Weekly roundup - Posies, preening and pattern-cutting

I seem to have fallen into the habit of a couple of round-up posts a week. There's just too much going on!

On Wednesday a few of us went to see on of my favourite bands, The Posies, at one of my favourite venues, The Borderline. I am prolific (as you may have noticed) at writing about things that I like a lot, but I am less forthcoming about things that I really love, there just aren't the words. So all I will say is that the gig was incredible. This was billed as an acoustic set, which wasn't true at all, unless "acoustic" has recently been redefined as "just electric guitars with no drums or bass". So it was just Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow up on the tiny little stage, singing and playing mainly very old stuff, showing just how genuinely talented a pair they are. I've always thought The Posies deserved to be more famous, as they really are blindingly good. If you haven't heard them, start with "Frosting on the Beater" from 1993. You won't regret it. Here's a blurry cameraphone picture of the band - I only took one as I can't stand people who stand there at concerts concentrating more on taking photos than watching the performance, and distracting everyone else with their little screens all lit up, but I thought one was acceptable:

The lovely Lotta, a girl with her finger most definitely on the beauty pulse, found out about Sparkling Thursdays at Selfridges, so off we went on Thursday evening to happily flit around the makeup department taking up their kind offers of free champers and mince pies. We all got makeovers at Givenchy, which was fun although I just could not convince my artiste that I wanted something fairly outrageous - the problem was I was dressed in my dull office gear with my dull office makeup on, and I don't think she thought I was telling the truth when I said I normally wear bright pink eyeshadow at weekends. So I got a muted aubergine look, although it was terribly polished and grown up. I was convinced into buying some foundation and blusher, things that until now I thought my skin was young enough to do without. But my skin just looked that much more dewy and even, so perhaps I have to admit I am losing precious collagen as I grow ever-nearer to moving from my mid-twenties to my (gasp!) late-twenties. I had to go to MAC straight afterwards to buy some stuff to convince myself I am still young and hip. Here we are, all glammed up - Lotta had the international makeup artiste so got the supermodel look:

Last night, the knitters hit Friday Lates at the V&A, which are a monthly series of free events on a Friday evenings on various arts and crafts subjects. Last night's was on couture. What with the all-important knitting time in the beautiful cafe, I didn't see many things, but I did go to a viewing of the 1995 documentary film Unzipped, which follows fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi (who to me looks like Gary Numan) as he designs and shows his winter 1994 collection. This was absolutely hilarious - so camp, and so deadly serious about fashion, exemplified by Mizrahi's utter devastation when he finds out, just before his own eskimo-inspired show, that Jean-Paul Gaultier has just also shown an eskimo-inspired collection. It also featured a very young and surprisingly nice Naomi Campbell, and an even younger, very sweet Kate Moss (mediating an argument between models on who got to wear heels versus flats on the catwalk). Both far removed from the [censored to avoid me getting sued] they are today.  I loved that the film was in black and white until the very end, where the catwalk show was filmed in colour, revealing just how bright the clothes were - you'd had no idea of this until that moment. I remember the 90's trend for acid-brights, I had bright orange jeans and an acid-green satin shirt, both from Topshop. But then I was a young teenager so must be forgiven for this.

Shame I missed the "create your own corset" pattern-cutting workshop during the film, though I might have to borrow the pattern from one of the others. I did get quite a lot of my second cashmere wristwarmer done during the film though, and I was quite impressed that I didn't go wrong in the dark, although it was hardly plot-heavy so I was able to look at the knitting quite a bit. I was pleased to find these in the V&A shop, big plastic milkshake cups filled with yarn, a pattern and needles:

This weekend will be mainly spent finishing the boyfriend's giant alpaca scarf. Hopefully there will be an update and an FO tomorrow!