Lavender & Twill : thailand

Showing posts with label thailand. Show all posts

Saturday, July 20, 2019

༺ In the Courtyard ༻

One of the prettiest places that I really enjoyed visiting in Chiang Mai was Nimman One. A group of buildings in Nimman {the district} just outside of the Old City that are arranged around the loveliest courtyard.

I fell in love with this place the moment I laid eyes on it, and instantly knew it had to be featured on the blog!

Of course, it’s difficult to fully portray the beauty of the architecture and surroundings ~ there are lovely tall green trees in the courtyard, and outside of the building ~ and it’s a very popular place. Lots of people walking through to visit the tiny shops tucked away in the walls, my favourite of these being the Monsoon Tea Shop which stock local teas made up into a huge range of delicious blends and flavours.

While we were there, another group was also taking photos ~ but they had set up a mannequin and were taking stock photos. Which was certainly easier than trying to figure out the timing for taking some of the pictures we did!

At night time the whole area is just as gorgeous, as the lanterns light up the clock tower, and the fairy lights that are strung all over the courtyard in the shape of a marque make the cobblestones glow.

Story time though, ‘coz the unexpected can still happen in the prettiest of surrounds!

…So to start at the beginning: I’m wearing a stunning true vintage dress in these pictures, and I just love it. It’s homemade I think ~ no label, and the waist is sewn shut with no opening or fastening so it’s a bit impossible to put on. It’s one of those “wiggle gingerly and smoosh through one boob at a time” kind of dresses ~ and if you’ve ever had one of those you’ll know exactly what I mean!

And all is going fine and dandy with the shoot, I’m so happy with how the whole ensemble looks in this location ~ but of course, it’s tropical heat so I’m “glowing” in no time at all.

And unbeknownst to me, this had caused my dress to stick horribly!

Most of the way through the shoot, and I do is put down my handbag… Then I hear that dreaded ripping sound that is every vintage wearer’s nightmare. Uh-oh…!

Of course, I can’t actually see where the rip is located at first, but that won’t be a problem for long because the more I’m moving around, the more ripping I hear ~ *le GASP*

Obviously, I’m doing my best to minimise my motion, I’m keeping my arms glued down, so I really didn’t think it was that bad until I tried to adjust my hair, and not one, but BOTH armpits had blown out significantly ~ yes, you could totally see almost all of the side of my long line bra through the holes! *cringe*

So now I’m tucking in fluttering shreds of fabric, smiling for photos and trying to make sure no one sees my bra, because OF COURSE everyone’s looking at the strange lady dancing around in the middle of the courtyard.

Thankfully, we finished the photoshoot and walked back to the closest shopping mall, which is Maya. On the way I noticed that there was a tiny clothing stall selling dresses and I stopped immediately to pick up an emergency dress.

It was only when I got changed in the bathroom at Maya that the full extent of the damage was revealed ~ unfortunately it was the worst I’ve ever seen happen in a vintage dress. On one side it was the fabric right next to the underarm seam that had popped, which is perfectly fixable, but on the other side, underneath the sleeve had shredded, and this giant tear went straight across to the apex of the bust, and down the side of the bodice. Somehow that tear had decimated the sleeve completely.

So there went my hope of an easy fix, but there’s enough fabric left in the sleeves to mend the bodice, so thankfully I can repurpose the sleeves for that. Then I’m going to purchase some black velvet and make replacement cap sleeves for the dress. And I’m also going to fix the waist and create some sort of waist opening because it’s just a pain to put on. But now I know why such a stunning dress was priced so cheaply… Haha!

So all’s well that probably ends well, and I’ll almost have a different dress to wear out of the whole ordeal.

But gosh! I've never had a vintage dress {or any other kind of vintage} disintegrate so completely while I’m wearing it, and I really hope it never happens again. I should say that it doesn’t deter me from wearing vintage in any way whatsoever, because even while my dress was literally falling apart on my back, I still felt so elegant in this frock. I loved the way it moved, and the pleated skirt was so swishy. Plus, that little black velvet touch at the lapel really adds that extra detail that I do so adore. So while I might have had the worst experience vintage has to offer with this dress, I also had the best experience at the same time ~ and I love it!

Of course, now I want to hear what’s your worst {or best} experience with wearing vintage. Do you have any fun stories? Let us know if you do, I’m keen to hear them!

xox,
bonita

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Friday, December 28, 2018

༺ Rose Gold ༻

It has been a very quiet Christmas for the Vear family this year. We weren’t able to fly back home to be with our friends and family ~ and I must say, it really put a damper on the holiday celebrations for me.

So many of my favourite things about Christmas ~ and pretty much all of our holiday traditions centre around being close to, and spending time with, the ones we love. Playing table top games, making gingerbread together, driving around the neighbourhood to see Christmas lights, going to the carols ~ all of that is done with our family…

Not being in Australia for Christmas was hard.

