R.I.P. ventricular projects...HELLO FANGIRL!

Hello!  

For a while now, we've been hinting about changes around here and doing a lot of behind the scenes plotting, and now we’re ready to share our new venture - Fangirl.  

The past couple years of blogging and working on creative projects together, Carly and I been figuring out where we want to take this.  Opening a store has always been a far-off dream. Making things ourselves, of course.  Supporting and collaborating with people whose work we enjoy, definitely.  Writing more about my pop culture feelings (for me - sorry, world...but I use the internet as my diary and most of my emotions come from listening to pop songs).  Working with our local creative community. More girl power always and forever! With that in mind, we’re launching Fangirl - a blog and webshop.  

Why Fangirl? What is it gonna be? Generally speaking, I’m bad at playing it cool. Sometimes I try, though, like when I’m talking to people who I think are beautiful and talented and stylish, but it never lasts, which is a good thing because I’m sure I’m terrible to talk to when I’m trying to impress you. Using the word “fangirl” in these types of conversations is particularly good at shifting the mood to a place I’m comfortable - unrestricted enthusiasm. It's like a secret code to let people know that it's okay to gush about your favorite things.

Fangirl is a corner of the internet carved out for a little old fashioned appreciation in the digital age.  Our focus is primarily on emerging talent and D.I.Y. spirit, but anything’s fair game for inspiration. We'll be launching the webshop in a couple weeks with a few pieces by super cool girls and constantly expanding to stocking a diverse collection of affordable items perfect for gifting and treating yourself alike. We also hope to get more involved with the local creative community and plan events like pop up shops and workshops.


We hope you all continue to follow us on the internet and are just as excited about our newest venture as we are. Thank you to all who have supported us along the way and who will continue to be fangirls with us in the future!


- Tricia & Carly
blog.fan-girl.us

friendship

There are actually very few photos of Carly and I together, so I'm glad that this one exists.

a big zine post

It's been ages since we've talked about ZINES on this blog, which is silly and so that ends right now.

I got a zine & sticker pack from Grace Miceli ages ago, and I had high expectations for fun, but I was still impressed by the sheer volume of zines (The Official Digital Valley Girl Coloring Book, We Would Be Sisters, and Hey Net Girl Hey), stickers, and temporary tats that she stuffed into that 5 x 7 envelope.

I used to have one of her Pawnee Goddesses stickers that had been a gift from Caroline, but I put it on my car and that car was totaled. I was sad about the whole thing...you know, being in a scary situation that resulted in months of inconvenience and pain, but also losing the sticker, so I when I placed my order, I requested Miss Knope as one of my stickers if it were at all possible. She was all out, but included a Pawnee Goddess print which was super nice of her and totally unnecessary  But I guess us glorious female warriors have gotta look out for each other!

Not even close to fitting everything in.

I have not played this game of MASH, because if I didn't get Drake as my husband, I would probably kill myself.

Cat Haikus and Art and Stuff is a zine my friend Melissa recently put together that is, of course, exactly what is advertised by the title. It features an illustration based on one of my photos and some pretty excellent cat Tweet screenshots.  I proposed that we put together an entire zine of Tweets about cats, so look out for that if I ever decide that doing something I would enjoy and could accomplish easily would be better than not doing anything. You can check it out Melissa's cat blog and Etsy shop, both called A Cat in the Window.

Beaker being the best little zine model in my house.  

Sad Girls Issue 1, which features work by some pretty cool contributors , is available now! I've been looking forward to it ever since Leah let me check out a PDF of the zine when I stopped by her apartment a couple months ago on my fittingly sad vacation, but I didn't give it a proper look through because I thought it would be really antisocial to just show up and hang out on her computer.  The physical copy is super nice and its coffee table presence has already (really unexpectedly) led to my favorite kind of argument (basically the only kind I'm ever in) where everyone's a little drunk and talking over each other and I'm just sitting on the couch laughing really hard.

 Sad Girls and some other fun Leah Goren things! It is just a fact that zine girls are nice and want to give you stickers. I'm especially into the compact mirror with a girl putting on makeup.  

Yelena Bryksenkova's work in Sad Girls and a stack of other zines I dig.  I don't think Megan McIsaac's Excerpts from 2011 is still available, but I'm just gonna take a second to say that she's still killin' it, so go look at her photos.  

And, finally, a little throwback to my zinester beginnings! I initially got into zines when I was in jr high and posted on message boards about punk rock.  I loved reading scans from old fanzines and eventually that led to exchanging personal art zines with like minded individuals, one of which I came across recently.

I never made a fanzine myself, just a lot of featuring my photography and creative writing, and I'm starting to think that maybe since I've been into all this for a decade now, it's about time, but who will the lucky subject be?

telluride

At the end of last week, headed out to Telluride, Colorado for a few days of hiking, perfecting my book-to-scenery-line-of-vision equation, and dog cuddles. I hadn't been to that part of the country at all, but some family moved there a while back and I finally made it out there. It was one of those situations where I wouldn’t have visited this very beautiful place if they weren’t living there and I would have visited them if they didn’t live in a very beautiful place.

It turns out that I picked the perfect weekend - the aspen trees were at their brightest goldenrod and I got to skip out on the Texas heat for a bit and break out my ankle boots and a light jacket.

Telluride has a fairly tiny year-round population, but there's usually a festival in town (the film festival and Blues & Brews are the biggest, but there are so many more) and, of course, ski season is a big deal, but I'm not one for winter sports so I'm happy to have missed those crowds.

The town itself is supercute.  They don't allow franchises, so it's all local businesses and there were plenty of fresh flowers everywhere.  I set up a bit of a residency at a coffee shop that generously rewards patrons with free pastries and refills, because life requires caffeine and family visits require a safe space to duck off to.  

