For the love of shoes!

You may have noticed that I have added another friend to my blog roll. This lovely lady, is Mandi Kremer, whom I had the opportunity of dressing at Portland Fashion Week. As I found with a lot of the models, they were so much more friendly that I thought they would be. The other amazing thing about Mandi, is that she designs her own shoes. (Designing by adding things to her shoes and making them spectacular!)

Miss Grishley wrote an article for the Daily Barometer talking about her fabulous shoes after Portland Fashion Week.

She recently designed some new ones, and I am now saving up my monies to buy a pair!
Here's a bad picture of the shoes, go to Mani's blog to see them better!

Tsunami

It is amazing to me how news can travel so fast in this world. We live over 7,000 miles away from Japan, and yet, moments after a devastating incident, we know about it. It's too bad we don't have a way to prevent these things from happening. The wonderful thing that comes from our current technology, is that we can send help and aid that much faster. Even Lady Gaga is contributing by selling bracelets.

Somewhat-comforting thoughts are that of all countries to get hit with this, Japan is most prepared (at least for the earthquake part). Less people have died than could have, but that is still people who are gone and family and friends left to miss them.

As you may or may not know, I'm trying to get an internship in Japan for Fall term 2011. I know by then Japan will be up and running again, but I feel so sad for what's happened.

Here's a good article about what's happened in Japan. And I leave with the image of the Great Wave.

Asian Zippers

Hey! 3 posts this month! I'm on a roll!

If you don't know, I have an internship thing going on at the Rain Shed here in Corvallis. If you don't know what the Rain Shed is, it is a specialty fabric shop with lots of great outerwear fabrics and more!

Every I leave that place, I learn something new or am extremely inspired. A couple weeks ago, one of the ladies there introduced me to this awesome zipper company's website. I have yet to see if they sell retail, but some really fun zippers!

She thought they were a Japanese zipper company, but it turns out the headquarters on Chinese Taipei (Taiwan). The company is KCC (Keen Ching Industrial Co.). You should definitely take a look at their zippers.

I love this zipper:

Alright, that's my quick post for the night. Hope the zippers inspire you as much as they inspired me!

Year of Peace

So a couple of weekends ago, I went down to San Francisco to visit my little sister and watch the Chinese New Year Parade. The parade was awesome! I didn't realize that it would be set to be more at night, but it makes sense, because they have so many chinese lanterns and fireworks and the like. The parade started at 5:30pm and my sisters and I left at 8pm and it was still going! If we had prepared a little better for the cold, we would have stuck it out a little longer.

There were a lot of cute little kids with bunny ears (actually, lots of things with bunny ears). I also really enjoyed the tiger leaving (2010 was year of the tiger) and the rabbit coming in. Sadly, I used Kambria's camera instead of mine. Hers does not take very good pictures at night, and she has it, so I can't get any of the good pictures off of it! So enjoy the googled images!

Cassandra was saying that the year of the Hare is always a year of Peace. It comes before the year of the dragon, which can be a changing kind of year. So enjoy 2011, friends!

Recycled Fashions for 2011

Hmm... two posts in January, two posts in February? Perhaps I've been busy? Well, this last Thursday was the 21st annual OSU Recycled Fashion Show: Dumpster to Diamonds. I created two garments for the show, because I'm crazy and seem to love being busy.

The first garment I thought of last year: The Yin Yang Dress, made of black and white karate uniforms. My lovely model Christina did a fantastic job, made for an exciting part in the show with a fan snap!

My other creation came from trying to figure out what to do with the plastic bags my curtains came in. Then I remembered how many of these zippered bags my mom has, I told another lady about it who has lots of them, and so before I knew it I had lots of plastic zipper bags to make a dress with!

My beautiful sister Kambria modeled this dress in her best runway walk yet!

I was also really happy to have Heidi to do hair for my models, both of my amazing models did their own make up. I think I see a future of styling for Heidi in the future.... :)

It was a really great show, and if you would like to watch it, go see it on KBVR!

Some special things to note, were some of the awards my friends won:

Ashley Bates: Most Innovative Design This dress was made of her old school bag and a suitcase!

Megan Amadon: Creative Use of Material As you can see, her dress is made of footballs and turf!

No awards for me this year, but I'm very proud of my designs!