cheaply.  I suppose I used to do the same, but it involved trailing around all the vintage shops, which were then just called 'second hand shops'.

I can't believe satchels are desired objects again... I hated my school one, which looked just like this, with a passion!  Another e-bay purchase, my daughter loves it. 

I love all the 1970's scribbling on the flap.  Mine used to have engraved names of boyfriends and rock bands I liked, too embarrassed to name them!

The inside of her satchel is much more interesting than mine ever was - of course she wouldn't dream of using it for school!

Photography: C&G Manipulation Picture #1...

Over the next few days I'm going to post some pictures I took for my City and Guilds, level 1 Photography assessment - my 'Manipulation' (Photoshop) portfolio.  This should give an idea of what's possible on Photoshop.  All the photos have been changed to a greater or lesser degree, but none of these have been altered substantially.  Some of my class colleagues produced  wonderfully altered photographs, but for this project I wanted to do some fairly simple and subtle changes.  I can't wait to do some outrageous pictures though!

I'm not going to show you my 'Typography' portfolio because they've all been posted in here somewhere over the last few months.

A big thank you to my muses, my two daughters and their lovely friend, who posed for me for all these photos, and put up with my tugging, pushing, poking and rearranging... with great patience!

Before...

After...

I changed the original picture to black and white, then put some selected colour back in in an attempt to create a simple, dreamy picture.

Pom-Poms...

Are very popular on the High St at the moment.  My girls have decided to make their own...

...pom-pom scarves. They are so easy to do, but not, I hasten to add, any cheaper than those available to buy.  Obviously this depends to some extent on the wool chosen.  We did use good 100% wool, but not all expensive.  The expensive ones included fabulous multi-coloured Kaffe Fassett 'Colourscape' chunky and Debbie Bliss 'Donegal Luxury Tweed Aran'.  However, we also included a Twilley's wool which was much cheaper and my girls' favourite.  It seemed to create fluffier balls, but I preferred the other wools.

This made me realize that  the pom-pom scarves in the shops, which are much cheaper to buy, must be made using machines, cheap labour and presumably wholesale acrylic mix fibres.  Making home made versions look wonderful, including all the mistakes, are all slightly different in size and texture, look very individual, but are very costly... 

The shocking thing about pom-poms is how much wool they require.  This average size pom-pom uses about 21 metres of wool...!  I hardly dare admit this, but I tried, stupidly, to make a super fluffy pom-pom using over 30 metres of wool, I filled up the hole entirely, then found I couldn't get it off the plastic pom-pom template... Okay, lesson learnt, what a waste, I had to cut it all out.  So the advantage of using cardboard templates is that you can, in fact, cut it out, and therefore, create a much more luscious pom-pom.  It just means you have to create a new template for each pom-pom, which isn't difficult, and doesn't have to be perfect.  From my experience, it's best to make 2 cardboard templates with quite large central holes, and the outer section can be any size.  If anyone wants to know how to string them together securely, I can provide instructions.

Tom is the reluctant pom-pom swinger, as his expression testifies!  I was just trying to capture blurred movement using the shutter speed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr Fizz is slightly less grumpy...

The scarves are growing daily, I think it's nice to use a mixture of wools, textures, and random autumnal colours...

My Girls...

having fun, dressing up, going out with friends...

   

 

    
 
  

          

Vintage...

   

 ...is big at the moment, and I do love the look.  However, not everything needs to be old to fit this criteria.  Nor is the idea new.  I was certainly acquiring vintage (we just called them 'junk' or 'second hand') things back in the late '70's to mid '80's before it became distinctly uncool.  In the punk era I was buying all my clothes from Oxfam, including shoes.  Before that I bought bags, hats, gloves, jewellery, all with a 1930's Art Deco or Victorian/Edwardian flavour, often from a wonderful shop in Oxford called 'Pom Pom', sadly now long gone.  I also bought and wore a selection of 1950's dresses and memorabilia back in the early 1980's in Peckham.  My home was almost completely furnished with second hand furniture (still is).  Beautiful Victorian mahogany dressing tables and full length triptych mirrors (from a shop called Rapscallion in Streatham - now defunct also). Nothing was ever antique in the real sense, my furniture always had imperfections, but I didn't care!      

I suppose Thatcherism the 'power' look, padded shoulders and a buoyant economy put an end to it all for a while.  It's interesting that the 'vintage and craft' resurgence seems to be inextricably linked to the downturn in our economy.  Apart from trying to save money, we seem to feel a need to express ourselves individually when times are tough.  

I will find some old photos to show here, but that involves hunting and scanning, so bear with me. Meanwhile, some 'modern vintage'...

   

Linen is such a fantastic, cool fabric for summer, you just have to learn to live with the creases!  I bought these beautiful beads in a vintage shop in Crystal Palace when my girls were about 3 years old, so about 1999.  I love them, the teardrop beads, the lustrous pastel shades of lilac, palest blue and ivory.  I couldn't resist them, even though they cost only a few pence.  I knew that one day I would wear them, but actually bought them for my girls' dressing up basket...  they just weren't wearable at the time...  'What goes around, comes around'... 

      

 
There are, of course, some things I hope never come round again, partly because of being older - I can't see myself in floaty hippie dresses, much as I loved them. Then there are the early 1970's fashions in particular - brightly striped tank tops... hmm?  However, I see some dreadful things on the streets now, so maybe it wasn't all so bad.

   

I used to love lots of 1970's looks.  Skinheads with their Ben Sherman shirts (bright, loud checks), braces, very wide ankle swinging turned up jeans, Doc Martens and slick crombie coats.  Where I came from, Burnley, Lancashire, the boys wore red hankies and red rose embroidered badges on the breast pocket of the crombie.  A few miles away, over the border in Yorkshire, they wore the same insignia in white.  All associated with the 'Wars of the Roses'.  I'm sure nobody knew a thing about these historical battles, which were basically intermittent civil wars fought by members of the House of Lancaster and the House of York circa 1455-1485.  They ended when King Henry Vll, who started the Tudor dynasty, symbolically united the two roses to create the Tudor Rose.  But still, I digress...

I wasn't a skinhead.  I think my timeline was something like: David Bowie/T Rex/ Tamla Motown/Northern Soul fan, followed by mid '70's hippie (we were a bit behind up North!).  I remember hitching to Brittany in the summer of 1976 (the really hot one...) and being bewildered to see all the chic Parisian teenagers dressed in drainpipe jeans!  Back in Burnley, we were still in flares with inserts and made patterns on them using coins underneath the denim, which we sanded on the outside with matchboxes to make simple flower designs.  We still made dreadful creations such as 'constructing' coats from our grandmothers' beautiful crocheted blankets (I'm ashamed to admit...)  

Going to Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry in September 1976, I found myself immersed in Ska (the Specials came from Coventry, so it was a very cool place to be then) Reggae, Rock Against Racism gigs and demos, 'Pogo on a Nazi' badges, Punk - Sex Pistols, Siouxie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks and Clash concerts.  At the same time I embraced Disco/Funk/Soul/Jazz -  basically a whole new social scene...  The rest, as they say, is history...  

(In memory of Matthew McFall, Andy Stephens, and Duncan Green who died, aged 18, on this day in 1976 - the long hot summer...  They never progressed beyond mid seventies hippies...  RIP)