I also stopped in a string of smaller Colorado towns in between mountain passes - all equally adorable and full of the particular brand of rugged whimsy that relatively isolated locales breed, like a jail converted into a thrift store.

Pretty much everyone has a dog and you can take them everywhere. It's great.  This is Loki, who is massive but still a puppy on the inside.

My family legitimately lives in the mountains.  This is a a picture I took from the gondola that takes you from the town of Telluride to their neighborhood. Yeah, man, their public transit is a fucking gondola.

I have long maintained that being on mountains with dogs is an important activity to participate in as frequently as possible, and I've gotta say, I had some of the best dog/mountain time of my life on this trip.  You can't tell here, but I was actually very high up a few feet away from a pretty intense drop, so if Loki had decided to misbehave, he could have sent me flying off a cliff as he is much stronger than I am.  It was cool, though - we just played! Good dog.

Super into the black and white patterns on the trunks of the aspens.  

whatever, man...fashion!

Whenever fashion week rolls around, I ask two questions:

1) To myself: "do I care?"

2) To the designers, who are not listening to me and who have no idea who I am: "how are you going to make me care?"

And that, at its heart, is why I still keep up with runway shows.  Because I feel like fashion, as an art form, is all too often on the defensive. When I see a collection that feels like its on the offensive, it's an exciting thing.  

I haven't quite come across any New York collections that did it for me, but London Fashion Week has gotten off to a promising start!  

ERDEM

Easter egg snake prints!  Psychedelic florals! Neon pom-pom looking things!  Sure to be called "country club on acid" by many lazy people, but certain other lazy people might just predict what the first set of lazy people would say.   

ACNE

Here's something about me that you might not know but hopefully will not be surprised to learn: I hate hate hate Renaissance Faires. There is nothing redeeming about them; they are simply the worst.  I got coaxed into going to one last year, though, after I worked on a dress for a Ren Faire production that cost upwards of $1000 and kind of wanted to see it in action.  "It will be fun!" they said.  It was not fun. I showed up at about 11AM and quickly started drinking so I could be drunk for as much of it as possible before sobering up to drive home early in the evening and ended up spending all those hours not doing much of anything because everything was really expensive and wouldn't have even been worth doing it it had been free. At about 5PM, I was sober and more than ready to head home, only to find out that I couldn't leave until after the Faire was closed for the day because I had taken advantage of the free staff parking and my car was locked in.  I was escorted to the camping area to wait it out, and a bunch of gross dudes kissed my hand when they introduced themselves (get it? chivalry?) and then I had to listen to them talk about how potential employers expecting them to have professional-looking haircuts is "sexist."

This comes back to Acne because at some point while I was there, I got conned into posing for one of those awful Old Timey photoshoots where they throw a sepia filter over you and want you to pay crazy amounts of money.  If you are a drunk girl wandering aimlessly, people are going to try and sell you all kinds  of things, but I did not purchase a copy. Anyway, the costumes they give you do not function as actual clothes - they tie in the back, so you're wearing half a dress over jeans and a t-shirt.  That's what this Acne collection reminds me of - princess and court jester costumes tied over everyday clothes. But, like, in a good way!

I had not heard of Marques Almeida, but checked it out on a tip from my girl Ana, who knows about these things.  It's sort of easy to glance over it quickly and notice how much it has in common with the Acne collection (flowing lavender and white, chunky 90s sandals, etc.) but I get different vibes from the collections. Marques Almeida is more "Fuck this! I'm going to the beach!" and Acne is more "Fuck this! You don't know my life!"

So yeah, thus concludes a very professional blog post about London Fashion Week.

Quilts by Meg Callahan

In the past week or so, Tricia and I made a few jokes on our Twitters about how we'd like to quilt, start a quilting circle and just be all around craft-divas. Jokes aside, if I could create anything remotely as spectacular as the quilts by artist Meg Callahan, I can guarantee you that's about all I would be doing. Her collection of textile designs are just as impressive and just as coveted by yours truly.

Ada Quilt

Harrah Quilt

Spine Quilt

Just Another Fashion Post

Long time no see! Tricia and I are cooking up a few new blogging ideas (VERY SECRET IDEAS) which we'll hopefully be revealing to you soon. Until then, I'm going to fangirl over a few of the latest collections from this past week. To be perfectly honest, there's only about 3 collections I peek at during fashion week. I find I just get way too overwhelmed otherwise and there hasn't been a Rachel Comey or Steven Alan collection I've seen and hated (although I didn't really LOVE either collection 100% , some of it seemed a bit ill-fitting, but there were definitely a few stand out looks).

Rachel Comey

Steven Alan

Images from http://www.fashionising.com/ & http://www.fashionista.com

stay home club

Stay Home Club (the brainchild of illustrator Olivia Mew) recently launched to brighten the spaces we should probably never ever leave because the world outside is terrifying.  The shop is currently stocked with pillowcases featuring the work of some of our faves and plans to expand to include a greater range of limited run textile-based home goods created in collaboration with supercool artists.  As if we needed convincing to avoid getting out of bed!

Tea towels by Olivia Mew

 Caitlin Shearer and Rik Lee

 Olivia Mew

Becca Stadtlander

brigette bloom

Photographer Brigette Bloom recently put together a small book of her photos, which you can find out more information about here.  To order a copy, just donate what you can via PayPal and you'll get sixty pages full of fields, forests, mountains, beaches, plenty of cute dogs, and the occasional human (most often in combination with the aforementioned elements.)  You know, the good stuff.

You can check out some of my favorites from her rapidly expanding body of work below and much more on Tumblr and Flickr.