add another flame to our forest

ALELA DIANE - THE PIRATE'S GOSPEL


edit: this sweater belongs to my sister, hehe.

sunday

Yesterday was the warmest day of the year thus far, we went to Amsterdam and I bought a new bright-blue dress and kept it on. For some reason random people kept making photos of us, I think that's happened about five times - maybe they were tourists who thought we were some kind of typical Amsterdam couple? Anyway, we sat on the bank of the Herengracht and it was lovely. I can't wait until my exams are over and I can do these kinds of things every day.

WALDECK - WHY DID WE FIRE THE GUN

outfit video

So, my very first outfit video! I became inspired by the cute outfit videos by Sandra of Niotillfem and Carrie of WishWishWish and wanted to do one of my own. So here it is! I'm wearing a River Island top, Zara skirt, Primark belt and the shoes I bought at Tango (the brand is Bullboxer). I'm also wearing my new Rimmel lipstick that I bought with 50% off! The color is called Red Fever.

doublement rouge

I've been thinking lately that this blog may give quite a bad impression of me - because it's a style blog, all I write about are things like clothes and makeup, and I never really have anything interesting to say about life or things that actually matter. While it's true that caring that much about appearances is shallow, I don't actually perceive liking fashion as superficial. I think the way you dress is a form of art and while there's definitely more that I care about apart from fashion, it is the part of me I'm most comfortable sharing. Still, when you see post after post in which I'm flaunting all these clothes I have and trying to twist my face into the most flattering position I can manage, I might come across as this really shallow-brained person whose only thoughts are about what she'll put on tomorrow and who likes to pout prettily when she looks into the mirror.

But fact is, I just like to take photos. And I like to shop. I feel like when I'm wearing something nice, I create this world of my own in which only good things can happen - like I'm in a movie or something. I also love to draw, read books and kiss my boyfriend. I like the smell of fresh laundry, my favourite food is pasta salad and when I'm cycling home late at night, I sometimes sing very loudly. I believe in fate. When I feel confident, I put on red lipstick; when I feel insecure, I put on lots of eyeliner. I love it when a boy has freckles. I once nearly broke my back in P.E. when I was fourteen and am suspicious of anything gymnastics-related ever since. I haven't traveled much in my life; the only faraway country I've visited is India. I'm good at doing accents. I like to go out and dance, but I can also suddenly become very tired when I'm out and just want to go home. I listen to music all the time. I love being in love.

And so the I'm-really-not-shallow-post has turned into a post in which I introduce myself. Seeing as this is a fairly new blog, that's quite appropriate, right?

If you'd like to tell me some things about yourself too, I'd love that. Who are you? What are your likes and dislikes? Do you sometimes sing at night, too? I'd really love to know.

iep!

I bought this dress at Primark, and when I put it on Thessa said I looked like Iep, a girl in a Dutch movie with wings for arms:

Yesterday we had the annual school performance called Unplugged, which is always nice, especially since it's the last one I get to sing in before I finish school. I wasn't entirely happy about how I did so I'm not sure if I'll post the video my mum made on Youtube. Speaking of Youtube:



How bloody adorable is this? I could keep watching this forever. And now I sort of want a kitten.

PRIMARK DRESS AND BELT, RIVER ISLAND SHOES, HAT BORROWED FROM MY SISTER, THE HEART NECKLACE WAS A GIFT FROM MY GRANDMOTHER

that dress

I'm absolutely in denial of how cold it still is. It's still no more than 12 degrees Celsius outside but I'm putting on summer dresses every morning because the sun is shining outside, throwing on a blazer last-minute, and then spend the day clutching my blazer to my chest because it's still bloody freezing. Fortunately, it was warm enough today to have a picnik in the parc with Corona and chicken salad. I was not wearing this dress, but I wanted to. I sort of want to wear it all the time, so I have to prevent myself from putting it on every day.

KATE BUSH - IN THE WARM ROOM


P.S. I put all the pictures I've collected over the last few weeks on my tumblr. If you're incredibly bored or looking for inspiration, you should take a look!

zomerse taferelen

Wouldn't it be nice to never wear winter clothes ever again? Summer dresses are so much nicer. Especially when they have a heart-shaped panel in the front: 

The dress is from Primark.  

And these sunglasses are huge and insect-like. Look! They're ginormous! 

easter brunch

This is what our table looked like on Easter morning:

analog

Having a boyfriend is great, especially when everything's still new and fresh and you're really excited about everything. Having a new boyfriend who happens to have a talent for making pictures with an analog black-and-white camera, and then makes pictures (see above) of you, is greater still. If said boyfriend looks like this (picture taken with the same camera):

 and also dresses very smartly, and is also the sweetest guy on earth, it's almost to awesome to contain.

all my little plans and schemes, lost like some forgotten dreams

Regina Spektor - Real Love 

When I saw the sun was shining again today, for the third day in a row, I ran outside armed with a tripod and my mum's new camera to make pictures. I found this willow tree near where I live and decided it was the perfect spot for pictures. Unfortunately, apperently it's also the perfect spot to walk your dog, so I got a couple of weird looks while I was doing my best I'm-from-Wonderland-pose. Anyway. The shoes, dress and necklace I'm wearing are all from London and the jacket I bought just before that, in H&M, and I really love it. But the dress is the real winner here:

I thought it was so utterly adorable, when I found it in a little shop on Portobello Road. I like the sheer fabric, the color and the white lace thingy, but mostly I love the print:

Look! It's tiny rabbits! With backpacks! Oh, and I completely covered the heels of my new shoes in mud. Maybe I deserved those weird looks I got, if only for ploughing through soft mud in 10cm heels: 

JACKET, H&M / DRESS, PORTOBELLO ROAD / NECKLACE, TOPSHOP / SHOES, NEW LOOK / BELT, OLD

london life

I wasn't planning to do a very long London post, but I made so many pictures! So I'll just put up my favourites here and tell you the story behind them.

