Day 2, 1.42pm

lunch: fishball noodles, again. (not my fault, there's a real lack of variety here at upper paya lebar!)

NOT GOOD. ate all the noodles. have also decided that fishball probably isn't really protein. had sweet coffee after lunch, which compounds the 'not' in 'not good'.

am sad, but satiated, and am desperately hoping that fishball noodles= 400 cals.

Day 2

of my attempt to lose weight (and flab, let's please not forget flab) using the book "Skinny Chicks Don't Eat Salads" by Christine Avanti for guidance.

Basically, it's (supposed to be) all about maintaining blood sugar levels. So in a nutshell:

1. eat first meal within an hour of waking up

2. eat every 4 hrs, a small meal that's got protein and carbo. (no more than 400cals)

3. exercise for about 30-45 mins a day

ok, so the book essentially promises me i won't starve AT ALL (maintaining blood sugar levels means that the moment you starve, you're doing the wrong thing), and that my metabolic rate will go up, and that i WILL shed those stubborn pounds. (these are super stubborn pounds: 8kgs of weight that just won't go away)

the problem with this is that
1) i don't cook much cos no time no time no time
2) i like chips. A LOT.
3) i hate exercise as much as i like chips, so won't be bothering with that bit much, though i will try to walk a little more instead of taking the bus for super short distances.
4) i also like cookies, martinis and many other diet-unfriendly things.

Day 1 was yesterday. started well: ate an egg and had coffee for breakfast. coffee with sugar= carbo; egg=protein. had noodles with fishball for lunch. not so good, but left half the noodles untouched and i'm hoping that fishball=adequate protein. dinner was a disaster. it was my birthday so i went out with friends and ate a Very Big Meal with Dessert. oh well.

TODAY:
is going well so far. egg is eaten, coffee drunk. lunch in an hour! (hope will not be weak and eat super yummy indian food at print hub foodcourt).

five minutes more

and i'm out of the office. yayyy. i've never had a full-time office job before, if you don't count the measly three months i spent interning at an architectural firm some years back, so i never fully appreciated what it was like to watch the clock and impatiently wait for that magical time of the day when you get to shrug off office ennui and zip home.

i'm new, so i don't know enough to do a lot around here. been helping out with some units of a grammar activity book but otherwise i've been sitting pretty. lucky for me i have lots of nice clothes. unlucky for me my office protection against the cruel cold of the air con is a layere black isabel marant cape. very lovely, but i've spent the whole day checking for shoulder snow cos i'm paranoid that way. very unglam.

it's 1803hrs. i'm off!

this year, for halloween, i might be

ELTON JOHN.

i usually cringe at the mention of justin timberlake (yech) but i love this vid... justin timberlake as elton john circa 1970s. woohoo. i want a suit just like this, i do i do i do.


Watch Elton John - This Train Don't Stop There Anymore in Music  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

oh kate spade, kate spade

is both the boon and bane of my existence. Yes, maybe i'm exacggerating just a little... but it sure does feel that way whenever there's a lovely KS sale and i step in and hold up the lovely little bags up to my outfit and wonder if i should, even though i always know i shouldn't. i bought one last year and haven't regretted it... i even named it!.... and i carry it ard all the time and now i want another one in another colour.

my friend abi bought a new kate spade wallet and i'm jealous:and this is the bag i want want want:



and shoes i want but cant find in any shop anywhere (i'm starting to think i perhaps hallucinated these into existence):

back to writing cover letters and vamping up my CV. such dreary but necessary things.