But there were things we got to do and see that we did enjoy, so all was not sad!

There has been giant pink Christmas trees, delicious food for our Christmas dinner, sleepy days at home, Lego building, decorating with carols blasting and the whole family dancing as they put up lights and baubles, plus smiling Thai friends wishing us Merry Christmas, even though they don’t celebrate Christmas ~ and can barely pronounce it!

I also really, really loved the chance to do something different with our tree this year.

Usually I go for a traditional tree, as pine tree-like as a fake tree can look (!) with loads of wooden and folk style decorations. This year I wanted to satisfy my pastel princess and go for a more 1950’s atomic pastel explosion!

We bought a white tree ~ the last one in the store. It was on display, and I waited for half an hour while they found the box out back and packed it up for me!! Absolutely worth it because I love it so much.

Then the girls wanted pink decorations, and I was definitely happy to oblige. There were some “pinker” coloured baubles, more like a bubble gum pink, but I loved this peachy rose gold colour! So much that we got a ton of those, and I accented the peach with ice blue decorations and some yellow gold for nice contrast.

We even found wrapping paper to go all matchy-matchy our pastel aesthetic. Some of it was actual Christmas wrapping paper, and some of it was cupcakes and macaroon paper ~ neither of which where particularly Christmas-y, but you know, matching aesthetic for the win… Haha!

I wore my specially purchased Christmas skirt ~ I knew I wouldn’t be able to make anything for my Christmas ensemble this year, and paired it with a sheer net blouse, bow belt, and hair flowers that I’d found while out shopping in Malaysia, and local Thai markets and shops.

I had saved my Christmas Pavlova Wreath brooch from Fancy Lady Industries especially for the day ~ I knew it was so fun that I just had to wear it. And when I unwrapped a Peppy Chapette Christmas Angel from the bestest Mister ever, it was a pairing made in heaven! My Christmas angel now had a Christmas dessert halo!

Best.

Christmas.

Brooch.

Combo.

….EVER…!!

The tiny roses I clipped in as a band/crown across the top of my head were also a lot of fun, and felt very 1940’s in style to me even though the rest of my outfit was totally more of a 50’s look. I don’t know if it was because of my outfit, but I had a couple of random strangers taking my picture that night when we went to look at Maya’s gigantimungous pink Christmas tree, and even had someone jump next to me as her husband snapped a picture!

So random! But I think because Christmas isn’t celebrated in Asian countries that it is funny to see people dressed up for Christmas! Mind you, my outfit would still be considered “dressed up” in Western countries too, so there’s that.

Having the chance to view the pink tree was really delightful, it felt very Christmasy and festive! I enjoyed it a lot. Plus, dinner was soooo good. We went to The Duke’s, which is an American style Chiang Mai chain restaurant. We like to go there on special occasions, as it’s the perfect place to celebrate. If you can’t celebrate with family and friends you might as well celebrate with a super delicious meal!

So Christmas was really different this year, but it was a good one. As we go into the beginning of 2019, I want to wish you all a joyous holiday season, a belated Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!

xox,

bonita

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

༺ Versailles Roses ༻

Tropical vintage spring with Hell Bunny | Lavender & Twill

In case you couldn’t tell, this is one of those posts where I had a lot of trouble whittling down the amount of photos to put in… I know. I know. I didn’t do a very good job… Ooops!

Also, sorry not sorry for the second Hell Bunny post in a row. I just had to share this lovely skirt. It just arrived in the mail the other day, and I couldn’t wait to wear it as it matched perfectly with my new handbag and Lyn Around handbag charm.

I really love how the charm reminds me of gumnut leaves and gum blossoms, I have been missing Australian spring with the wattle and gumtrees in bloom!

And even though this isn’t the most vintage-styled outfit ever, I still really love it. The tee is so soft and silky to the touch, it’s a great top to wear out and about. Comfortable, but looks nice at the same time! And the colour palette of this ensemble is so my aesthetic, even with the tiny touch of black accent.

The Parisian print with the pink roses matched so well with my Peppy Chapette mirrored swallow brooch, and when I paired my mint Miss L Fire Juarez Heels, it was just perfect.

I love to have soft tones everywhere, so I end up falling for anything in baby pink, baby blue, mint or white. Throw in some gold accents, and I would happily live forever in a Marie Antionette, Rocco inspired house.

And while this spot I found to shoot at isn’t quite as extravagant as Palace Versailles, I was thrilled to find this gorgeous location that is only 15 minutes away from us! It’s a very cute, whimsical restaurant that is called the Floating Restaurant. It’s kind of a jetty over a miniature lake {or a large pond?}, and there’s a playground for children, all these lovely flower arches, and so much space!

