Girl Leaves House, Still does Crafts. My Night at FNO.

You know, I don't spend all my nights hunched over my desk pencil in hand. Sometimes I even go out, like last Friday for Hong Kong's first Fashion Night Out! My university mate Helene just moved to Hong Kong so we spent an amazing evening exploring together.

Here I'm wearing a vintage top made with fabric recycled from an old kimono, it's the most beautiful fabric with little snails on leaves I wear it all the time. On the bottom: Uniqlo jeans, n.d.c. brogues paired with Accessorize necklace, and my l.a. Eyeworks their gimmick being that they only produce one of each style.

My favourite thing by far was the tapestry workshop with Suzie Stanford at Lane Crawford's Pacific Place location. We went really early and was lucky enough to have Suzie teach us some basic stitching techniques. I started a little rat embroidery to take home which will be finished probably never, tapestry is harrrrrrrrd, and I was like 'Caaaan we take a breeeeeeak?'.

So we hoped on over to the other side of the harbour to play at the IFC location where pretty, pretty model Amanda S. was serving up some pretty, pretty pastries at her pop-up shop petite Amanda.

There were so many people lining up for paper cut-out portraits with Japanese artist Shoko Tsuchida, we waited forever but still didn't get one, I was sooo sad. Her work is amazing of course, but look at how cute her outfit is! Little white scissor tights and a scissor print dress.

We got fake tattoos done! Fake tattoos and henna are so cool, I keep meaning to add them to my regular wardrobe, it's such a special, lazy way to accessorize. It's been almost a week and my tattoo is still 75% on. Here Helene models her fresh diamond spike tat with a few scoops of deeeelicious XTC Gelato (try the salted caramel, it's a mouth party).

Super cool model DJ Eve Special was spinning cool beats all night. Here is me & Helene trying to be friends with her. 

Here's a good look at all the fashionistas in Hong Kong, on the Left: the new guard, all the cool underground kids with their out of this world outfits. And on the right we've got the fashion establishment: Grace Lam of Vogue China and Wyman, HK's celebrity lyricist/fashion icon.

FNO was so much fun! A big thank you to Helene for coming with me and for so generously letting me use your photos for this post. All the pretty in focus photos are by her, the others and the poor photo editing are all by me.

Did your city have a Fashion Night Out? Did you go? How was your experience?

30 Day Drawing Challenge | The Rose of the Orient

For the 30 Day Drawing Challenge I've decided to stop taking the themes so literally and instead use them as a jumping off point to see where my imagination takes me. It's so much more enjoyable this way and I think the illustrations come out much more pleasing and more to my style. For Day 17: Favourite Plant, I thought flowers and then remembered this beautiful photograph I saw of Anna May Wong on Pinterest. I did the sketch on paper with Chinese ink (how fitting.) and then coloured it on Photoshop.

Anna May Wong is such inspiration both style and career wise. Did you know The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong made U.S. television history as the first show to feature an Asian-American lead, Anna played the titular role as a art dealing detective (total babe!). Sadly, the show is presumed to be lost so we will probably never see her wielding a magnifying glass, but in the meantime feast her eyes on these beautiful old portraits of the star.

That last video there is such a gem! Her voice is classic. Here is a longer version of that Chinese Costume Party video in it's full 1930's racist technicolour (dis)glory.
So who is your favourite old Hollywood screen siren?