I am ever so pleased to share the news that the turning of the year brought with it a little addition to our family ~ my new niece. After a jaw-droppingly long and challenging labor, my beautiful sister and her husband welcomed their new daughter to the world.
It was an incredibly emotional event for us all, not only the first baby in my generation for our family, but a terrifying and gorgeous reminder of both the tenuousness and the vitality of life. 
And when the little one was finally (finally!) safely here, I found myself spinning into a vortex of infant-related sweetness - hours perusing hip designer baby fabrics online, like this incredible mermaid-and-octo print by Heather Ross - plotting all the tiny finery I'd make for her... in my copious spare time, yes. 
So while I try to stay focused on sewing more adornments for the upcoming Edwardian Ball, and rehearsing to record next month with my band Baby Seal Club ~ I must also make some space for simple, blissful amazement at this new child's tenacity, my sweet sister's courage, and the overwhelming love I have for both of them.
1.04.2010
New Year, New Life
8.27.2009
Everything that Creeps: Elizabeth McGrath
I've long been an ardent admirer of Liz "Bloodbath" McGrath ~ woman of innumerable talents and one of my aesthetic heroines. Equally comfortable in a gallery, on a stage, or wearing a dress made of candy wrappers.
You see, as if it weren't enough to be an auspiciously brilliant pop surrealist sculptress and artist, she also fronts the theatrical L.A. outlaw rock band Miss Derringer, along with her husband, Morgan Slade. Liz creates all of the album cover designs, naturally.
She sings, she paints, she draws, and she sculpts. But my true love is for her compelling dioramas. Like so many artists I'm drawn to, she finds the loveliness in the grotesque, the magic in the wicked, and binds it all together to craft dark and whimsical little worlds for us.
I'm mad about McGrath's meticulous attention to detail and her penchant for the macabre ~ the unlikely bedfellows of preciousness and freakish oddity. Many of the pieces have a carnival side-show feel, like she's built a tiny stage for a character with a story to unfold...
I'm fortunate enough to own a copy of her lovely and sadly now out-of-print book called Everything That Creeps, which contains gorgeous full-color images of her work, so one can get close to the haunting creatures she's created.
Wide-eyed blue-lipped waifs and mournful two-headed fawns, winsome skeleton birds and tutu-wearing insect girls, they're all in here.
I hope to see her work in person, someday, to peer into the vast reaches of the twisted universe of her imagination. 
Until that day, I'll content myself by reading about her adventures on her new blog at my favorite underground art mag, Juxtapoz.
6.14.2009
Le Scaphandrier ~ The Giant Diver
I'm thoroughly enraptured by the work of French performance art and puppetry troupe Royal de Luxe. Their May 2006 performance in London, The Sultan's Elephant, was nothing short of genius ~ I can't even imagine the glory of being in attendance at the event, which included a little girl Giantess, a wooden rocket-ship, and a 50-ton mechanical elephant.
And now I've just heard that they've done it again... Writer R.J. Evans posted a blog about a new performance that took place starting June 6th in Nantes ~ the birthplace of Jules Verne ~ that involved a giant deep-sea diver, Le Scaphandrier in French.
I've always been a lover of puppets and marionettes, so to see a 30-foot-tall diver hauled out of the water by a team of frock-coated puppeteers, and then sent out adventuring, just blisses me out.
And there's a beautiful and complex mythology, too, for these amazingly emotive characters, that's been unfolding around Europe for years in various performances - about how the Diver is searching for his niece the Little Giantess, a character from the Sultan's Elephant performance. With the help of Google's nifty translation engine, you can read more about the back-story on Stéfan Le Dû's blog.
The company is rather mysterious and rarely releases information before a performance, adding to the intrigue. But you can find some jaw-dropping YouTube videos, along with a Flickr pool filled with lovely images from the performance.
It's one of those things that makes me happy to be alive, that there are people out there creating such things. We humans may be making war, and reality TV shows, but we're also making street spectacles with grand mechanical creatures, simply for the sake of wonder and magic and art.
