Secret Garden Party, 24th-27th July

So last year I was working at Secret Garden Party to "earn" my ticket, and even though I didn't have as much time as my friends I managed to squeeze a lot of things in when I wasn't working, but this year I paid for a ticket seeing as so many more people were going.

Bristol Vintage Kilo Sale

It's been a while because I haven't been doing much and when I have I've forgotten about it.

ANYWAY, today I went to the Bristol vintage kilo sale for the second time. You buy clothes by the kilo (£15/kilo) which can be kind of steep - it's more expensive than charity shops and less expensive than vintage shops. Most of them are advertized on facebook, and they happen all around the country. I bought these things and spent about £16.50:

shirt, jumper, t-shirt, Levi cut-offs, shorts that make me feel like Rupert Bear.

There are a few things that make the whole experience easier / less panic-inducing:

1. Write a rough list of what you want to buy - BEFORE you go. When you get in there you will most likely start wanting lots of really weird things, which is okay if you have the money or confidence to wear them all, but being a little organized helps to make the pile smaller.
2. Make sure you have time. Each time I've been to the kilo sale I've spent at least an hour in there, making sure I haven't missed anything really good. Also make sure you have time afterwards to lie around and be lazy, because you will need that time.
3. Have the energy to rummage. Eat or drink something before, and have something after as well. I did have to sit in my mum's car eating maltesers before I could leave (shut up it was totally necessary).
4. Don't start off picky. Pick up anything and everything you might like, because otherwise someone else will get it / it'll get lost under piles of other stuff. Then, when you get too tired, take your mountain to a mirror to try it all on.
5. Remember, the pricing is by WEIGHT. There are a lot of Levi's and denim jackets and fur coats that look really pretty but will punch your bank account in the stomach. If you want some Levi's to make into shorts, look for the Levi's that are already cut into shorts. You'll save about £5 just by doing that.
6. It's fine to check the cost, then go re-think your items. Queue up as many times as you like to find out whether you can afford all your stuff, and feel free to throw stuff back in the bins or ask the person serving you to take items out to reduce the weight.
7. Join up with people if you have under a kilo. The first time around, my friend and I had £10 worth of stuff each, then we put our stuff in together and it came to £17 or £18.

Kilo sales can definitely be a great way to get some new vintage clothes for your wardrobe, and as long as you don't go overboard on the coats and jeans, you can get some pretty great deals.

What Are You To Me exhibition at Centrespace Gallery

This weekend, I went into town and bought way too many things and got very tired and annoyed at people because THERE WERE SO MANY EVERYWHERE. On Saturday, I also visited an art college's open day for the foundation diploma, so I guess that's partly why I had so many feelings about what I saw later. I went to visit the Centrespace gallery in the Bristol city centre. I've only been there once before, and it's so tucked away it's amazing it's still open. Here is the street it's on:

Teeny tiny gallery road

I've walked past that road so many times, but today I went in and it felt like walking into a secret room in my grandparents' house; you can hear people talking about their memories (home videos being shown on small televisions or projectors) and as soon as you go in there's soft lighting but there are so many things to look at and you just think what the hell is this? But in a good way.

What Are You To Me is a collection of treasures that the collaborators have gathered from their families - photo albums, suitcases, clothes, lightbulbs, a pipe... You're invited to interact with anything you want to in the exhibit, and there are even biscuits & sweets laid out. It feels so cosy and I just wanted to be so quiet in there because it felt like being in my grandparents' attic, trying to be quiet while I looked through all their things because they would wonder what I was doing if they heard me walking around. Paper luggage tags are placed all around the room, where people have written about memories of their family, and you're encouraged to write your own. A lot of it is in faded sepia tones, but then there are some really stand-out pieces like the wedding dress in a suitcase, and a wall covered in descriptions of items (which really reminded me of unphotographable's concept of "a picture I did not take"). I found it so interesting to see these precious items taken account of so objectively, even though they carry so many memories for the people they now belong to.

Hand-drawn family tree

I've started trying to film the things I see as well as photographing them, so this is my attempt at doing that. What Are You To Me is open at the Centrespace gallery on Leonard Lane, just off Corn Street, until 20th November.

Employment and that

So..... I have a job! (At least for a little while, anyway.)
Urban Outfitters held a recruitment evening last week, and a few days later I got called back for a group interview, then was told I'd been offered a Christmas temping job there.

