Kawaii High Tea

If you've been following my blog lately you would be forgiven for thinking that not much has been happening here in Wellington. It has, but at the same time I feel like the winter has really been dragging and I am well and truly ready for it to be over.

This weekend was fun though as an event I had planning with some friends for a long time finally happened - we had a Kawaii High Tea.

What is kawaii you ask? Well the internet explains that it means - "lovable", "cute", or "adorable"

I decided my kawaii outfit would be kind of witch themed, I started with this pattern that Ria bought me a while ago, we had been planning to make the same jacket for a while and the Kawaii High Tea was the perfect time to do it!

I also have a lot of creepy cute fabric in my stash, because I love creepy things. I also apparently love purple as well because I had a bunch of purple fabric.

So here's the thing about this jacket, when I read my measurements on the envelope it said I would be a size 22. I'm pretty weary of the HUGE amount of ease big pattern companies seem to put into their garments and that just didn't seem right. So Ria and I measured the pieces and it seemed that a 16 would fit better.

But as you can see from the photos, its still really too big especially in the shoulders. However this is also because I started cutting this out when we first came back from our trip to the USA. While we were over there I ate all the food and put on some weight. Since I've come back I've dropped back to my normal size. I'm not one for making or buying clothes that will "fit me when I lose weight" but maybe I should have know better and in this case made a size smaller.

Although the jacket is obviously too big in the shoulder which makes it look pretty wonky I did have fun making this jacket and I feel a bit more confident with my sewing after making it - plus I managed to use a bunch of fabric that had been sitting around for a long time.

Both of the fabrics I used were from Spotlight and had been bought when I was shopping and thinking - oh this is cute, I will find a think to make with it sometime. Also known as fabrics bought solely for the fabric stash!

Here's some of the trim I used for the jacket - I bought the purple trim from Pete's Emporium and although I bought 3 metres it wasn't enough. So I went to Made on Marion and bought 4 metres of broderie anglaise but that wasn't enough either! So I ended up using the purple trim around the bottom part of the jacket and the broderie anglaise along the top part.

I think that my favourite thing about the jacket though is the big bow at the back - I love it!

As for what I wore underneath the jacket, I wasn't entirely happy with it. I actually really like this simple little shift dress and I know I will get a lot of use from it in the "real world" however, I don't think it was the right thing to wear under the jacket.

I really should have used what was on the pattern envelope as a guide and made either the skirt that came with the pattern or another equally full skirt. I think the straight skirt under the full jacket looked weird.

However, I was running out of time to finish though and I decided to go with what I knew and made another dress from Maudella 5619, rather than a full skirted dress pattern I was less familiar with.

Even if it didn't work as well with my costume, I love this dress because I love the creepy trees and bats. I got this fabric on sale from spotlight as well, it hadn't been sitting around as long as the purple fabrics though.

You may be wondering about the actual high tea itself? Well I can say it was AWESOME! It was at a new to me high tea place called Louis Sergeant. I wish I had taken more photos of the interior of the restaurant as it was beautiful, but I kind of forgot. I did however take photos of our table and the high tea.

It was  also important to get photos of my friends looking pretty awesome in their Kawaii outfits!

My friend Jo bought a selfie stick along - I'm a cheese ball and I love selfie sticks, so we took a few photos (we could have spent all day playing with that selfie stick).

We were even generous enough to let some of the others at the table play with the selfie stick for a bit.

When the tea stopped being poured - we decided it was time to leave, but there was still time for a few more photos over at the Old Bank Arcade.

It was a really fun morning out and I now know two things for sure, one I need more dress up fun times with friends and two I really need to replace my horrible camera!

USA Part Four - More Seattle!!

Our plans for our second day in Seattle was to visit the Seattle Sky needle and EMP Museum, we planned to walk to  walk there from our hotel in the International District and check out a few things along the way.

When we had been for a walk the previous night we'd seen a small park near Pioneer Square that was all locked up for the evening and we were curious to see what was in there. Turns out its an inner city waterfall! When we were in Seattle it was a million degrees, so its was a nice spot to visit and I can it would be a good place to hang out in the summer.

