Hello...again...

I am possibly officially the worst co-blogger ever. I haven't posted since June last year. That really, really sucks. If it weren't for Georgia holding the fort this blog would have died a long time ago (so thanks, Georgia!).

But here I am, back in 2013 and ready to blog again! An awful lot of things have happened (and been bought) in the past months that I feel should have been featured here - for example, I've finished high school forever and I now own a Cambridge Satchel (which is beautiful - but more on that some other time). I was considering doing a big update-y post, but today I rearranged my bedroom and created some wonderful new spaces that I really like so I've decided to share some photos of my bedroom with you instead (seeing as I haven't shared any photos of my new house since my family and I moved here in May of last year!).

There's really no one better to grace the door of my bedroom than Patti Smith.

I found myself a desk and put together this new workspace today featuring the blackboard I made myself, a 1950s dining chair, my Instax Mini 8 (a Christmas gift), a Maidenhair fern and my collection of Popular Penguins, among other things. It feels great to have table space without too much clutter!

Hung from a string of fairy lights, a string of polaroid pictures taken with my Instax Mini and pegged to some twine with teeny tiny wooden pegs, featuring a photo of me & Georgia when she came down to Christchurch recently! I love all of these photographs so much.

The very DIY jewellery organiser made from picture hooks and twine that I put together last month, my favourite perfume and Karen Walker jewellery, and a see-through storage box (actually just a recycled Ferrero Rocher box) inspired by this post on Love Aesthetics.

A sneaky mirror photo of my messy hair and $7 thrifted daisy shorts. They were just sitting there, waiting for me. So amazing. Also featuring hydrangeas in an old Coca-Cola bottle.

I love my bed so much. It has a beautiful quilted linen headboard and I love sleeping in plain bedding so I bought a white duvet cover from Ikea when I travelled to Australia last December (amongst other things that I struggled to fit in my suitcase on the way home).

It feels great to have a nice-looking, well-functioning and uncluttered space to spend time in. I also recently had a massive wardrobe clean-out - I've gotten quite sick of having so much clothing that never gets worn or loved - so for all our New Zealand followers, I'll be listing a lot of vintage dresses on Trademe soon, so keep an eye out!

I'm trying to be a better blogger. Really, I am. Hopefully this gets the ball rolling again. But in the meantime...

(PS. This is one parenthesis-heavy blog post!)

Shiba Productions fairytale books

(I've had this post queued up for ages. I'm in Vietnam! It's hot and mad and I am covered in infected bedbug bites and I have the flu. So glamorous! Pictures and things to come later.)

My mum and I are pretty mad book fiends, which must be in the blood as her family owned a bookshop/printing company in Wellington until a couple of decades ago. We're both especially obsessed with literature we loved when we were kids, which works for me because my mum kept every single one of her books from her youth. This means I was raised on more or less the same stuff as her- we're both absolute Enid Blyton and Laura Ingalls Wilder fangirls, but there is one amazing book that we both read until it literally fell apart. Mum's grandparents got it for her on a trip to the USA sometime in the 60s, and we both pored over it 30 years apart.




This amazing 3-D copy of Thumbelina was the greatest, scariest thing to me as a 6 year-old, and when we found it while cleaning out the garage, we embarked on a mission to find out more about them. A quick Google lead to tonnes of results, and it turns out we're not the only ones who were in love with this book- and there's a whole series! They were imported from Japan to the US in the 1960s. The 3-D imaging is called lenticular printing, and these books were published by Shiba Productions in the mid- to late- 1960s. This company was founded by Kihachirō Kawamoto, who was a stop-motion artist who also designed and animated puppets for television shows. The prints in these books are technically staged photographs of dolls, but their creator refers to them as puppets, because they 'act'. Magical. Some other studios made different editions of these 3-D puppet books and other lenticular literature, but the ones we love are the traditional fairytale ones, published by Golden Press.






Wall of info, compiled from lots of different sources for anyone who loves these holographic puppet storybooks books like we do. We had to pay through the nose for some of them on eBay and Amazon because it turns out they're pretty collectable, and it's rare to find them in still-readable condition. This is the collection so far- we're still missing a couple, but we're working on it, and The Little Mermaid is currently on its way to me. We bought a second copy of Thumbelina because the original one had been over-read by too many generations and was beyond repair. Something about these books is just ridiculously appealing to me- the hyper-saturated cartoony colours, the puppets that you can see were so lovingly crafted, the weird new way of presenting these familiar stories. I love the detail in the scenes, it's so careful and complex. Anyway. I hope someone else can derive as much weird pleasure as me from these photos.