A monster mess

now resides where the top of my desk once was. Headband-making is an unbelievably mess-making craft... at least where I'm concerned:




but i did manage to finish my latest creation, the Andromeda (I wanted to call it the Cassiopeia but Zarina wanted it called the Andromeda, since that name has some significance to her) which I've put up in my Etsy shop. I gave the prototype to Zarina though, since I'd bought the vintage button-charm for her to begin with. We had drinks at No.5 Emerald Hill which always does yummy martinis, but the atmosphere was sadly lacking. no clue whether it was because of the school hols, but the place was full of swaggering children. so glad i sat facing the wall.

the Andromeda:

Hairbands

... are quite the obsession of my life lately. it started with me at handicraft markets looking at handmade hairbands and thinking, I CAN MAKE THIS. (i swear this is the sad result of having been ar architecture school)... so i bought the requisite felt and lace and things and made one, just to prove a point.
after the point was proven, however, i found myself continuing to make one hairband after another cos i quite like process. plus it gives me an excuse to be forever looking around for bits of lace, vintage charms, buttons etc that i always like to look at but could never really find a use for. i've put up some of the better-looking results of my crafting efforts on my etsy shop and so far no one has bought anything but a lot have looked, so i'm keeping optimistic.

let me introduce my lovelies.. this one is called the Dido:



this one here is called the Elphaba (I saw Wicked while I was in London and loved it, don't care what people say about musicals!)



and this is the Anastasia:



the small but intricate (almost ruined my eyes!) Demeter:



and finally, the Isolde:



Everything here has been put up in my Etsy shop, but I'll take orders for any piece except the Elphaba (the charm is unique, no other pieces) here in my blog if anyone's interested. (I think some of my pieces would be very well suited for weddings!) Just email me for details: yeohjoann@gmail.com

Meantime, I'll be at my computer, trying to multi-task... sewing hairbands while watching old episodes of CSI... I miss Grissom!

a happy lunch... at a price

one day last month (yup, i know that's a long time and doesn't quite warrant news, but blogs aren't news yea?) qiurong and ben and i decided we'd hop over to dempsey for a little lunch. qiurong had it in his head that he wanted pancakes for lunch and ben said the pancakes at p.s. cafe are really something, so off we went...


... no pancakes! (boo!) so we settled for other somethings on the menu... i honestly can't remember what we had, but the food was quite blah, so thank goodness there was lovely conversation (love you, ben and qiurong!)... BUT the one saving grace was the ambience (i really hate this word, to be honest... it sounds so horrible pretentious and i always roll my eyes when someone else uses it, but right now i can't think of another word and i can't really be bothered to)... the decor was really lovely, so it was like having lunch in a forest dell, just with air conditioning. perfect! now if they can only improve on the bloody food.


ben and i look pretty happy in the last picture, and we were, but our wallets sure weren't. growl. rubbish food in a great setting, what else is new? restaurateurs should start spending more money hiring great kitchen staff instead of blowing it all on renovation.

one-piece is all i need

i stumbled upon bona drag sometime ago while randomly surfing fashion sites and i've been checking it quite often ever since... praying fervently that something i want will finally be on sale... so far no luck, but i'm being stubborn, so there.

an hour ago, i saw this romper by samantha pleet on the site and experienced love at first sight:





i don't own a romper, and have never wanted one and suddenly this... and of course i'll now be checking every bloody day to see if it's on sale... oh growl!... thimbles and gingham , if you're reading this, i now completely (oh, completely, completely!) empathise with your romper-obsession-thwarted-by-economic-circumstances problem... and if i ever learn to make one, you'll be first to know.

skirting the issue

couldn't resist the title, sorry. =)

i've been taking dressmaking classes at furama centre, and it's finally paying off somewhat. the first two projects (an a-line skirt, followed by a flare skirt) are done, and now i'm learning how to make a shirt. i can't help but be terribly excited by the idea that i'm finally able to put together clothes, since for the longest time i've been moaning about how sad it is to be forced to make choices that are limited to other people's ideas of what women should wear.

anyhow, my first skirt (the a-line, in itself already stodgy and schoolmarmish) felt lacklustre... an insipid little thing made with the cheapest cloth i managed to find at people's park centre, to which i added yellow piping in an attempt to spice it up. didn't quite work. my flare skirt, i'm happy to say, worked out much much better:



so i wore it out last week, matching it with a topshop floral jersey dress i bought on sale last month.





don't i look just gleeful in that last pic? glee was definitely in order: a fun new outfit, half of it made by me, what's there not to love? i trotted off to stamford house to see what i could find at the baylene sale, and while i was looking around the other shops in the building, one of the owners of Swirl told me how cute she thought my skirt was: very! so i did what any woman would do in my tiny sartorial triumph: i treated myself to a new baylene dress.