Also keep an eye out for the off-shoot company of brilliant fabricators La Machine. They built the original sultan's elephant, and they were also the ones who sent a massive wooden and steel mechanical spider called La Princesse marauding around Liverpool in a post-apocalyptic frenzy, to the delight of onlookers, for week in September 2008 before moving on to Yokohama.
La Machine also built the permanent exhibition Machines of the Isle of Nantes at its workshop, which is open to the public, features the elephant giving rides, and includes a mechanical squid.
Glorious. Simply glorious.
5.19.2009
A Mere Moment: Audrey Kawasaki
I've long been captivated by the work of pop surrealist darling Audrey Kawasaki. Her lithe and doe-eyed lovelies are both moving in their childish innocence and disquieting in their subtle eroticism.
I read an interview that quotes her as saying, "I paint them because they are distant, elusive, and unobtainable, and slip right through your hands. They are something I chase after, and that I grasp onto for a mere moment, and am forced to let go, and that is what keeps me painting."
I love that description of the moment of connection between artist and muse. I love that she paints the girls on wood and uses the grain in the image, which gives them a lovely organic feel, and that she tends to pale and washed out colors, like faded vintage ephemera.
It's the juxtaposition of opposites in her work that's most enchanting to me, and I especially love it when remnants of the natural world slip in ~ bones, feathers, sea creatures.
And the blush of swirling-haired art nouveau brings to mind echoes of another of my favorite artists, Alphonse Mucha, or the waves and flower-petals of Hokusai.
And look... tentacles, just for me.
You can immerse yourself in Audrey's exquisite world at her Web site, and keep up with her via her LiveJournal blog.
4.14.2009
Why I Love Isabella Rossellini
Truly, one just can't help but adore the fabulous and talented Isabella Rossellini. 
Never mind that she came to New York from Rome at age 19 and paid for school by being a translator and circus ringmaster. Never mind that she's been romantically linked to Martin Scorsese, Gary Oldman, and David Lynch. Never mind that she's stunningly beautiful, brilliant, and an active environmentalist.
I love her for her fearlessness. She was mesmerizing as the masochistic lounge singer in Lynch's neo-noir classic Blue Velvet. And who could resist her as a double-amputee beer baroness wearing beer-filled artificial legs in the beautiful surrealist film The Saddest Music in the World by Canadian genius Guy Madden?
But it's Green Porno that sealed my love for Ms. Rossellini. When asked by the Sundance Channel to make a series of "flashy environmental" shorts, Isabella took it upon herself to illustrate the frequently disturbing sex lives of insects.
Most definitely not safe for work, but delightfully bizarre and candid, the series features a charmingly amorous Isabella frolicking about in an oversized, cartoonish set, mostly made of paper. And she's just released Season Two - on sea creatures. Please let there be an octopus episode, please!
Here's a recent interview with Isabella. And my favorite snarky feminist pop culture rag, Bitch Magazine, just featured the series in an article called Wings of Desire, on the radical gender role implications of documenting bug sex.
You know you want to see Isabella as an orgasmic snail in a giant homemade paper maché costume. And her accent makes a statement like "We're sequential hermaphrodites" sound positively sensual. Just go.
12.03.2008
Bits and Bobs
I always loved Brit colloquialisms like "bits and bobs" or "I'm well chuffed." In fact, I may single-handedly try to bring "chuffed" into the American lexicon. Who's with me?
On to the bits. First, a tease - new designs are coming for Adornments for Tarts, at last. I received some exciting bundles in the mail - new raw silk, new velvet ribbons. And there's also a winter special in the shop - free pair of earrings with the purchase of a collar!
Also, my last post on my love of cephalopods helped inspire a new group blog from select members of the Etsy Steam Team. Come visit the Cephalopod Tea Party - a blog dedicated to a love of tentacled sea creatures! We plan to scour the inter-webs for all things octopus-ish, squidly, and tentacled for your enjoyment.