Notting Hill was fan-tas-tic. It was the very first place we went to go shopping (after a very long bus drive) and in the first shop we went into, on Portobello Road, I immediately bought three dresses (one of which is shown in the post before this)! The houses were all pastel-coloured, which made the street look sunny even in the dreary London weather, and there were all these little shops with cheap dresses that may have been very unoriginal in the stylish London - every store there sold the same dresses - but I have never seen before in Holland.

This was the 'lovely' view from the hostel window. The hostel itself, with the mandatory noisy bunk beds that are the cliché in every school trip, was as grubby as its view, although I was lucky because I slept in one of the better rooms - we actually had hot water. And windows.

On the first night there we ate pizza, which was nice. The restaurant had quite a fastfood-like name (something like Pizza Express I think?) but it was just like a regular Italian restaurant and my pizza with chicken and peppadews was delicious.

On the second night I ate sushi for the first time in my life - and decided at the spot that it would my favourite food, haha. Finding a place to eat on the third night was exhausting, because we were so tired our feet couldn't carry us any more, but finally we ended up in a place called Shaftbury's, on Shaftbury Avenue - I can definitely recommend it if you ever go to London; it was very affordable for such good food (I paid somewhere around 26 pounds for an entree, the main course and two drinks, and everything was delicious) and the staff was very nice (and, in the case of one waiter, very handsome).

We saw so many London Underground stations. You take the tube for literally everything in London, because it's so fast (and cheap as well - 1 pound a day for us, because we had group tickets). One time we had the choice between walking 5 minutes or taking the tube, and guess what? We took the tube.

And oh, the shops. Seeing Topshop on Oxford Street was enough to make me scream and run towards it, but it was just so expensive compared to the other stores I saw that all I bought there was some accessories. Some other stores in Oxford Street were great too, of course, especially Primark - so much better than the Dutch one! - but, as any Londoner probably could have told me, the greatest things were to be found in little shops.

Camden Town, of course, provided enough cute little shops to keep us occupied for some time. I rather liked the atmosphere there, as well - a bit more alternative and open-minded than the rest of London.

Seeing as we slept an average of five hours a night and were on our feet all day, paid a visit to Starbucks quite a few times. We do have Starbucks here in Holland, but only on the Central Stations of Amsterdam and Rotterdam and it's always so busy there you feel like you're in for some kind of special treat instead of just getting coffee. In London, however, there was a Starbucks on every corner so you could just pop in and get a moccha frappuccino and walk out again - and feel like a celebrity, strutting on the streets, sipping from your Starbucks cup.

Of course we did a bit of sightseeing too. Being faithful Harry Potter fans, we went to see Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross station, for example; but most of the sightseeing went like this: 

Get out of the underground station...

.. make some pictures...

... and return to Oxford Street.

Some other things we saw were:

                 

Piccadilly Circus

the British Museum

Tower Bridge

and Covent Garden (followed by a rude word in Dutch, haha).

The main thing I noticed about British people was that they were all so incredibly polite and courteous. Everyone said 'sorry' if you bumped into them, even if it was your fault; everyone stood neatly in a row at the right on the escalators in the tube stations, so that people that were in a hurry could pass; and when we were at Lush and our cards didn't work, the guy behind the counter apologized a thousand times, even though there was nothing he could possibly have done about it. I guess the English are just raised to be much more well-mannered than the Dutch people I'm accustomed to - or maybe the Dutch are just rude?

We were told by our teachers that seventeen-year-olds cannot possibly enter any pub in London, but we got in without a problem, and there we chatted with three very nice Swedish guys. When I checked my pictures later, I noticed you can see two of them in the back of this photo (that was taken more as a yay-I-got-into-a-pub-picture). After the pub closed at an inhumanely early hour - half past midnight - we talked with them outside for about an hour or so, thus drastically diminishing our chances of talking to an actual British guy - I had the mission to chat with a native British speaker to check if he would notice I was Dutch, but the only English I heard was when I talked with the people who work in shops. 

        

After the obligatory phonebooth-pictures and in the possession of a bulk of new clothes (in my case: five pairs of shoes, seven dresses and a lot of accessories. Prepare for loads of outfit posts), we drove home the whole night, leaving at midnight and arriving at 11 the next morning, which was quite hellish for me because tired as I was, I just can't really sleep in a bus. I do feel like I haven't even begun to see all there is to London, but a school trip was a good place to start, because you can do everything together and it's so much fun. In short - I love London!