In the pink

Happy 2012! How did you see the new year in? I celebrated with some Japanese friends eating way too much, including toshi-koshi (bridging the years) soba noodles which are traditionally eaten for a long life. If I were in Japan today I’d be eating other traditional food such as shiny boiled black beans, little fried fish and golden chestnuts, all of which symbolise things like success from endeavour and prosperity. I’d also be freezing as it’s the middle of winter over there, whereas here in Melbourne we are in the middle of a heatwave.

My New Year’s Eve outfit was therefore pretty casual, made up of the usual op shop and flea market finds (sandals, silver Afghan necklace), travel purchases (blingy Indian gold necklace) cheap buys (under-singlet from ¥100 shop), self-made creations (earrings and skirt) and – somewhat unusually – a designer piece (Balenciaga grey singlet which was a hand-me-down from a dear friend many years ago.

The skirt used to look like this:

I made it probably over 10 years ago from a length of material that my aunt gave me, she’d had it sitting in her cupboard for years (hmm, do you see a family tendency for hoarding there!?). I think it was from Thailand. It was a super simple skirt – I basically made a tube with a seam at the centre back, put a dart on either side to give it a bit of shape, and ran some elastic across the back waist to gather it.


Perhaps you can see the back a bit better here. I folded over the waistline to create a casing, and the elastic only goes between the two back darts.

As much as I like the exotic princessy kind of vibe of the full length skirt, it was a bit hard to walk in (even though I put in a slit in the back hem) and not very versatile, and had been resting in my wardrobe for years. So when I was trawling A Pair & a Spare blog and saw Geneva’s pink skirt I decided to give it the chop. (Funny how her post was not about skirts AT ALL! I’m so easily distracted!)

All I did was chop it to mini length and stitch some folds down at the hemline to create a bit of a bustle at the back.

I made the earrings too, by combining op shop clip-ons made of these brown stones with quartz crystal pendant heads.

Crystals and fortune telling seem kind of appropriate at the start of the year – I wonder what the future holds for us all?