And there you can find treats like this outfit. Someone beat me to making my long-desired tentacle corset...
Found via BoingBoing, from this treasure trove of fabulous couture.
In other exciting interwebs fame news, I had an image featured on Theremina's drgblz blog, where LOLs meet airships - yay for ridiculously juvenile internet memes!
Finally, in the how-many-social-networking-sites-can-Choklit-frequent category, you can now find me on Twitter and on Facebook. If you must.
11.21.2008
Things That Please Me: Cephalopods
This probably won't be shocking, given the propensity of a certain kind of person - that is, the Ectomo-devoted, Victorian-ephemera-appreciating, underground-art-loving kind - to also have an affinity for creatures of the tentacled variety.
In fact, it might even be a bit trite. Witness the ubiquity of the Octo on Etsy. I don't know what it is, really... A much tamer interpretation of the terribly-not-safe-for-work Hokusai woodcut Dream of the Fisherman's Wife? Some sort of Jules-Verne-ian deep-sea-monster fixation?
All I know is that I'm helpless to resist all things tentacled.
Exhibit One: A gift from the much-beloved Stache - vintage dictionary illustration of an octopus, made into a striking pendant on vintage velvet ribbon, by Found & Made Designs.
Exhibit Two: This miraculous thing from UnCorked - all good things rolled into one: Octopus! Mini clipboard! Test Tube! Two keystrokes and it was mine.
Exhibit Three: On the wish list - together at last... tentacles and little Victorian girls. 
It's a Moleskine journal etched with a print by Dan Hillier. Brilliant. And Modofly has these with covers by dozens of my favorite artists.
Exhibit Four: Just discovered breathtaking art by Tucson artist Chiara Bautista, also known as Milk.
I could go on, but... I'll save some tentacles for another post. I know I'm not alone on this fixation.
7.30.2008
Things That Please Me: Sub-Culture Blogs
'Cause who doesn't love blogs that offer up tasty bits of sub-culture?
COILHOUSE calls itself "a love letter to alternative culture, written in an era when alt culture no longer exists."
Photo from their lovely survey of Ruffs in fashion.
Stunning imagery, snarky commentary, and entries on favorite topics like steampunk, Victoriana, and of course Cthulu make this a treasury of entertainment for Choklit.
Ah, Cthulu ~ a nice segue to the venerable Ectoplasmosis: "a wonder closet of fringe art, culture, and ephemera."
Ectomo features must-reads like Moustache Monday, where my very own Stache was once featured, and juicy categories like the multi-purpose prefixpunk and perennial favorite tentacles are what keep me going back to Ecotomo for more. 
Image from a post on Brass Goggles. Which is another visual treat for those with a love of all things steampunk. But that's rather deserving of a post of its very own, don't you think?
Go forth and be amused!
6.17.2008
I Made The Team!
...the Etsy Steampunk Team, that is...
And it kind of feels like suddenly being part of the varsity cheering squad I so purposefully avoided in high school, except the "cheerleaders" are all smart, hip, crafty counterculture types. This is no small thing, lovely readers. I'm in with the in-crowd now. These people are seriously talented, and seriously organized. And they welcomed me with open arms despite the fact that my adornments are more Neo-Victorian, looking over flirtatiously at Steampunk.
Here's just a wee sampler of some of the beautiful things made by my fellow Steam Teamers: Clockwork Green Pendant by Heterodyne, Steampunk Gold Lace Cuffs by GrandmaWasAFloozy, The Adventures of Captain Octavio collage by WinonaCookie, Widow's Weeds brooch by slvrlily and TotusMel, WWII Spat Corset by velvetmechanism, and Nautilus Necklace by ClockworkCrow.
Not only do they have a blog, a Flickr group, a mySpace page, and a web site, but there are also incredibly active, and addicting, private discussion Forums.
So I'm meeting new people, and getting new inspiration, and suddenly I have friends on Etsy! And they like to talk about all the same things I like to talk about! This is a very good thing.
Be still my heart!
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