Anyway, today there was an induction - mainly paperwork - and we got to look around the store and go through some of the basics. IT ALL LOOKS SO NICE AND COOL AND PRETTY AND ORGANIZED, I CAN'T DEAL WITH IT. Also everyone else is so cool and stylish and so what UO employees should look like, and I'm just stood there thinking, how the hell am I even here.
I'm super lucky to have even got the job, and I don't really know how it happened; a lot of my friends applied, as well as around 300 other people which is just crazy (!!) and I think around 20 people were given temporary positions, which is just like whaaaaat. (Very coherent, as usual.)
I'm super keen to get some better clothes because we need to represent the company well and such, so I am excited for my discount card to come through especially! I'm going to do some looking around soon to plan some more outfits, although I'm only contracted for one shift a week so I could possibly get away with being a horrific outfit repeater for a little while.

In other news, life decision of the day is to do an art foundation course for a year and then have another think about uni. My brother went to uni and he did learn a lot education-wise and cooking-wise and life-wise but I know a lot of people who didn't go to uni and have still found jobs they like, whether it took them a little while or a long time. Plus, visual artist and visual merchandising manager are real life legit jobs - like, you get paid for being creative. Amazing.

Basically, whether I go to uni or not, there will be a day where I have to make a decision and start looking for a sustainable source of income. I'm kind of afraid of it, and it's something that really preoccupies me at the moment and has been messing up my mental health over the past few weeks (stress levels have been going super high) but art is something I like doing and there is still a lot of Bristol that I want to see. I'm gonna try and finish applying to uni this year, because it's good practice, but to be honest, I do really wish that I'd asked for more help with deciding what i want to do.

I hope you're okay and you have a good week and stuff!!!!!
- Alice

Bristol Fashion Week

Photos and outfit sets from the live blogging event / catwalk show on 27/9/13.
All the photos I took (the good onces, at least) are now uploaded on my Flickr, but these are the ones I referenced to create polyvore sets after the show.

Bristol Fashion Week

#bfwaw13 times a MILLION

So, a little while back, I was on twitter, and I saw someone mention blogging at / about Bristol Fashion Week at the Mall Cribbs Causeway. I've been before with my mum a few years back, so I looked into it, then ended up talking to Claire, the PR & Comms Executive at the Mall (!), who got me and Billie free tickets and a blogging pass to Bristol Fashion Week, and today was the day we got to go.

 (I will be posting outfit photos & polyvore sets soon, but here's the blogging part for now)

Bloomberg New Contemporaries at Spike Island

So Spike Island has a new exhibition that starts tomorrow (13th September) and goes on until 10th November. It's called Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and it's been going on since the late 80s under its current name (other connected annual stuff has been going on since the late 40s, so it's pretty long-running). Once it's finished in Bristol, the exhibition is heading for London's ICA.

I'm gonna be volunteering to be at the gallery for a few days while the exhibition is on, and today, all the volunteers and invigilators were invited to come and meet some of the staff at Spike Island, have a tour of the upstairs studio spaces and look at the exhibition before the public, to get an idea of what it's like. One studio in the building has 24-hour access, which I thought was pretty amazing. Nobody was working in the studios that we saw, but they still all looked really interesting and artsy.

Because of how BNC works, there's no real bias involved - anyone studying fine art who a) graduated last year, b) is a postgraduate or c) is in their final year, can apply for their work to be featured. When they select works to go in, the art is chosen purely by looking at photographs of it. The people choosing the art don't get to know the person's name, gender or age until they've been confirmed.

Everyone who works at Spike Island is really nice; they explained everything really clearly and gave us lots of time to go round looking at the art by ourselves before being told the details of some of the pieces. All the volunteers got given a free copy of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries catalogue, which has full-page photos in & is super nice aesthetically. You can buy copies from the main desk at Spike Island.

I could've got some of this wrong, because I was getting really tired towards the end and I knew I still had to do a half-hour's walk back to the station, but as far as I can remember, this is what they said.

You might think it'd all be conceptual work, or that because the artists are graduates or still studying, the work won't be very good quality, but there's a huge range of great art available to look at, and some of the big names in art were featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries once (David Hockney and Damien Hirst, for example) so it's worth a look.

- Alice