When I arrived there was no-one around at all, so I asked the owner if I could shoot some photos and they were happy to let me which was so great.

I really want to go back and explore more in that area as there seems like there was a lot of amazing places to photograph. I love exploring, and it’s great to find reliable shoot locations close by to our house finally! There’s a whole city, but it’s not always practical to drive 30 – 40 minutes for a shoot when you have to run out quickly while the children are napping!

Anyway, it’s my birthday today and isn’t weird how birthdays make you want to think and reflect deeply on passing time?

I guess it’s natural to start pondering the year that’s gone by, and to contemplate the path you are on. I’m beyond glad that we’ve been able to start this adventure ~ despite all the challenges and difficulties. First we’ve been able to enjoy living overseas, and now the opportunity to begin our own business. I have been really loving working on Teacup Girl. Even all the business side of it is really fun to me! It’s something I enjoy ~ although the art & design is my favourite for sure.

We talk about it a lot ~ what we want to achieve with Teacup Girl, what direction the business should go in ~ and I have sooo many ideas outside of brooches that I have to save to do some R&D with.

It’s so exciting, and I really can’t wait to see where the next year takes us!

xox,

bonita

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Saturday, July 28, 2018

༺ Palm Tree Sky ༻

Here we are in our Moo Baan garden again!

I can’t decided if I’m just being a lazy blogger or the grounds of our Moo Baan are so pretty that it’s only fair to take lots of photos there… Hum.

This look was shot a couple of weeks ago when we had a rare sunny afternoon breaking through all the cloudy and rainy weather.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s still warm here, but the rainy season does tend to keep the sunshine hidden for most of the day.

But you didn’t come here to talk about the weather!!

It’s take me a long time to get around to posting these because one: I’m really busy at the moment, and two: I’m really struggling with my photography again.

Let’s get back to reason one in a little bit, but ugh…

It turns out that taking photos yourself means that even with the *best lens ever* I’m still struggling with lighting issues and all that.

Over the years I’ve been trying to move away from the filtered “Tumblr” style of photography {even though I still really love how it looks} and have been working on creating a crisp, fresh look to my photos. I want them to be pastel and light without looking completely washed out, over exposed or too hazy.

But I don’t know… That perfect look keeps eluding me and while I don’t mind so much how the photos are turning out for my blog, at the moment Instagram is a total editing nightmare!

I used to have good photos compared to a lot of what was out there, but either my editing style is too old school or my camera is letting me down, or.. something… I can’t figure it out, but I’ll keep trying to improve.

In the meantime, I am crazy busy as we chip away at our giant project!

I can’t remember how much I’ve spoken about this before, but one of the major reasons we decided to move to Thailand is so that we could get a decent start on creating our own family business. I will have more to say on it later, I kind of want to write a whole “big reveal” post!

For now, I will note that we are getting closer to launch day. That means I’m working my butt off like a turtle moving a mountain, but we are beginning finalize the first steps, and we are ticking off our mah-assive To Do list which feels pretty darn awesome I must say!!

Creating pretty outfits to wear is fairly low on that list, and currently I want stuff that is easy to throw on and go. I really loved this navy striped tee with the peter pan collar I found at Big C the other day. It’s cute and simple, and I love how this whole ensemble came together pretty quickly thanks to the inspiration!

I don’t often wear full nautical looks, which pretty hilarious as I adore navy, white, and red, and have tons of it in my wardrobe. While it can be typical of nautical fashions to heavily feature those colours, it also relies on certain themes in styling that I don’t wear. Sailor collars, nautical prints, fish, ships, and the like.

I did make an exception for this gorgeous tropical nautical print skirt from Betty Page as I totally loved the little palm trees and crabs and thought it was absolutely perfect for Thailand. Plus, it goes amazingly well with Deer Arrow’s Kurtis the Kraken.

While I don’t really do much nautical fashion, I do have a huge love for nautical themed brooches and cephalopods! Something about sea creatures are just so fascinating, so I’m glad I could find the perfect ensemble for debuting Kurtis on the blog.

Also, I’m kind of obsessed with all the straw hats ~ I was interested to see how this one is black but comes out navy in the pictures. I do actually need a proper navy straw hat though. I’m picky enough about matching that even though the black hat *looked* navy, the fact that I know that it isn’t, bothers me quite a bit! I’m not sure if a girl can have too many hats, so I will happily accept the challenge of finding a true navy boater…

xox,

bonita

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Friday, July 6, 2018

༺ Wonderwall ༻

The rainy season has well and truly set in. We’ve been having so many wet days, that sometimes a whole week will pass without sunshine. It feels so weird because all I remember last year was sunshine for most days, then rain for an hour or two.

