would you be mine, valentine?

valentine typewriter
ettore sotsass, 1969

i want one!

five minute study break.

i love playing around with brown paper + black graphite pencil + white pencil.

i also love my fair lady.

hm, bad quality photo + very fast sketch = questionable results...oh well.

(oh no, another white dress...that was completely unintentional, i promise).

white dresses, part 3: more paintings!

i just love the pre-raphaelites and pre raphaelite-influenced art.  people may call it kitschy but oh well.  i enjoy some bad architecture just as much as some good architecture, so i may as well feel the same way about paintings.  plus, it makes me feel calm.  which is a good thing.

The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse, 1888

The Accolade, Edmund Blair Leighton, 1901

white dresses, part 2: paintings

Two contrasting depictions of white dresses in the Victorian Era - one impressionist, a windy walk outside, the white dress all the more impractical but picturesque (i'm thinking Anne of Green Gables or A Room with a View); the other a portrait of a woman sitting down on a luxurious chair, her elusive expression challenging the viewer to question a woman's role as just another ornament in a lovely house.

Claude Monet - The Walk, Woman with a Parasol (Madame Monet and her Son), 1875

John Singer Sargent - Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892-93

girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes...

...and red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach....and white cotton....

Anyway, enough with the quoting of song lyrics.  Have I mentioned that I love white dresses? No, it's not wedding dresses in particular that I'm fond of (although they are awesome in their own right, and I love Vera Wang).

It's just the thought of clean white dresses in general.

At my high school graduation all the girls wore white dresses, and although I was admittedly a little bummed about not getting to wear a cap and gown, everything turned out beautifully.  (i'll just wait till i graduate from uni for that, which will be plenty since i'm pretty sure the cap would look horrible on me).  i ended up making my dress:

oh summer dresses.  they are so pretty.

and then we have white dresses in the more historical/literary/romantic/whatever-else-that-is-not-directly-related-to-contemporary-fashion-tastes context.

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described a scene in which "the only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.  They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house...Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor."

It's a beautiful passage, and i could go on and on about the fantastic prose of Fitzgerald (drool...), but back to the subject, it sums up perfectly what I visualize when I think of white dresses - white flutters and the green of summer.  I have yet to see The Great Gatsby movie, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

There are, of course, the stiff but beautiful Victorian whites in movies such as Anne of Green Gables and A Room with a View (obviously the ones in which the lace/ruffles goddess didn't have too much of a field day with the trims).

...and the classic, empire-waisted whites of Pride and Prejudice and all those other Jane Austen movies, although I don't necessarily associate them with rolling green hills or the like.

Finally, before I get too distracted and avoid doing all my homework, there's the new movie coming out, Princess Kaiulani.  I think at least part of the movie will have its share of white! (so excited!)

revelations about paper sizes (and root 2 rectangles)

today in architecture class we learned about the four important shapes of architecture - the square, the double square, the golden ratio rectangle, and the root-two rectangle.

naturally root-two rectangles captivated me; not only are they just naturally awesome, but they also gave me a bit of insight into paper sizes (now i understand!).

so to explain the basic idea of a root-two rectangle: it is a rectangle with the ratio of 1:1.414 (or, square root of 2), and its diagonal forms the angles of 35 and 55 degrees.  most interestingly, when you cut it in half it yields two similar rectangles.

this is the principle that yields the paper system used in countries that are, well, let's just say, way more practical than the united states.  yes, just like how the metric system makes SO MUCH SENSE, so does this system.  so, the standard A4 page is half the size of an A3 page, which in turn is half the size of an A2 page, which is half the size of an A1 page, which is half the size of the gigantic A0 sheet...i am still fascinated.

i need inspiration (not just another negotiation...)

i love drew barrymore's clothes in music & lyrics.  it's the kind of stuff i would want to wear but probably wouldn't.

(okay, this seems a little bit random, but "way back into love" popped up in my itunes, and it reminded me of the movie...)