today i want...

yet another bag:

this one's by Jillian, whose shop on etsy, JohnMetBetty is etsy's featured seller at the moment. i'm not in the habit of actually buying things on etsy, cos although i love handmade clothes and bags, and though i adore anything vintage, the prices with shipping added always stun me a little. BUT that doesn't stop me from browsing and drooling over stuff on etsy, so i decided i'd put the picture of this lovely red robin clutch on my blog and see if i can exorcise any demons (demons that insist, gently yet firmly, that of course i need to treat myself to a nice bag this month) that way... so far it's not working, though.

must... have... new... bag

i know i'm supposed to save money, and god knows i'm trying... but arrgggh how am i supposed to resist all the luxe, lovely leather things that fate flings into my path? fling something else for a change, bitch! (something i can resist, like a cocktail ring, or sunglasses, or a scarf, a jacket, or even shoes!)

i blame my mother; my love for bags is entirely her fault... growing up, i was obsessed with clothes (and often driven to despair because in the late 1990s there really weren't so many untacky things a girl could wear without looking twice her age) but bags really weren't my thing. my mother, on the other hand, was (still is, still is) an absolute bag nut. and so, to cut this predictable story short, my sister and i have grown up and the apples have fallen right underneath the tree.

anyway. i was browsing through the Flannel sale online and fell head over heart over (sob sob) wallet over this delish Dolce and Gabbana number:




za would scream.... she hates checks and similar patterns.... i really love checks and gingham and all that, and the harlequin-esque patching on this bag is to die for.... as i write this i am trying to figure out how (HOW HOW HOW) to buy this without ruining myself financially. looks like i'll be buying lottery tickets later yea?

and this Fendi nubuck secret code bag (wow, what a name):




there is another bag my heart hopes for, but i won't put it up here. i'm going to lick this one wound in private. *sulks*

christian lacroix exhibit at the national museum

i was reading a fashion magazine a couple of weeks ago (i read so many, so can't actually remember which one) and there was a short bit about the christian lacroix exhibit at the national museum. so last sunday i dragged my sweetheart off to see it, though to give him credit, he didn't exactly protest.

there were exhibits of clothes he'd designed for various theatrical productions... Carmen, Othello, a version of Cinderella... everything beautiful and absolutely inspiring... suddenly i felt the urge to buy a dress with a full skirt, suddenly i wanted to wear lace bustier dresses in all sorts of colours.



the picture below is of a costume lacroix designed for the title character in the opera Eliogabalo... can you believe it's made entirely out of paper?



three of these (below) are from Cosi Fan Tutte. i love the colour of the dress, and the organza crinkled to look like a skirt in the suit-like outfit is really quite inspiring... i'm sure it could translate into ready-to-wear in a second!







oh what a dress!



another section of the exhibition featured mobiles... dresses hanging from the air, other heftier costumes on slowly spinning platforms... all against a background of projected film clips of ballets and other theatrical performances. very very surreal. photos don't do this display any justice!







here are some of my favourite sketches from the exhibit.. when i saw them , i felt so terribly ashamed of the pitifully bland sketches i've been making for my sewing class... (clearly, though, one can hardly expect to rival lacroix!)

the first three here are for the costumes in Gaite Parisienne, a production by the American Ballet Theatre in 1988. Love those colours! My personal favourite is the red gown in the second picture... and i'd love to be able to wear those headpieces when i go shopping. fierce!







this is from the production of Cendrillon (Cinderella) by the Opera Comique, Paris... the sketches are for the costumes for the stepsisters' ballgowns... i think it's wonderful how lacroix manages to use all these grays and blacks and bland little browns and still come up with sketches so riveting.



here's a sketch of costumes from Arsa y Toma, a flamenco performance recounting the history of the dance from the 1950s til today. lacroix used small frills of real cloth to create these caricature-like sketches in the style of postcards.



lastly, here's one from Othello (the faces are so nicely done!)and another from Le Femme sans Ombre...