The Mister reminded me that we were actually in Malaysia this time last year, and it suddenly makes more sense!

I can’t believe we’ve been living in Thailand for well over a year now, but I guess it feels a lot shorter as we did have that five month extended stay in Australia ~ smack dab in the middle of it all.

Despite the rain that’s constantly rolling in, I was lucky enough to get a blog shoot squeezed in last weekend.

It was a bit of a gamble as to whether it would come together at all. It was late afternoon by the time I could head out. The sky was becoming quite cloudy, there was hardly any light left ~ and I didn’t even know where to go! It’s always a nerve-wracking race if you are spontaneously doing a shoot at the end of the day, you’re scrambling to get everything sorted out before the sun sinks, frantically racing those last golden beams as they disappear over the horizon.

I searched google maps for the nearest public park ~ and I found one that was only 3.5km away, but the problem with traffic in Thailand is that it is a little like Sydney. If you hit the roads at the wrong time, the dense traffic and abominably slow lights {It takes 10 minute to get a green light, sometimes even longer if you miss the change due to the backup of traffic. We avoid traffic lights wherever we can, though some are most definitely worse than others!} can mean that it can take up to 30 minutes to get that 3.5 km!

Then I was risking that the park would have any good locations to set up, or not be crowded with people, or actually have a nice backdrop. You know, all those important things ~ haha!

Thankfully, there turned out to be some lovely scenery, and this very pretty house with awesome architecture, although I wouldn’t be going back for the park itself. That turned out to be the corner of a block that was terribly overgrown with grass, and there was a giant shine in the middle, taking up most of the space.

I’m very cautious about photographing shrines, as I want to make sure that I respect Thai culture and not appear like an insensitive foreigner! Which, being a foreigner and blogger can really be the worst combination. Even though it was a super quiet neighbourhood there were a lot of people running past exercising, or walking dogs, and my little venture with the camera out at dusk meant I was the ninth wonder of the Thai locals! Awk-ward!!

And after all that fuss, I wasn’t even sure I’d have enough photos to do this post, as I broke the number one photography rule and went out with a semi-almost-dead camera battery… Which meant that my battery died before I could finish the shoot… naturally.

…Whoops!

I keep saying that I need to buy a spare, and maybe now that I’ve had the worst happen I’ll finally do it? Haha, or it will end up like my camera lens and take me fifty-million years get that done…

Busy as we are at the moment, I have found the time to do a little thrifting ~ second hand and vintage shopping is not really the same in Thailand as it is in other places, but I’ve found some cute pieces here and there. I picked up this lovely chestnut leather purse last year at a street market, I think it might be from the 60’s or 70’s.

My hat I found at a second-hand stall in the shopping centre carpark (!!) where we do our grocery shopping. {Stalls in Thailand are weird, they exist just about anywhere you could think or want to set one up. We even bought a brand new, custom built couch in the carpark!!}

I really loved the idea of pairing them with this repro dress from Sisjuly, as this late 1930’s or early 1940’s inspired frock really felt like it needed touches of 30’s fashion with it. I know that technically the skirt is too short for a true 30’s look, but those sleeves! They are definitely 30s worthy with that glamorous flouncing, and I just love them.

I’m also fond of the sage green fabric. Although it often feels like there is way to much green in my photos of Thailand already, somehow I still find myself wearing shades of green far more often than I ever do in Australia. I guess my love of matchy-matchy even extends to which biome I’m living in!

So do you think my look passes for a 1930’s inspired ensemble or should I stick to the 1940’s and 1950’s? I’ve been eyeing off a lot of 30s fashions a lot lately, and I’ve even bought a stack of 1930’s vintage patterns as well as some of the Simplicity re-releases. As much as I love it, I really couldn’t afford to buy true 30’s vintage, {not that it would ever fit me}, and I’d be terrified of ruining it.

Plus, I’m not sure I could ever get my hair to behave for finger waves. I’m hard pressed to get a decent pin curl set out of it, so in these pictures I just rolled it under for a faux bob. I feel like if I worked a bit more on it, my faux bob could look okay, so I’m seriously thinking of dabbling a bit more in 1930’s styles, hence buying the sewing patterns.

It’s an era of fashion that is calling to me, but I’m a bit unsure if I can actually pull off 1930s properly… There’s no harm in trying I suppose? Or is my style just not accurate enough to make it work? Would you have any tips for a first-timer? …Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough.

xox,

bonita

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Saturday, July 20, 2019

༺ In the Courtyard ༻

Friday, December 28, 2018

༺ Rose Gold ༻

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

༺ Versailles Roses ༻

Saturday, July 28, 2018

༺ Palm Tree Sky ༻

Friday, July 6, 2018

༺ Wonderwall ༻

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