After checking out the waterfall we decided the most interesting way to get to the sky needle and museum would be via the waterfront as we had noticed a fun boardwalk area down there the previous day.

Along the way we stopped off at Pike Street printing press which was a really cool indie printing press, I picked up a couple of postcards for friends here.

We stopped off to check out Miners Landing which was the boardwalk we had seen before, it was pretty fun with a pretty vintage carousel and the biggest gumball machine I'd ever seen! I was quite excited by the gumball machine and had to have my photo taken with it - OBVIOUSLY!

If you've been following my blog for a while, you will know that I always love visiting tall buildings and I think that the Seattle sky needle was one of the first tall buildings I was aware existed. I have always loved the 1960s space future look of this building and it was so amazing to see it in real life!!

After the Sky Needle our next stop was the EMP museum, we had friends that had visited this building before and I was pretty excited to check it out finally. In case you've never heard of it before, the EMP Museum is a museum of science fiction, music and pop culture. When we bought the tickets for the museum we were told that it would take around two hours to look around, which wasn't true, I could have spent days at this museum.

The first exhibition we went to was Can't Look Away - The Lure of Horror Film , I had no idea this exhibition was here and I was  so excited to find out it was on! I think I said to Rich something along the lines of "Did they know I was coming and put this one especially for me?".

There were a lot of props and costumes from various horror movies on display, it was pretty amazing to see so many things from my favourite movies up close - so many fan girl moments!

 There were a bunch of little booths were you could watch snippets of famous movies with commentary from various movie directors. I especially loved hearing John Landis and Eli Roth's perspective of various horror movies. Again there were so many fan girl moments.

Another really fun thing was the "scream booth" - its a sound proof booth that you jump into and the booth scream! Which is pretty fun - I loved it!

The next exhibition we visited was Infinite Worlds of Science Fiction - again there were a lot of fan girl moments.

 The hover boards from Back to the Future and costumes from Fifth Element were two of my favourite things as the exhibit, being huge fans of both of these movies.

Although it cost a little bit extra, we also decided to check out the Star Wars costume exhibit - although I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, I grew up watching the movies and learning all of the inspiration for the costumes was fascinating.

As well as the larger exhibits, there were lots of cute places to take photos around the museum - like the Super Mario Wall. I was so excited to see this as I spent HOURS playing this game when I was a teenager.

Rich was quite taken with ALL OF THE GUITARS! So was I actually - its pretty darn cool!

 One of the cool thing about a lot of the exhibits are that they are interactive, the Indie Game Revolution was full of cool games you could try out.

We spent a fair bit of time playing this game about an Inuit girl and her wolf, we could have played this game all day as well as being a lot of fun it was so beautiful.

When we had been wandering around Seattle the previous say I'd seen a poster for a Chuck Jones exhibit. I thought it would be an AMAZING thing to see as I grew up watching all the old Warner Brothers cartoons and always had a soft spot for Pepe La Pew and Daffy Duck. Guess where that exhibit was happening?  It may not have been the biggest exhibit, but it was SO interesting and there were plenty of photo ops (I'm mostly in it for the photo ops).

Also there is a super fun thing called The Sound Lab - I struggle through music at school playing drums and later on flute, but as much as I enjoy music I'm NOT  a musician at ALL. Rich however was in his element, you have the opportunity to play all kinds off instruments with tutition (from a computer scree, but its still a fun thing to do!).

We also saw the Nirvana exhibition and the Guitar Gallery but I didn't take photo of those as they were the last two exhibits we saw and I'd reached information overload by that stage and we didn't even see EVERYTHING!

We left around 7pm when it was closing time, but like I said before I could have stayed for days at this place. I hope sometime we will head back to Seattle and have another chance to visit this place. If you're going to or even thinking of going to Seattle you must check out this museum - its one of the most fun and interesting places I've ever been.

Also guess what? There's still ONE more post about Seattle to come - I kind of loved this place, can you tell?