extremely outdated london post: jo and za see buckingham palace and the great big topshop

now i know why i've never been able to keep a blog... i'm not someone who can constantly write write write about her life... far too busy buying and reading books, poring over magazines, tutoring teenagers, fussing over my clothes and hair.

anyway. i thought i'd write up my trip to london. love the city to death... i know everyone says it's rather grey and dreary and IT IS, but i love how there are a million things to see and do and things to lust over in stores. i spent a lot of time in the british museuem, the tate and the national gallery as well... i was so excited to see van gogh's sunflowers at the national gallery that i leaned too close and got told off by an attendant. ("MISS, please step back. there should be SOME distance between you and the painting.") oops.

the flight there was awful. i couldn't sleep the night before so i felt like a zombie version of myself even before i hopped aboard the plane (i use 'hopped' in the loosest sense of the word) and then couldn't sleep throughout the 12-hour flight because the headrest was so poorly designed. (here's a note to anyone at SQ who cares: the headrests in most buses that travel between singapore and malaysia, even the ugly old ones with stuffing popping out, are better designed for the comfort of the human head than the headrests on the A380. so much for technology.)i was so glad i was travelling with za, and we watched movies in sync on our separate viewing panels and kept ordering wine in order to keep from feeling the keen discomfort of the seat.

anyhow, our first experience on the tube (to our friend ratna's place at holloway rd) was uneventful but we felt the entire time like we had come from the first world to the third world, and not the other way around. now i know where the malaysian railway authority did their precedent studies in the eighties.

after a moderately good night's sleep, we consulted one of the two guidebooks za had brought along and decided to walk towards the palace, see the changing of the guard, walk to trafalqar square and then head to oxford street to shop and meet our friend andee for lunch.

morning elegance

i've always had very vivid dreams, not nightmares, mind you, but adventures of the swashbuckling, riding-a-carriage-through-midnight-streets-on-the-way-to-save-the-world kind. many times i've woken up knowing i'd found some sort of secret to life in the dream i'd just had but that there was no way i could remember now. gah.

so when i stumbled upon this video while blog-surfing this afternoon, all i could think of was how wonderful it would be if my dreams gave themselves away like that. and what a clever, clever use of bedspreads and things!

something blue

i want this so badly.

Hello Lomo

I've borrowed a Holga lomo camera. YES. After many many months of procrastinating ("sure, lomo looks like a lot of fun, but I really don't think I have the time"), I'm finally off to take pictures tomorrow. I'm starting with Chinatown, since I know it so well (thanks to 3 years at architecture school, where professors can't think up any other cultural site and somehow consider the kitsch and commercialism of Chinatown to be somewhat... cultural). But it's an interesting enough place, anyhow.

Took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to actually load the film into my borrowed Holga. Very sad. Suddenly I felt anger at being deprived in childhood of Lego and other toys supposedly designed to improve technical ability. This video I found on www.goholga.com saved my Lomo adventure, which I felt, after 45 minutes of struggling with the film, was doomed to be over before it had even begun:

2009 resolutions

I'm 26. Sometimes I'm happy to be 26 and financially independent and in many ways free to live my life the way I want to, other times I'm a little afraid of what's to come, what I haven't yet accomplished, and at times like these I feel like time's running out somehow.

I've never seriously blogged before, but I thought I might as well this year, since I've made up my mind to actually start doing all the things that have just been floating around in my head the past few years. So I think I'll put up, in this very first post, a list of some of the things I'm hoping to do by the end of this year, as a reminder to myself that ideas have to somehow be translated into action if they're ever going to mean anything at all.

1. Complete my sewing course, and keep sewing til I'm at least halfway decent at putting a garment together

2. Get down to writing and illustrating, and COMPLETING the children's book I've been wanting to

3. Be a lot more creative with my clothes, since I'm trying to save money (!)

4. Design more, and lust less after other people's wonderful creations

5. Lose the 8 kilos (that's around 20 pounds) that I gained during the last one and a half years. (I know it's horribly cliche to put weight loss into new year's resolutions, but what the heck)

6. Travel to at least 2 different countries I haven't ever been to!